I can easily imagine this guy coming in from work every day. Changing clothes and digging away under this huge ass rock. Until he finally succeeds in removing all the supporting dirt. :smack: He should have thunk this through a bit better.
Perhaps a Darwin Award nominee?
**Archimedes **Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth. Yeah, but will it crush you afterward? 
I thought the whole point of the Darwin Awards is that they are given to people who remove themselves from the genepool before having reproduced?
Your article says:
So…
Good point. He’s disqualified for the Darwin Award.
Too bad. He certainly worked for several months to earn one.
Reminds me of the Darwin Awards metal thieves who tried dismantling a metal tower from the bottom up.
The “Wile E Coyote” Award may be more appropriate.
As a rock solid martial arts instructor, he trained to anticipate crushing defeat while trying to bury his adversary.
Here’s what I don’t understand - what was he going to do with it?!
Let’s say the boulder was now loose and he survived. You’re not putting that thing in a wheelbarrow. You’d have to lift it to get it out of the hole. You’d need a heavy-duty vehicle to move three tons. If you have to bring in cranes and tractors anyway, why not bring them in early enough to do the digging with?
Maybe he just didn’t do the math on how big the rock was to start with, but after a few months of digging, I’d be thinking “If a cubic yard of water weighs a ton…”
On the other hand, I know several martial arts instructors. They have many admirable qualities, but thinking things through is not usually one of them.
Explosives!
Or he was going to break it up by hand. After all, it’s really just a big brick.
It looks like by digging the hole the boulder could be moved away from the home then just covered back up with dirt - no dis-assembly required. Not a bad idea, sans the getting crushed part.
To add insult to injury, they used a tow truck to safely move the boulder to recover the body.
If something like this happens to me, please make sure it doesn’t get in the papers!
That does make a little bit of sense, at least. I’m still not sure that it qualifies as a good idea, though. The odds of getting the boulder to roll the way you want it to, and of you not being in its vicinity at the time seem very small.
It’s a classic trench digging mistake. Dirt doesn’t want to stay in place when you cut it vertically - especially if it’s under load from a massive rock. Trenches tend to collapse. Trenches with a 2 ton rock on their brink, doubly so.
I think the guy just didn’t realize how hard it is to push a heavy boulder. Its even harder (maybe impossible) to stop a rolling boulder.
Think about a car. I can push a car (that won’t start) and get it moving on flat ground. But if the car is rolling towards me there’s no way I can stop it. It’ll run me down just because of its weight and momentum.
That’s what happened here. The momentum of that rock was too much for even three guys to stop. One guy never stood a chance.
Didn’t anybody warn him, that boulder was part of a terminal moraine.
Boulder 1 to boulder 2 “Did you plant a garden this year?”
Boulder 2 “Just some squash”
Yeah, this is probably right. I live in a place where giant stray buried boulders are fairly common and the standard procedure for dealing with one is to dig a hole next to it and roll it in. I’ve watched them do it with a backhoe (both for the digging and the rolling), but I hear that back before the days of ubiquitous power equipment they used to do it by slowly digging out the underlying material until they could roll the thing in with prybars. If they followed the normal safety rules for digging a trench and were methodical about removing the underlying material, it was a tedious but not particularly dangerous job that probably could be done by one person if necessary.
I agree with Mangetout’s suspicion that his mistake was probably not following the trenching rules. Digging a proper sloped hole would add a bunch more work to an already ridiculously labor intensive job so that’s probably an easy corner to cut.
Most fatal stupid mistakes are made on the spur of the moment, and you can sorta understand the lack of planning. Comeau, though, had been snuggling up to this rock “for a couple months.”
It’s sad, because now this boulder is going to have to live with this on it’s conscience for the next several million years, until it is eroded away into tiny particles.
Since I grew up in that town, I’m just relieved it wasn’t someone I knew.