The Monster on our Street

I was in the basement the other day and heard a loud engine and some kind of grinding noise.  I thought it was a street sweeper but it didn't seem to be moving closer in any kind of hurry, so I came up out of the basement and saw this road milling machine.  It has a giant drum underneath it, with huge carbide teeth and they grind down the top surface of the road and then the ground up blacktop goes up a conveyor on the front and dumps into the dump truck that leads it!  Oh man, what an incredible machine.  So I grabbed a camera and started shooting.

Its first pass was down the street on the side where the worker is standing.  You can see that the road is lower there.

The reason I heard the machine was that it has a monster engine in it that makes it go and that runs the grinder.  I looked it up and the engine is 800 horsepower!

And this thing is big!  It dwarfs all the other equipment that comes along with it, like the dump trucks and the front end loader that cleans up some of the left over debris from the milling.

This is what the milled street looks like after a few inches of blacktop has been ground off.

Want to hear a funny story?  As I ran down the driveway to get a better photograph of the machine, heading downhill, it was followed by an empty dump truck which would take the place of the full one.   The driver passed me and hollered out his window, asking if I knew who owned the car, on the left in this photo.  I said I did and ran up the stairs of the neighbor's house, but no one answered the door.  So I grabbed my cell phone and called the neighbor's cell phone.  He said he was at work and I quickly explained about the road milling machine and he said he would try and reach the driver who was their nanny.  The milling machine by then had turned around and was headed back up the street.  It paused for a bit and I talked to the foreman and told him what I did.  He said it would be OK, they would just drive around the car while milling!  Well, they did that, but the passed pretty close, don't you think?

Here is the result of their close pass!  The foreman said it would be OK, they would just do that spot after the car was moved.  He said there was no parking and that we had gotten flyers in our mailboxes letting us know we couldn't park on the street during this period.  I said that we had not received any notice.  He said he would call his office and let them know.

This is hysterical.  Late in the afternoon, we all found flyers in our mail boxes, and we found these bright yellow signs on all the telephone poles on the street!  Just a bit late, I would say!  The woman did move her car, and they were able to finish this part of our street by the end of the day.  A bit of excitement for a usually quiet street.