Some things in life must be seen to be believed. We tend to think of water as soft, since people routinely dive into it from great heights, but in large enough quantities, it can have tremendous force behind it.
And by large enough quantities, we mean the amount held in the bucket of a mining excavator, which is best described as “incomprehensibly huge.”
We’re no experts, but we’re savvy enough researchers to think that the machine pictured is a Liebherr 9800 mining excavator, which has an operating weight of 1.875 million pounds.Assuming that’s the case, a Liebherr 9800 excavator will hold 54.9 cubic yards of material.
If we convert cubic yards to gallons, we realize that the bucket in the video will hold a mind-numbing 11,088 gallons of water, which is enough to fill a a 10-foot by 25-foot swimming pool that’s 6 feet deep.
Water weighs in at around 8 pounds per gallon, which means that nearly 89,000 pounds of water is hitting the Ford Escort Wagon pictured. As Autoblog points out, that’s not the best way to wash your car with a single bucket of water.
That may be enough force to bin the car, but we’re pretty sure even that’s not enough force to get pine sap off of the paint.