Intense Video Shows Smokestack Falling On Excavator WIth Operator Inside!

It’s coming up on the two year anniversary of this clip, and it’s about time for it to go viral again. This guy should have gone and bought a lottery ticket as soon as his interview was over. Of course, I just happen to know as a fellow Alabamian that he would have had to drive to another state – literally any of the surrounding four – to buy that lottery ticket, but seeing how his luck was trending, it seems like a risk worth taking.

The man at the controls of this excavator, Pell City, Alabama native Tim Phifer, had to get in close to the massive Avondale Mills Smokestack to finish the job after a controlled explosion intended to bring it down proved to be a little too controlled. The explosives didn’t quite pack enough punch to cause the towering brick structure to fall, so Tim jumped in the excavator and decided to give the stack a little nudge. And when he did, it fell, right smack on top of him.

Luckily, the Komatsu excavator had a well-built cab designed to protect the operator from a incident just like this, and Tim walked away with nothing more than an elevated heart rate and some soot covering himself from head to toe.

While this ended up being little more than an inconvenience, it certainly looked for a moment that Tim was likely injured, if not worse, before the dust settled and the cameras could see that the cab was intact and Phifer was completely uninjured. The smokestack continued to draw a crowd, even after it was reduced to a pile of rubble and dust, drawing out locals to see the remnants of the stack that nearly killed a man. Thanks to the event being live streamed and the awesome overhead angle from the drone flying above, the footage of Tim’s brush with death went massively viral when this incident occurred almost two years ago, and it’s popped back up several times since then.