Chain Breaks While Loading Heavy Equipment on a Cargo Ship

I’m not gonna lie, when this video started rolling, my first thought was “That chain looks awfully small to be lifting such a huge truck chassis…” and it didn’t take long for my hunch to be proven correct.

Loading up a huge cargo ship is a delicate procedure despite the massive amount of weight at play. Crane operators precisely maneuver tons of cargo and stack them like building blocks on the deck of the ship. In most cases, the cargo is inside rectangular containers which allows for nice uniform stacking. However, sometimes the cargo is a little more awkward, or just plain massive, even by cargo ship standards. In this case it’s both!

This massive piece of machinery appears to be a monster-sized dump truck chassis like you might find hauling tons of dirt around a mining operation, but they can’t drive them everywhere, so they have to ship them to their destinations. This time, the truck proves to be too bulky for the chain holding it and it comes crashing to the deck of the vessel below. Luckily none of the men helping guide it aboard were underneath it, as they would have been crushed beneath the behemoth earth mover! In fact, this went about as good as it could have if the chain was going to break, as it could have fallen on a worker or into the water below.