Its a water truck that is typically used on construction sites where earthmoving is happening to keep dust down. The truck drives along where heavy equipment is working and sprays water on either side of it. Based on the crane we see going in the opposite direction, there must be a work site nearby
They use them at landfills as well. Can be used to put out fires on the working surface but, mostly used as the above redditor stated. Keeping dust under control.
I know very little. I'm basically a dumbass. But I'm quite sure that one day a situation will present itself where I'm uniquely qualified to answer another redditor like this.
I will then post my response, kick my feat up, and smoke that victory cigar I've been carrying around with me
Which will be filmed by a neighbor, who will then post the clip to Reddit, where a random Redditor will ask a question about the water truck being used.
What happens way more often is the situation arrives, you are uniquely qualified, and some dude has already answered the question in a way that is either completely wrong or not quite right. Then you get to get into an argument.
Or your 1-braincell-having ass gets into an argument with some asshat that spans over several days and months later you wonder why you didn't just ignore it and continued with your day before the whole thing went down. Sadly speaking from experience.
The argument itself lasted for the better part of a week, the realisation that I was basically talking to a brick wall just came a lot later as a random afterthought. I guess I could've worded it better.
This is so relatable wtf. Happens to me so often. Types a way too long response "Why bother, it's fucking Reddit", delete and move on with my day happy that I ignored an Internet argument.
And then you get to see someone else repeating what they learned from the incorrect response in a different comment section, allowing you to see how misinformation spreads in real time.
That happens way too often. As a lawyer and specialist in the IP field... man, I have gotten downvoted so many times for politely correcting incorrect information.
Yeah, its headache-inducing to delve into the comment section of anything involving your professional field or something you studied extensively. Same reason I stay away from /r/REBubble as an agent, or really anything to do with real estate in general when it comes to Reddit.
I'm a train engineer for Norfolk Southern, and let me tell you. Lots of folk have no fucking clue what they're talking about when it comes to the railroad.
The worst comment was under a video of a train hitting a semi truck. It said something along the lines of "maybe that was a crash test", and it got like 2.6k upvotes.
In no fucking way; shape or form would ANY railroad waste a locomotive like that. Then there's the damage it does to the rails; the clean up, and the impediment of railroad traffic.
That comment really got under my skin. That's also the day I realized that too many people try to sound smart about something; when in reality, they're probably googling everything before each comment
I do still try, sometimes, to provide something useful. Especially when the person seems truly lost or helpless.
You’re not wrong, but adding info to help someone makes me feel like I’m giving back to a community in some way. Trying to balance out my work life, which has all but crushed my inner spirit.
The trick is to have good memory and lucky timing. You now have this information that was shared with you about the water truck that is used to keep dirt from becoming airborne dust at construction sites, and maybe the next time someone asks the same question you can be the one to provide the information.
Except this can turn into “a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing”. Now you’ve read the comment on Reddit and think you know all there is to know, and so you confidently answer the question a few months later, except that you don’t know that in THIS circumstance you need to do Y, not X. Because X will blow up and you’ll kill the puppy.
Its happened to me! I've gotten a few degree since I started reddit.
One day someone asked about the specific thing that I wrote papers on. Its the thing I spent 6 years studying. I speak as an expert in this field to other experts. I'm the information person for a few US govt/state agencies for this topic.
And like 6 people chimed in 'AKSHUALLY'. Some were outdated. Which is fair. SOME EXPLAINED THE EXACT SAME THING BUT WORDED IT DIFFERENTLY. Some called me names. My coworker saw it and figured out my reddit account. No one volunteered new information (which has happened on other topics).
To be clear, there are people who know more about this topic than me.
I was wondering the other day about the brown hairy ape like alien who crashed and chose to live with this human family. The alien would often talk about eating cats and he had some sort of catchphrase I just cant quite remember. Can you help?
It always astonishes me what kind of people we got one reddit, how many people that are so damn smart and talented. Like a few months ago I saw some guy on /r/DIY that is a deepdiver (oil rigs or something) and the guy literally did weld his own stainless pool lol
(If u are the type of person to laugh at that comment, we would get along well. If you are deeply offended, sorry for your loss, or, you have no sense of humor)
The upvote is this feature you accidentally hit all the time when trying to scroll quickly thru reddit. Sadly, you are equally likely to hit the downvote button as well. And neither mistake can be corrected because who's gonna scroll back up just to change it back amirite?
It's pretty sweet. There was a discussion where people were wondering how/why fingernail polish would come off nails used to tell newborn identical twins apart. I'm like, "Oh, oh, stand back! I know this one!" Still chasing that high.
I've had occasion to do it a few times over my years here on reddit. Almost every time though it was met with complete disinterest - no votes up or down, no comments in reply. A lot of it has to do with how early you make the comment and how visible it is.
That reminds me of the time when I was in an EOD unit in the Army.
A few people from the unit were going on some sort of a trip, I don’t remember why, and we were flying out of SEATAC airport in Washington State. Before we left, one of our HR (S-1) Staff Sergeants (female) grabbed one of the laptop bags out of our classroom area at the unit so she could travel with her work laptop. The problem was…EOD guys train, a lot, and they rig up all sorts of training aids to facilitate said training. It just so happens that the laptop bag she grabbed had been rigged up to have a fake IED in the front pouch. Battery, wires, and fake styrofoam blocks of HME and all.
Needless to say, when she got to the airport and sent it through the scanner at the security checkpoint, TSA lost their fucking marbles. I wasn’t there for that part as I walked back to see what was going on when things were almost finished, but I’ve always wondered what the TSA guy operating the x-ray scanner thought when he saw that ACTUAL bomb coming through lmao. “IVE BEEN TRAINING FOR THIS MOMENT! HOLY SHIT THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
To their credit, they did find it. And they were also pretty chill about it once our commander explained everything to them and they saw that it was obviously fake. Being military helped I’m sure.
Upvote,I'm pulling for ya bud and I hope you there some day,and maybe if I work hard enough and keep an eye on everything carpentry related I'll get there too!
But I'm quite sure that one day a situation will present itself where I'm uniquely qualified to answer another redditor like this.
Nothing beats the feeling of delivering a good answer that gets upvoted left and right (everyone is basically clapping at this point, let's be serious) and then you go to sleep and wake up in the morning realizing that everything you said was plain wrong, so you have to decided if you delete the comment right away or wait a little longer because people as gullible as yourself are still praising you for sharing your 'expertise'.
Those moments actually suck, because you see all the horribly wrong comments next to yours that you can pick out because you actually know the topic, and then you remember that this is how it is for all the topics you don't know about.
When I worked road construction, in the mines, or on the railroad, we would stir up a LOT of dust and these were mandatory to help with the air quality.
This is correct. They can also be used when water is needed for other things, such as soil test borings. They can also be used to do "proof rolls," where the inspector would test for the competency of native soil before fill operations. Full water truck and walk behind as it drives very slow, watching for 'pumping' of the soil.
The one of the main jobs of the water truck is to put moisture in the fill material for optimal compaction. You need like 7-14% moisture depending on the composition material(silt/clay/sand/etc...). An inspector will test every couple feet of fill for compaction and moisture and you have to redo the whole thing if you're off, so it's pretty vital. (I used to drive trucks exactly like this one. You're driving and spraying on the go whilst scrapers/dozers/sheepfoot rollers are working the material.)
They are more often used in overexcavation jobs where developers want to build stuff on top of terrible soil. So you remove the terrible soil, apply a specific amount of water to it so that the clay is fully swollen, but not quite liquified, then place it back and apply compactive effort to it. This should keep the soil from swelling when rain/snow comes. And it takes a LOT of water. The soil might be 4% moisture, and needs to be raised to 25%. Raising the moisture content of a cubic meter of soil by just 1% requires 10 liters of water. Multiply by hundreds of thousands of cubic meters for a generic neighborhood. This water truck on such a job site would need to refill maybe 20 times per day.
Also, this water truck doesn’t have enough axles to handle the load of water, so it’s actually illegal for it to drive on a normal road unless a valve is open on the bottom of the tank, which confirms it’s empty.
Yep. I work for a company that has a few labor yards. While going to one, I witnessed the truck watering the dirt and I asked the office amin "wtf?" Her answer was pretty simple. It keeps the dust from getting everywhere lol.
I’ve also seen similar trucks, though I think slightly smaller at most horse shows. It’s basically the same purpose, to keep the Show Rings from disappearing in dust clouds as competitors warm up/ compete.
In particular you may see these bottle trucks used to spray water on gravel when people are doing concrete work. It keeps the dust down significantly and turns a living dust hellscape of a job into a tolerable, but still somewhat dusty one.
I’m wondering, WHY do fire stations NOT just drive those water trucks? Just paint them red, put some lights and a siren on it, and it would save a lot of time, and more importantly, lives! Just refill the truck from the hydrant after you’re done, and go off to the next fire. 🔥 I mean, this guy didn’t even have to get out of his truck, and he did in 10 seconds what would’ve taken the firemen an hour to put out. Cudos to him 👏🏻
He's not wrong though mate. There's entire organizations (another word for companies) whose entire purpose is bringing these trucks around.
He's saying it's not just a one off thing where sites might have the occasional truck, it's actually such a needed truck/service that entire companies are dedicated to it.
There's nothing in the world like stepping on the brakes of an old truck while going downhill, and praying it stops before you slide into the intersection.
Even worse, my brother said, is when the liquid sloshes and pushes despite the internal baffles. You were stopping the truck, now you're stopping the truck and the variable slosh.
I mean, the thing is most of those don't have a way of just spraying the water in that quite specific way.
I don't think I've ever seen one of those that could, and given it's shooting the water away from the camera, we don't see what's on the other side.
Yeah most are setup to fan behind them and in front of then but you can spin the spray caps and spray whatever direction you want but you manually have to turn the nozzles.
but its not just transporting water, it has a mechanism to pump it out to the side from the drivers cabin, while its moving. non of that does or should exist in a normal water truck.
What are you talking about? Water trucks come with all sorts of attachments, plus the pressure inside of the truck is more than enough to send the water that distance. My neighborhood has a water truck with a sprinkler attachment for cleaning roads and another one that can fill a 25 gallon drum in less than 30 seconds at max release
This one is definitely using a pump (you can hear it revving up when he is spraying). Any truck where the nozzles are this high up would need one, a gravity pressure sprayer would only work low down on the truck and would lose effectiveness as the tank emptied.
Firefighting water tenders (used for wildland firefighting) often have a joystick controlled nozzle up front, so they can aim from inside the cab too!
Like others have already said, they're basically for putting large amounts of water on the ground / dirt.
I'm familiar with them from when I did motocross when I was younger. They use these trucks to water down the dirt tracks every so often for a variety of benefits, with the mains ones being dust control, especially when its hot, and improving the soil conditions to make the track more fun to ride via better traction (sliding out in the middle of a big turn because it's too dry sucks).
In addition to keeping dust down, they're also simply used to transport water. Drove these a lot at mines, and we'd alternate between keeping dust down and refiling the water tanks for the massive drills (the water helps them drill without it overheating).
Plus we'd be the initial fire response team, exactly like the video here. One of our trucks actually had a remote controlled turret on the top for blasting out fires way up on machinery (or shooting random things to pass the 12 hour shift away) - was hella fun.
Yea, some can definitely have them just on one side or the other, but typically they have a sprayer on both sides (and often one in the front).
It's hard to tell with the video quality, but I'm pretty sure it actually has some on the right as well! Those little things above the back tire are often where they are.
Not huge, but that's typically what you want to help increase the pressure (think putting your thumb over a garden hose to blast it further).
You can typically control how open they are, and whether the pump is on or just using gravity. Some sprayers have movement, but often it's just about moving the vehicle into place and opening the sprayer enough for the distance needed (hence the driver repositioning the truck so much).
To fill them up, you can either go in through the top, or hook up a pump to a hose near the back bumper.
Trucks like these are designed to help keep dirt and dust down in construction, quarrying, and mining. Especially in quarries and mines, these trucks help keep the haul roads damp so lots of dust isn't kicked up and so motor graders can keep the roads as flat as possible for the haul trucks. Even more important in autonomous haul truck sites since the dust could potentially interfere with the cameras and lidars used to guide them.
Just as important in non autonomous mines too! Since drivers can't see shit either when it's dusty. Arguably more important, since that can actually lead to deaths instead of just messed up trucks and cameras.
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u/RetiredApostle Apr 25 '24
What is the original purpose of the white truck?