On a Tuesday morning in September of 1992, Frank Donnelly stood at the edge of a swamp and watched his career sink into the mud. 3 days earlier, his company’s newest piece of equipment, a Caterpillar 375 excavator, $600,000 of hydraulic power, and computerized precision had broken through what the surveyors promised was solid ground.
The machine had dropped like a stone, its 60tonon weight punching through the thin crust of dried earth into the bottomless black muck beneath. Now the excavator sat in the swamp like a wounded dinosaur, buried to its cab, its yellow paint stre with mud, its tracks completely invisible beneath the surface. Every hour, it seemed to sink another inch.
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