Killdozer!
Feb. 3rd, 2008 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuA recent addition to my Tivo season pass list is Shockwave, a show about disasters and accidents and whatnot caught on tape. Like all such shows, it's short on actual footage and long on endless looping replays of the video clips with lots of overwrought narration. What I like about it, though, is that they also use computer graphics to go into the details of how the events happened, and how the individuals involved survived these seemingly lethal incidents.
The most recent episode, though, including a fascinating story that in a comic book world would have heralded the birth of a supervillain. A man by the name of Walter Hemeyer (I'm not sure of the spelling, though) lived in the town of Granby, Colorado. He had a long-running fight with the city council over a decision to allow someone to build a business next door to his property. Despite his objections, the city council allowed it. He sued and lost.
In 2004, Hemeyer began terrorizing the town with what the locals came to call the Killdozer. Hemeyer spent eighteen months building this monstrosity. He started with a large bulldozer that stood 13 feet tall. He welded two layers of half-inch thick steel plate over the whole thing, and filled the six inch gap between the layers of steel with concrete, making it utterly bulletproof. There were no windows. He had six video cameras in 3/4-inch bulletproof glass boxes mounted on the vehicle, feeding images to three monitors inside the cab. There were gunports on the vehicle as well, and he had a .50 caliber rifle, a .308 hunting rifle and a .22 caliber rifle with him.
He spent hours rampaging through town, demolishing buildings and flattening cars, including some police vehicles. The police tried to stop him, but had no weapons that could penetrate the armor. A city employee in a large construction vehicle tried repeatedly to stop him, but the killdozer was too powerful. Hemeyer had even coated the rear of the vehicle with axle grease so nobody could climb up onto it. A police man did manage to jump down onto the top of the 'dozer from a rooftop, but the hatch was bolted and after much effort and multiple gunshots (none of which had any effect) he had to jump off again to avoid being crushed by debris when the 'dozer destroyed another building.
The local police actually contemplated calling in a national guard helicopter to use an anti-tank rocket on the thing; nothing they had could stop it. Fortunately, the killdozer finally came to a stop while methodically destroying a hardware store owned by a city council member. The tracks on one side fell through the floor and the killdozer got hung up.
The police swarmed over it, trying to get in--and heard a muffled gunshot from inside. It took them 12 hours to get inside, eventually resorting to using a blowtorch to cut the hatch open. Hemeyer had killed himself with a .357 revolver. When it was all accounted for, Hemeyer demolished over a dozen buildings and crushed several cars, doing more than $10 million in damage. Happily, nobody was killed--though that was due to the police evacuating buildings in his path before he got there to destroy them.
As I said before, it sounds like something from a comic book. But it really happened.
The most recent episode, though, including a fascinating story that in a comic book world would have heralded the birth of a supervillain. A man by the name of Walter Hemeyer (I'm not sure of the spelling, though) lived in the town of Granby, Colorado. He had a long-running fight with the city council over a decision to allow someone to build a business next door to his property. Despite his objections, the city council allowed it. He sued and lost.
In 2004, Hemeyer began terrorizing the town with what the locals came to call the Killdozer. Hemeyer spent eighteen months building this monstrosity. He started with a large bulldozer that stood 13 feet tall. He welded two layers of half-inch thick steel plate over the whole thing, and filled the six inch gap between the layers of steel with concrete, making it utterly bulletproof. There were no windows. He had six video cameras in 3/4-inch bulletproof glass boxes mounted on the vehicle, feeding images to three monitors inside the cab. There were gunports on the vehicle as well, and he had a .50 caliber rifle, a .308 hunting rifle and a .22 caliber rifle with him.
He spent hours rampaging through town, demolishing buildings and flattening cars, including some police vehicles. The police tried to stop him, but had no weapons that could penetrate the armor. A city employee in a large construction vehicle tried repeatedly to stop him, but the killdozer was too powerful. Hemeyer had even coated the rear of the vehicle with axle grease so nobody could climb up onto it. A police man did manage to jump down onto the top of the 'dozer from a rooftop, but the hatch was bolted and after much effort and multiple gunshots (none of which had any effect) he had to jump off again to avoid being crushed by debris when the 'dozer destroyed another building.
The local police actually contemplated calling in a national guard helicopter to use an anti-tank rocket on the thing; nothing they had could stop it. Fortunately, the killdozer finally came to a stop while methodically destroying a hardware store owned by a city council member. The tracks on one side fell through the floor and the killdozer got hung up.
The police swarmed over it, trying to get in--and heard a muffled gunshot from inside. It took them 12 hours to get inside, eventually resorting to using a blowtorch to cut the hatch open. Hemeyer had killed himself with a .357 revolver. When it was all accounted for, Hemeyer demolished over a dozen buildings and crushed several cars, doing more than $10 million in damage. Happily, nobody was killed--though that was due to the police evacuating buildings in his path before he got there to destroy them.
As I said before, it sounds like something from a comic book. But it really happened.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-03 02:54 pm (UTC)*blinks*
That's... unbelievable. Crazy bastard.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-03 06:01 pm (UTC)THAT is an amazing story.
I have to confess... I kinda' sympathize with old Walter's grievance, though. His solution to it, while regrettable for Granby, was pretty operatic in scope.
A one man natural disaster. =heh= I've heard it said before about others -- this guy actually was one.