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Sunday, February 1, 2009

Bucket Wheel Excavators


I was cleaning out my email today and I came across a draft that had map coordinates to a couple of bucket wheel excavators in Germany, so I marked them on a Google map. Normally this works pretty well, but this time we got a glitch: the satellite images don't line up. I sent Google a note, we'll see how long it takes them to fix it.

Bucket wheel excavators are large machines used for strip mining coal. I think they use them in Germany because they have soft coal there, and these machines work well. I don't think we use them much in the U.S.

Interesting thing is that if you go to the map view, all these machines are located in one area with no roads. Hmmph. Imagine that. No roads to the excavators. But you can see them from a satellite. They look like little marks at the default zoom setting. The more you zoom in the more you realize how big they are. There are excavators at all of the blue markers on the current version of the satellite map. The red one has very precise coordinates, but there is no excavator there. Maybe there will be if and when the map gets fixed.


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