Breaking down the Arizona Fatal offroad recovery

all right guys so a week ago uh you may have seen floating around the internet a a story about a fatal incident in arizona regarding an off-road recovery that went wrong and i got contacted on the orgs facebook page by the widow jennifer woods and she had asked to share the story and uh as time went by here i made a post on our public page for the off-road recovery team and it went viral very very quickly i think as of this morning we're sitting at 930 000 views almost 4 000 shares so it's going pretty far and wide so i reached out to jennifer and asked if i could convert this into a video that could also be shared and she said absolutely yes and it's dedicated to her husband ryan so what we're going to go over is what happened in arizona and basically to give a little uh early synopsis here into the video they were out enjoying their uh their super duty and i'll overlay some pictures and stuff in here as well as we go um but they're out enjoying their super duty as in arizona and uh you know it's monsoon season it's actually pretty humid this morning here in colorado too and they ended up trying to go through some mud and got stuck i don't know how long they were stuck i i didn't dig into you know that granular of detail but they were stuck someone came along a friend buddy passerby and tried to pull them out and they were using a drop hitch and they were using chain and i believe a static strap and ultimately the forces at play which we're going to break down exceeded the ratings of that towing hitch and when it failed it failed catastrophically just like most most scenarios involving toe balls and toe hitches do and it went slingshotting through the windshield at who knows how fast a couple hundred mile an hour multiple thousand feet per second hit the steering wheel of the super duty deflected up into mr woods and it was fatal very quickly fatal so what we're going to go over is uh i made some some notes here and we're going to go over some of the proper gear it's sitting on my tailgate here we're going to go over sorry my truck is sitting at an angle i'm just in the field west of my house here but we're going to go over the ratings on this gear and how it should have been done properly um i'm not trying to armchair quarterback this uh this is not meant to be a uh everything was done wrong video there was a loss of life on this one and this is more about education so it never happens again there's absolutely no reason for this to ever happen again and if anything comes out of this if anything comes out of our public page facebook post um just one person that decides that they're not going to pull on their towing hitches or toe balls anymore that's potentially another life saved so um let's get into it so the uh for for the sake of of guessing the math here um the super duty we're going to say weighs 9 000 pounds i don't know exactly what truck it was that was trying to recover the super duty but i'm going to go with an 8 950 pound truck example this one loaded down this thing's 8 000 ish pounds so i rounded up for the sake of easier math and putting it into the calculator to stay within some of the limits of of the gear and i'll dig into that a little bit as well but so 9 000 pound super duty 8 950 pound truck and the stuck force on that super duty uh running the math through the safe extract application comes out to uh 18 750 pounds and i'll also put a screenshot in here showing that so your two inch towing ball uh this guy right here uh it only has a rating of around 3 000 to 3 500 pounds it's actually stamped on the ball what it'll do this one says five thousand pounds so most of them are between thirty five hundred and twelve thousand i've never seen a twelve thousand pound two inch ball they're always between thirty five hundred and six so we've got a five thousand pound rated ball here and we have an open tube okay this is quarter inch wall who knows what steel i've had this forever i've probably had this since i was 18. um so 3 500 to we'll call it 12 000 pounds because that's what the specs say online and we're pulling with a stuck force of 18 750. this is extremely dangerous this really small shank on this ball right here is not designed for shock loads coming across it it is designed to pull your trailer flat down the road okay very low resistance if you ever got out and pushed your car because you've ran out of gas or had some kind of mechanical problem like this truck weighs 8 000 pounds if i put it in neutral i can push it i can't push 8 000 pounds but the rolling resistance of this truck is probably only a few hundred so that's what this ball is designed for you know it's not designed for shock loads across it now step up to oh this one's a lot heavier step up to this uh two and five sixteenths ball and this one is stamped ten thousand okay so most of the two and five sixteenths balls are good from six thousand all the way up to thirty thousand pounds this one has a bigger shank on it it's almost seven eighths to one inch actually i think it is one inch but still it is not designed for shock loads coming across it now this is a solid bar okay so it's a little bit stronger but this is your weak point okay the actual ball so you should never pull on that now i have one more hitch this much more closely mimics the one that failed okay this is my drop hitch for this truck specifically for this truck because of how tall it is that hitch in the pictures failed right here at the top of the gusset okay so this is also a hollow tube receiver yeah you can see that there's light coming through okay hollow tube receiver and this ball is also stamped fourteen thousand pounds okay i don't you there's probably no way you're gonna be able to see that but it's stamped fourteen thousand pounds we are still over the weight ratings of all this equipment not to mention the shock ratings of this equipment so one more hitch that i have here that i don't have i converted my little military camping trailer over to a regular um like a lock and roll there's a pintle hitch okay these have a rating oh let me get my cheat sheet so i don't say it wrong anywhere from ten thousand to sixty thousand pounds now this one says ten tons okay so that's twenty thousand pounds [Music] i don't know how to do the math in my head very quickly to kilograms but this is also bolted onto this plate it's a really thick plate but your failure point becomes the bolts this is also solid steel so the likelihood of this failing it's going to fail at the shear point here on these bolts okay so you're getting closer to what you should be using but you don't have you still don't have the proper gear okay so let's dig into this a little bit more here on my notes so when that drop hitch failed in arizona it failed at the top of the gusset it failed right here okay so it failed at the top of the gusset all of that steel hanging down there including the trailer ball like just me picking this up it's heavy imagine that coming at you at over a thousand feet per second and imagine that smashing through your windshield you would it happens in the blink of an eye okay so do not pull with this equipment sorry i had to shut the camera off for a minute there we had somebody walking by so what is the proper equipment to use proper equipment to use is something like this this is not a sponsored of any kind video let me get my face out of the way so it focuses okay factor 55 is probably the only company that i would recommend because of the way that they test and rate their equipment this is the hitch link 2.5 i have a 2.5 inch diameter receiver on this truck so i have a 2.5 inch hitch link this is rated at 18 000 pounds let me step out of the way so it'll try and focus 18 000 pounds all right so now we're getting up there to where the stuck forces are in that truck this particular hitch link has a failure rating minimum braking strength of 69 000 pounds the 2-inch version of this has a 9 500 pound rating so we're a little under the stuck force of that truck but the two inch version of it has a 51 000 pound braking strength now i would not intentionally use a two inch on a super duty like trying to pull it out with a a jeep or something like that because you are immediately exceeding the working load limit of the two inch version of this hitch link okay so using the two and a half inch version at 18 000 pounds we're within when i run calculations on the stuck force and add on that 10 fluff factor extra safety margin that 750 pounds not going to worry about this is not going to fail because i'm off by 700 pounds so what do you use through the hole on this you need to use the proper size shackle okay this is a skookum shackle the yellow and the red should give that away if you're familiar with them at all i'll step away from the camera so it'll try and focus on it scoop them and this is a all my paints worn off but it is a 12 ton shackle so this has a working load limit of 24 000 pounds and we are underneath the 24 000 pound rating with that stock super duty now the skookum shackles have a five to one uh safety margin built into them this is overhead crane rated so you can stand underneath of this if you were you know hoisting stuff up and having it slung over your head on job sites and this has a breaking strength of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds okay so twenty four thousand pounds times five hundred twenty thousand pounds this is not going to come apart the other thing you can do on the front of your stuck truck is run soft shackles this oh i got to get my face out of the picture this has a breaking strength of 52 300 pounds and it's actually stamped in kilograms 23 586 okay so these soft shackles this little piece of rope is stronger than this working load limit but this is its braking strength okay these are rated at their top end braking strength so this is actually technically stronger this is the top of the load limit so i would have run a bridle off the front of that truck and i would have used two straps like this i have two of these straps i'll get out of the way again so this will focus okay this says right on it never exceed 30 000 pounds okay we're only talking about 18 750 and if you ran two straps to each front of the toe point down to one of these shackles or a soft shackle off to a bubba rope there's a lot of different versions of these it's all just kinetic these are kinetic recovery ropes okay look at the strength rating on that 7 8 by 20 bubba rope 28 600 pounds i love this thing okay people seem to think online that we don't ever use these we use these all the time when we're stuck in snow these are fantastic i purposely go out and get this truck stuck just to play uh with recovery gear and practice my skills with friends this is what we use okay now for i don't know what vehicle was was pulling on it was definitely a truck based on the pictures from the the receiver but the safest way to recover that truck would have been with gear rated well above the stuck force or turn around the truck put a couple of straps on or even like grade 120 chain you can use chain it just needs to be rated for what you're using it for 120 grade chain is overhead crane rated mega safety margins high failure strength chain bridle off the front of the truck and go to you know a soft shackle if you can do it in a manner that it won't break it or hard shackle and then that would have required even on this truck with a 12 000 pound winch i would have had to have gone out and back with a two to one and a pulley block and pulled the truck out that way that would have been the safest way so i was trying to keep this kind of short i know it's already over 10 minutes it's probably over 15 minutes but this is the gear that you should be using okay this is not a plug for bubba rope it's not a plug for gator jaw it's not a plug for factor 55 this is just what you should be using okay you should never pull on pintle hitches you should never pull on drop hitches you should never pull on these little flimsy two-inch trailer balls okay this stuff's going to kill you all right if anything comes out of this i've seen comments on our facebook post already i did not know this i'll never do it again i've seen four or five of those that i can scroll through and find facebook's kind of weird when posts go viral it's very hard to get through all the comments because the way that they load people are seeing it they understand that you're not supposed to do it okay so if anything comes from this if anything comes from ryan wood's death stop pulling on the toe balls please all right go buy you some of this is so light i can i can pinky it all right it's this is incredibly light this shackle weighs more than this hitch link does from factor 55 right all right if you have any questions let me make sure i didn't miss anything oh i did miss one thing these hitch pins these hitch pins typically have a shear strength they call it double shear okay it has to be in the receiver all the way through and pinned they have a double shear strength forty thousand to sixty thousand pounds depending on the pin okay this is actually stronger i believe than a grade eight bolt grade eight bolts sheer double shear strength is actually pretty weak grade eight bolts have clamping force when you tighten them down the shear strength is pretty weak these hitch pins are actually stronger so you're not supposed to put your strap through your receiver and pin it it's definitely safer than using a tow ball but you can bend this pin and now your pin is jammed in there and you can't get it out okay you have to cut it out you need to put it in through like a hitch link this has double holes in it so you can run it vertical or horizontal but guys that's all i really wanted to cover if anybody has questions i'll do my absolute best to stay on top of the questions depending on how quickly this spreads some of those questions could be difficult but if you're out and you're stuck and someone comes by with a truck and some chain please decline their help please call people that know what they're doing call tow companies there's tow companies that go off-road um if you're in colorado call us um we are extensively trained we know what we're doing um we're going to probably over rig it and we're going to do it very slowly so that way we can control the extraction and get everyone out of there safely and not have any bits of metal come kneecap anybody or fly into your head so if you got any questions please post them um please share the video so folks can see it and that's all i got for you guys have a good one you

Channel: Colorado 4x4 Rescue and Recovery

Views: 1,043,236

Keywords: Colorado 4x4 Rescue and Recovery, co4x4rnr, offroad recovery

Id: Mb3BkeeXlIo

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/solenyaPDX]

Looking at how deep the tires are, I don't see how they thought a snatch was going to get that out.