Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast

by John Vaillant

These garage-sized payloads are dumped into a “hauler,” and the Caterpillar T797 hauler is one of the biggest dump trucks in the world. It is three stories tall and weighs four hundred tons—unloaded. There are hundreds of machines like this operating in the mines north of Fort McMurray. Far too large for ordinary highways, they must be transported north in pieces. It takes twelve oversized semi loads traveling with escorts to move the component parts of a single hauler. The tires alone are thirteen feet tall and cost $85,000 apiece. When one of them catches on fire—something that happens more often than one might expect, due to the terrific friction their loads generate—it must be deflated from a safe distance with a rifle bullet.