This same thought occurred to me, surely rather than wasting the whole digger, there must be some salvageable parts that can be easily carried or hoisted out of the holes and sold as spares?
Suppose you are one of London's 72 resident billionaires, and you're making 5% or so on your income.
You can pay for this digger in an hour, by spending that hour sitting on your ass, and it's not that you will be re-spending that money in your lifetime anyway. Fill it in or have someone salvage it, do whichever is quicker: you've got other things to do with your life and one of those things is to enjoy your new pool.
(Whether true or not, this acts as a good illustration of the scale of income inequality)
Why would the billionaire in question even be concerning himself with the transportation of some machinery? This decision would be taken by whoever was in charge of the excavation.
I'd have to agree. Just tell someone "there is a fully functional digger down, it's free, but you have to get it out."
Hell, people will come and haul away scrap steel from the bottom of a lake. A digger worth $10,000? 4 guys and 8 hours and each of them just made $2500 for a day's work.
Chances are you don't get to be a (self-made) billionaire without throwing away $5k here and there.
If you're spending your time saving easily recoverable $5ks, you might get to be a millionnaire but you will never get to be a billionaire: it's totally irrelevant on that scale.
Equivalent statement:
You don't get to buy a house without picking pound coins up off the street.
Or you inherited it? Or your a middle eastern minor prince, or your a Russian who was in the first place at the right time and got a good deal ( ;-) ) on some Soviet privitaisation.
Not all billionaires pulled themselves up by their bootstraps
I suspect whats called a "digger" by journalists is just a stripped frame. Anything that can be unbolted or cutting torched off has been removed, but the frame might be too heavy.
There is too much space for fraud... If you own a fleet of diggers and 3 minutes with a wrench and some bolt cutters can get you a $500 hydraulic control center or a $300 pump, its gone. You might tell the boss or insurance agent the whole thing was a complete loss written off and thats how it will be recorded on the bill, yet there's a new huge pile of spare parts with no serial numbers back at the warehouse... And any evidence is under a concrete slab.
