Watch a 310 Foot Tall, $100 Million Bucket Wheel Excavator Rip Through 240K Tons of Dirt a Day

You might be operating some big machines on your construction site, but, chances are, none of them can come close to the Bagger 288 bucket wheel excavator. There’s probably an excavator on your job site right now, but imagine the work you could get done if you have a machine with 18 buckets, each with a capacity of 6 tons.  That’s the capacity of the massive 30 story tall ThyssenKrupp Bagger 288 bucket wheel excavator.

Measuring 310 feet tall and 15,500 tons in weight, the Bagger 288 is currently being used at the Hambach mine in Germany to extract coal.  It took ThyssenKrupp 4 years to build the earth destroyer and cost the buyer around $100 million to buy. Set on 4 crawlers, the 288 can move up to a half mile per hour and is operated by 5 to 15 people at the same time, according to Tech Insider.