Here’s a particularly unusual overloaded skip story we heard this month: a Birmingham skip hire company have been fined because of a freakish incident in which a monsoon type downpour filled one of their skips with so much water that it exceeded it’s maximum permitted load weight!
The 7.5-tonne lorry, belonging to Need-A-Skip Ltd of Four Oaks, Sutton Coldfield, was carrying two skips when the unlikely storm struck - adding several inches of water to the load during transit.
The skip truck was legally loaded when the journey began, but the sheer volume of rainfall caused the load to be 410kg overweight by the time the driver was pulled over for a routine inspection off the M5 at Quinton.
The company had little choice but to admit responsibility for the offence at Solihull Magistrates Court where, fortunately, the unusual circumstances were taken into account. Because of this, the fine was kept down to £200 plus £209 costs.
As we all know, it’s hard enough trying to keep thoughtless neighbours from illegally overloading skips with their midnight fly-tipping antics, so being slapped with a fine for what is generally described as an ‘act of God’ is quite a harsh blow!
Fortunately for us, there’s still plenty of more traditionally overloaded skips knocking about out there for our amusement. The above picture comes complete with the lovely finishing touch of a couple of paint tubs, optimistically placed in the vicinity of the skip and the bin - in the hope that somebody will deal with them...
This skip, spotted by Helen Roberts in Copley, is so overloaded with garden waste, it appears to have morphed into an existing tree, making it difficult to tell where the skip ends and the garden begins! (Or is it just one of those rare ‘skip trees’
in full bloom?)
Please keep your overloaded skip photos coming. Email them to pr@theskip.net or you can post them to - The Skip, Baxall Business Centre, Adswood Road, Stockport, SK3 8LF.
