The Road Collapsed Under It A Western Star 6900XD and the Round Mountain Mine Haul Road Subsidence

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Published Apr 8, 2026

In November 2014 a Western Star 6900XD haul truck broke through a mine road in Nye County Nevada and dropped eight feet into a void that nobody knew was there. The road had been built over a legacy heap leach pad. The drainage piping underneath had corroded. Acidic leachate had been slowly saturating the fill layer for years, carving out a void forty feet wide and twelve feet deep directly beneath the road surface. One hundred thirty five thousand pounds of fully loaded mining truck arrived at eighteen miles per hour and the surface gave way in an instant.
This video tells the full story of what happened at Round Mountain Gold Mine, how the Western Star was recovered using a Manitowoc lattice boom crane over two days, why the surrounding road had to be cleared with ground-penetrating radar before the crane could even set its outrigger pads, and what twenty two days of void excavation and engineered fill placement looked like.
More importantly it covers what changed after this incident. Round Mountain became one of the first operations in Nevada to require mandatory ground-penetrating radar surveys for all haul roads constructed over legacy heap leach infrastructure. That policy shift reflects something the mining industry had been slow to acknowledge: a road surface that looks fine tells you nothing about what is happening forty feet below it.
This is a story about subsurface failure, legacy infrastructure, industrial recovery operations, and the gap between visual inspection and actual ground truth. If you work in mining, civil engineering, geotechnical work, or heavy equipment operations, this one is directly relevant to decisions being made on job sites right now.
The driver walked away with bruises. The investigation that followed treated the incident as a full-weight event with full-weight consequences. That distinction matters. Near-misses become policy only when they are documented and followed through. This one was.
Round Mountain Gold Mine is located in the Toquima Range of central Nevada and has been in operation since the 1970s. Heap leach gold processing was standard practice during that era. The legacy infrastructure from those original operations is still present at active mine sites across Nevada, Utah, and the American West. Ground conditions that were engineered decades ago exist beneath roads and infrastructure that have been modified, expanded, and repurposed many times over.

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