How much do you think you have??

I was watching an old movie the other day that many of yall know, Die Hard with a Vengence. The premise of this movie if you havent seen it is terrorists come and rob the federal reserve in New York by a series of games with the police. Good movie with some science flaws. The one I am going to address in this post deals with gold. They steal roughly 140 billion dollars of gold from the federal reserve by loading it into dump trucks and simply driving it out if the city to be loaded on a boat and home free, sounds plausable. There is one scence where they say that in each dump truck there is 13 billion dollars of gold per dump truck. Now we all know that dump trucks are made to haul large loads. the average city dump truck you see on a day to day basis will haul somewhere in the neighborhood of 26 metric tons. As many of my posts before have shown, gold weights much more than most people think. So here i am gong to lay out some basics and show the calculations so that anyone can follow and so we are all on the same page.

• Metric ton = 2,204.6 Lbs (Standard Ton = 2,000 Lbs.)
• Standard Dump Truck = 57,319.6 Lbs, 26 tons ( Standard = 52,000 Lbs, 26 tons)
• Troy Ounce of Gold = 31.1035 grams
• Troy Lb of Gold = 373.26 grams/Lb
• Todays current gold rate is about $1400 dollars per troy ounce of gold

Using these calculations above, we can calculate that the weight per each dump truck is about equal to:

• $1,400/31.1035 = 45.01 $/g
• In this case they said they had 13 billion per truck to equal 13,000,000,000/45.01 = 2.8E8 grams
• 2.8E8/1E6 = 288

This number means that each truck would be hauling 288 metric tons ( 634,924.8 Lbs) which by previous statement of standard dump truck is way too high. To put it in perspective, a mine hauler (industiral mine dump truck) hauls in the ballpark of these loads.

To conclude, it just is not possible for a standard dump truck to haul 13 billion dollars worht of gold in one load by todays gold prices, the movie was made in 1995 when the price of gold was roughly $385 which means this number would be even larger and even more outside the realm of possible.