wow! brings back memories for me too! But thankfully not to the extreme of yours!
My dad would use a frontloader/backhoe to pile excess dirt from his excavation jobs as well as shovel our long drive way into huge snow piles. we’ve had slight issues as kids and even my nieces and nephews where -as kids - we did not have good judgement and almost had mishaps.
My dad finally realized with my nieces and nephews to no longer make such piles so much less chance of problems since they would play out back unattended as we had.....
Thank God you were ok as is the child in the story.
Kids playing on huge dirt and snow piles. We would have done the same thing more than likely if we’d had access to them. We didn’t think of things going bad either. We lived in the inner city of Rochester, NY at the time. This was in the 50’s. We had no car, and entertained ourselves as best we could.