Overheard a guy at the supply shop say his dredge pump was eating chunks of wood from an old pier

I was picking up a replacement impeller gasket last Tuesday and this older operator was telling the guy behind the counter about how his pump kept acting up. He said he'd been pulling up these big splintered pieces for three days and finally traced it to a rotted wooden pier that was buried under the silt about 20 feet down. Nobody had a record of it on any map or site plan in his area, which is crazy to me because around here we usually have decent records from the 70s. It got me thinking about how much junk we never know is waiting down there, especially in older harbors or channels that have been dredged a dozen times. Has anyone else run into something unexpected like old foundations or sunken debris that wrecked your pump for a while?

3 comments

3 Comments

jordan_webb19d ago

Jumping off that, I've heard stories from guys up on the Great Lakes who've hit whole submerged cars and old dock sections that got buried decades ago. One guy I know had to pull his cutterhead apart twice in one season because it kept grabbing onto these old steel cables from a sunken barge nobody knew was down there. It's wild how much random debris gets swallowed up by shifting silt and mud over time. Makes you wonder what else is hiding just a few feet below the surface in spots we think are clean.

brianl5319d ago

Had that same cable problem myself, ended up running a magnetometer first.

rileyb6119d ago

Bet you could map half a century of junk with a good sub-bottom profiler.