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Had a shift last Thursday where the cutterhead grabbed a massive old anchor chain out of nowhere
It wrapped around the suction pipe so tight we had to call in a diver for 3 hours to cut it loose, has anyone else ever snagged something completely random that shut everything down?
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gavin_kelly9112d ago
Honestly I used to think the whole "old crap on the seabed" thing was mostly a myth or just small stuff. Thought divers were just having a laugh charging for hours of cutting time. Then three months back we were dredging near an old naval anchorage and our cutterhead grabbed a whole car chassis. Not even joking, a full 1970s sedan frame wrapped around the whole assembly like it was nothing. Took a diver with an oxy torch four hours to get it free and we lost a whole shift. That anchor chain you got sounds brutal though, three hours of cutting is no joke.
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nancy_ross11d ago
Wait, that was in an actual naval anchorage? How deep?
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margaret_gonzalez2511d ago
No joke, a buddy of mine who works salvage up in Puget Sound told me he once had to cut a 40 foot section of anchor chain off a WWII era buoy. Said it was so crusted with barnacles and rust it looked like a solid rock. The chain itself was probably 2 inches thick but the crud buildup made it look like a tree trunk. He said the worst part was the chain was wrapped around an old concrete mooring block that had sunk decades ago, and they had to use a hydraulic shear underwater to get through each link. Took his team almost 5 hours on that one job, and they missed the rest of their day's schedule.
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