Spent 4 hours fighting a clogged cutterhead on the Mississippi River job

I had this job near Baton Rouge where the cutterhead kept bogging down, and I figured it was just a hard layer of clay. Turns out a steel cable from an old wreck had wrapped itself around the shaft, and it took me and the deckhand 6 hours to cut it free with a torch. Nobody warned me the river was full of that stuff down there. Has anyone else dealt with random debris locking up your pump like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

emma_ramirez14d ago

You mentioned "random debris locking up your pump" but I gotta push back a little on that. Old cables and wrecks aren't random down there, the Mississippi is basically a junkyard from a hundred years of shipping and nobody does a good job of marking what's on the bottom. If you're running a cutterhead in that river, you pretty much have to expect steel and wire rope wrapped around everything, it's just part of the deal.

bailey.xena14d agoTop Commenter

Three feet of cable wrapped around your gear is a bad afternoon, not the apocalypse.