The day the cutterhead wrapped up so bad we lost a full shift

Back in 2019 on a job near the Port of Houston, we hit this nasty patch of what I think was old fishing net and some kind of plastic sheeting. It wrapped around the cutterhead so tight that we had to pull the whole ladder up and spend 6 hours cutting it off with sawsall blades. The pump was still running but the suction just died. My operator buddy said he'd never seen anything like it and he's been doing this since the 90s. Has anyone else run into weird stuff that just locks up the works like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

caseys3012d ago

Man that's brutal. Six hours with a sawsall sounds like a nightmare, sorry you had to deal with that mess.

blake_smith12d ago

but did you ever find out what that plastic sheeting was from? i've pulled up old car tires, shopping carts, even part of a dock once, but six hours of sawzall work sounds like you hit the motherlode of mystery trash. was it like industrial wrap or old billboard vinyl? those can be the worst cause they shred into a million strings. also, did the pump survive okay after all that or did it chew up the impeller too?

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