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Just read a dredge accident report from a job in the Gulf three years back. The main pump failure wasn't from wear, it was a single 2-inch piece of nylon rope.
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lunab973mo ago
But a two inch piece of rope? That's all it took to wreck a whole pump? Seems a bit hard to believe.
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joseph_roberts3mo ago
Yeah @lunab97, small things break big systems all the time lol
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emery8792mo ago
A 2 inch piece of rope sounds tiny but think about how tight those pump seals are lol. The clearances inside a high pressure pump can be like 0.001 inches or something crazy. That rope gets pulled into the impeller or caught in a check valve and it binds everything up instantly. One time I saw a single welding glove shred a whole dredge pump in my hometown because it got sucked into the suction line. Rope is even worse because it's fibrous and wraps around everything like a spiderweb. So yeah a little scrap can absolutely cause a major failure when the forces involved are that high.
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