When my cutterhead grabbed an old tire in the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge

I was working a maintenance dredge job on the Mississippi just south of Baton Rouge about 2 months ago. All of a sudden the gauges started jumping and the cutterhead just stopped spinning. We pulled up and found a big truck tire wrapped around the hub like a donut. Took us 3 hours with a torch and a winch line to cut it free. Anybody else ever snagged something weird that shut down your whole operation?

4 comments

4 Comments

anderson.piper21h ago

3 hours is honestly pretty fast for a tire that size.

lewis.finley21h ago

Three hours is lightning fast for that kind of mess. I pulled a whole dock piling up on the Columbia River a few years back, must have been a good 20 feet long with cables and barnacles all over it. Took us damn near six hours with the torch and a crane barge to get it off the cutterhead. The barnacles alone chewed up two sets of blades before we even got to the wood. That tire you got sounds like it was wedged in there good.

kimr7420h ago

20 feet of piling with cables and barnacles? That is a proper nightmare right there. I can't imagine spending six hours torching that thing apart, especially with the barnacles ruining blades that fast. You guys earned every bit of that six hours, that's for sure.

wadew5119h agoMost Upvoted

Used to think three hours was slow for a tire, but hearing about lewis.finley's six hour piling job really changed my mind.