That Wednesday when the pump clogged three times before lunch

Had a day last August on the Missouri River where I cleared the intake screen at 6 AM, then again at 7:30, then at 9:15. Third time I found a whole denim jacket wrapped around the impeller. Took me 45 minutes with a knife to cut it off. Anyone else hit a stretch of river where the debris just gets weirder every year?

3 comments

3 Comments

angelamurphy1d ago

August 2019 on the Allegheny River here, and I gotta say that denim jacket story has me beat. My record is a tire, but it was a passenger car tire, not a semi truck tire, so not quite as dramatic. The debris load has definitely gotten worse over the last five years or so, with more plastic bottles and those big foam blocks from construction sites showing up. A neighbor who's been on the river for thirty years told me he used to see mostly tree branches and the occasional lost cooler, not all this random junk. You'd think people would be more careful, but I guess not. What's the strangest thing you've pulled out since then?

shane1701d agoTop Commenter

Oh man, that bowling ball bag with one shoe is killing me. Like someone got halfway to the alley and just gave up on life. I've been pulling stuff out of the Allegheny since that tire story and honestly the weirdest thing I found was a full bag of cement that had somehow not hardened yet. It was just sitting there on a sandbar like someone forgot their home improvement project. @angela728 I think those foam blocks are the spawn of satan honestly, they just break into a million pieces and you never get them all. I'm starting to wonder if people are just using the river as a dump at this point or if the current is bringing stuff from way upstream that nobody even knows about.

angela7281d ago

Not me but my buddy Dave works a pump station on the Mississippi near St. Louis. Last September he pulled out a whole inflatable kiddie pool tangled in some barbed wire. Said it was still partially inflated somehow. @angelamurphy your comment about the tire is rough but at least that's recognizable junk. Dave's also found a fake Christmas tree still in the box, a lawn chair with no legs, and what he swears was a bowling ball bag with one shoe in it. The foam blocks from construction are everywhere here too, I swear they multiply overnight.