That time I spent 5 years fighting a silt anchor in the Gulf

Back when I was working out of Morgan City around 2010, I had this one job where we kept losing our shot line to an old silt anchor that nobody remembered laying. Every time we'd run a new line near that spot, it'd get tangled up in this mess of buried cable and chain that had been there since the 80s. I figured it'd take maybe a day to cut it free and get back to work, but it turned into a whole week of diving in zero vis with a cutting torch, feeling around blind. The silt was so thick you couldn't see your own hand, and I had to work by touch alone, literally wrestling with this crusty anchor chain in 60 feet of water. In the end we had to bring in a barge with a winch to pull the whole thing up, and it took almost five years for the company to finally admit that anchor was a hazard and remove it properly. Has anyone else dealt with old junk on the bottom that just never seems to get taken care of?

2 comments

2 Comments

hill.troy1mo ago

You know, that story rings a bell with me. I've seen similar stuff out in the Gulf, just old junk nobody wants to claim because it costs too much to pull up. The worst part is when you're down there in the dark and you grab something that you just know is gonna be a fight. I remember one time we spent three days cutting up an old pipeline that was buried but had a piece sticking up like a spear. It's always the stuff nobody remembers that ends up causing the most trouble.

robert_roberts1mo ago

The real angle here is that half those abandoned pipelines and structures are still technically owned by companies that went bankrupt in the 80s or 90s. So you've got this legal mess where nobody wants to take responsibility but also nobody can legally touch them without permission from a shell company that doesn't exist anymore. I talked to a guy from BOEM once who said there are over 2,000 documented "orphaned" structures in the Gulf that just sit there because the cost to remove them is way higher than any fine for leaving them. Meanwhile, the insurance companies quietly jack up rates for anyone working near those spots because they know the risk.