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Silt out visibility dropped from 15 feet to zero in about 90 seconds
We were doing a pipeline inspection off Port Fourchon last month, bottom time around 60 feet. Current was light, nothing weird. I nudged a soft patch with my fin while checking a valve, and the whole plume just erupted. Fifteen feet of viz down to hand-in-front-of-face in under two minutes. I had to feel my way back along the pipe to the shotline. My supervisor said the same thing happened to him on a jetting job near Galveston, took him four hours to find the lift bag by touch. Anyone else had a sudden zero-viz wall like that? What's your move when it hits out of nowhere?
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the_shane1mo ago
Wait, are we really calling 90 seconds a sudden wall when you had time to notice it happening? I've been in silty water my whole career and yeah, it gets dark fast, but zero viz at 60 feet with a pipe to follow is more annoying than dangerous. You had the pipe, you had the line, you just had to feel your way out. The guy who took four hours to find a lift bag, that sounds like a training issue more than anything else. If you're working bottom contact in soft silt, you should already be expecting this and have your hand on the structure before you kick. I'm not saying it's fun, but calling it a wall makes it sound like you weren't prepared for what happens in that environment every single day.
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