Question about the dredge setup I saw at the old quarry near Bakersfield

I was driving past the old limestone quarry off Highway 58 last Tuesday and they had a cutter suction dredge set up in a way that made zero sense. The discharge pipe was running almost 200 feet uphill on a pretty steep grade. The whole pump must have been screaming just to move slurry that vertical distance. It looked like a great way to burn out a motor fast and waste a ton of fuel. Has anyone else seen a setup like that, or is that just how they do things out there?

3 comments

3 Comments

wesleyflores22d ago

Wait, have you considered they might be using a booster pump halfway up that hill you couldn't see? I've seen setups like that where the main pump just gets it to the mid-point station. It looks weird from a distance, but it's a normal way to handle big elevation gains without killing one pump. They're probably moving material to a processing area or a different settling pond.

colethomas22d ago

Ha, yeah that's the kind of stuff that makes you question reality until you actually see it in person. I had a buddy who worked on a mine site in Nevada and he told me about this exact setup. They had a booster pump hidden in a little shack painted the same color as the dirt, tucked behind some scrub brush halfway up a ridge. He said if you didn't know it was there, you'd swear the water was just magically flowing uphill. @hannahcraig is right though, boring engineering wins again. But at least now I don't have to believe in magic pumps.

hannahcraig22d ago

Oh so now we're adding secret invisible pumps to the mix. That explains why it looked like they were defying physics, I just thought it was magic. Guess my money's on the boring engineering answer then.