The Day We Found a Car in the Intake
By Walt Kesler, Power plant maintenance manager, nuclear-qualified. Reviewed by Dana Whitcombe, technical reviewer.
Cathodic Protection & Anodes | Offshore & Subsea Diving October 17, 2009. 4:15 a.m. The number one circulating water pump started hammering, and the control room went from quiet to loud in about a second. I was on-call. By the time I got to the plant, the operators had already isolated the pump and pulled the suction gate shut. The pressure drop said we had something big on the intake screen. The river was high that month – almost to the top of the flood wall. We'd been raking leaves and tree limbs off the trash racks for a week straight. But this was different. The pump didn't surge; it just stopped pulling water. A low-pressure alarm screams differently than a high-vibration one. I remember thinking, 'We've got a log, a big one, or something worse.' When we put the trash rack hoist down to pick the load, the hoist overloaded and tripped on torque. The motor hummed, then the breaker popped. Whatever was down there wasn't a bundle of branches. We called the dive contractor out of Oakville. The water temperature was 58 degrees, visibility maybe two feet. It took them an hour just to get lines down and find the shape. They came up laughing and shaking their heads – a Buick Skylark, sitting on its roof, wedged between the screen and the rack. The license plate was from our county, and the frame still had a 'Class of 2001' parking sticker where the windshield used to be. That sticker made it a local story.
The Pull
Getting the car out wasn't a two-hour job. It took two days of planning and a lot of cursing. We had to bring in a mobile crane, set up a tackle system, and dive in to rig lift slings under the roof. The car was upside down, so the roof was the leading edge. The current had pushed it hard against the screen deck, and the trash rack itself was bent sideways. The dive crew spent the first morning just cutting away the screen mesh that had wrapped around the rear axle. Then they cut the car into three pieces with an underwater plasma torch. The motor block came up first. A D-ring from a sling was still latched to the front frame – a D-ring, from a wrecker. Whoever put that car in the river did it on purpose. The pieces went straight to a salvage van. The divers took a break on the dock, drinking coffee and talking about the kicker: the rear bumper still had a sticker from a local muffler shop that was torn down years ago. Everyone in the plant had driven by that shop at some point. It felt like we were pulling up a piece of the town's past.
The Car Had a Story
The VIN came back from the county clerk. The car was a 1987 Buick Skylark, registered to a local kid named Danny Gibbs. The parking sticker said Woodson High, class of 2001. Danny's car, known as the Batmobile because of the dark gray paint job, had been gone since the big flood of 2003. The rumor was he and a friend were racing on the bridge and lost control. The car went over the rail, Danny swam out. The car was never found, and no one really pushed for it. He left town a year later. When we called his mom to tell her, she laughed for five minutes straight. 'That car,' she said, 'was always a headache.' The local newspaper sent a photographer who stood on the bank shooting pictures for half an hour. The plant manager walked out and gave him a coffee. That was the moment I knew this wasn't just a maintenance grind. It was a local event. People came by the fence to look at the Buick sitting on the flatbed. Somebody from the marina knew Danny. I stayed late just to hear the stories.
The Damage Report
The car didn't just stop our pump. It bent the trash rack, tore an eighteen-inch gash in screen number two, and took a chip out of the pump impeller. We were down for 36 hours while divers cleared debris and a contractor rebarreled the screen assembly. The unit ran at reduced load another three days because the pump casing was warped where the impeller had ground against it. The damage bill came out of our maintenance reserve. It wasn't a good month. But the interesting part was the inspection that followed. We line-walked the entire intake channel from the river to the pump bay. We found a buried anchor, a full-length highway bridge timber, and a cluster of chicken wire wrapped around a survey stake. That car made us look hard at everything else. The crew started calling it the 'Buick effect.' Any strange vibration now gets a serious look. No one wants to be the one who says 'probably just leaves' again.
What We Changed
Afterward, we called the city's public works department and the county sheriff's office. We talked about the river as if it were a water system, not a flood alley. We put a steel trash boom upstream, twenty yards from the intake, anchored to the river bottom and equipped with a float-and-line system that would trip a sensor if it took a hard hit. That boom catches floating junk, not cars, but it slows things down long enough to spot a problem. We also started to audit the neighbors. A car turned up in the intake, but so could a propane tank, a dock section, anything. The city started a program to tow derelict vehicles away from the banks. That’s the real local lesson: nothing stays hidden on a river forever. And when the paper asked for a follow-up, we used it to remind people that the intake is the town's drinking water interface, not a dumping ground. The Buick ended up in a scrapyard, but the story stayed.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did a car get that far into the intake? The river rises, the bank erodes, and if a car was sitting on the edge it just slides in. In our case, the car was deliberately dumped, but it got caught in the current and rolled until it wedged against the screen structure. The racks are meant for logs, not vehicles. What's the biggest thing you've pulled off an intake screen? That Buick. Before that, it was a roll-off dumpster, but that didn't have a story behind it. The dive crew still talks about the Buick. Do all power plants have this problem? Every plant on a river has some story. Some use wedge-wire screens or traveling screens with deeper hoppers. But debris is debris. The local lesson is that old cars belong in a scrapyard, not a water intake.