Hydraulic hose burst on me 60 feet down off the coast of Galveston last Tuesday

I was about halfway through a hull cleaning job on a supply vessel when my main hydraulic line for the thruster just let go. Salt water sprayed everywhere inside the bell before I even knew what happened. I had to call surface immediately and abort the dive while my tender switched over to the backup system. Took me a solid 20 minutes to get clear and back up top, and the whole time I was thinking about how close that was to a real emergency. The hose was only 6 months old, so I'm trying to figure out if it was a bad batch or maybe I nicked it on some debris. Anyone else run into premature hydraulic failures on your gear lately, or is this just bad luck on my end?

2 comments

2 Comments

reese_patel14d ago

Hold on, I gotta push back on this a little. Six months on a hydraulic hose in salt water is actually pretty solid. Most of the time failure comes from how it was installed, not the hose itself. If you bent it too sharp or clamped it too tight at the fitting, that's asking for trouble. Check your bend radius and see if there's any chafing where it rubs against something. I see a ton of guys blame the gear when it's really just a bad routing job or a nick from a sharp edge they didn't notice.

holly89813d ago

Honestly, what nobody's talking about is the water temperature. Six months in cold salt water is way different than six months in warm salt water. Up north? Your hose might last a year easy. Down in Florida or the Gulf where the water's warm, the rubber compounds break down way faster. That heat speeds up the chemical reaction with the salt. I've seen guys pull hoses out of cold water that looked brand new after a year, and the same hose in warm water was cracking in three months flat. So don't just look at the salt, factor in if that water was warm or cold when it went bad.