Fans of The Curse of Oak Island know Vanessa Lucido as the smiling, take-charge blonde in the hardhat from ROC Equipment, the company helping treasure hunters Rick and Marty Lagina excavate borehole H8.
But Vanessa wears many hats along with her safety vest as she’s the CEO of ROC Equipment. Drilling is in her blood, and she gained her skills the old-fashioned way, watching and learning at her family’s drilling contracting company, Becho Inc. Vanessa also has a B.A. in humanities and business and an MBA.
She has two brothers, and in addition to her late father’s ties to the drilling industry, Vanessa has an aunt who owned and operated a blasting company.
Off camera, Vanessa is as driven and accomplished as she appears to be when leading her crew onscreen. She has a passion for riding horses and running long distance relay races, and she developed a successful children’s toy company.
But viewers of The History Channel’s documentary reality show know that success is not always a given on Oak Island, and Vanessa has seen her share of disappointment while running the operation at borehole H8.
On the latest episode, the rig responsible for hauling up the underwater soil in the Money Pit area took everyone by surprise as it suddenly clanked and shifted when the ground beneath the huge metal oscillator disappeared.
Vanessa and her crew scrambled to inspect the earth underneath the rig. She had to deliver the bad news to the treasure-hunting team that the oscillator had to be shut down because the borehole was caving in on itself.
But there was also good news: the dig was safe to continue using the three-ton hammer grab tool since the hole was not increasing in depth nor width.
That all changed within 24 hours. That night the sinkhole grew to a whopping six feet across with underground rumblings clearly audible.
By the next morning, the gaping sinkhole was 11 feet across making the entire area too unstable for Vanessa’s drilling operation, including the 220-ton crane and oscillator, to continue.
With a decent chance that the whole Money Pit area could collapse, the ROC Equipment drilling enterprise is now on hold until an engineer could inspect and evaluate the site.
The Curse of Oak Island airs Tuesday nights at 9/8c.