On tonight’s Gold Rush on Discovery, there is a huge catastrophe in the making for miner Rick Ness.
His wastewater settling plant has had a breach in one of the berms of soil, allowing muddy rainwater to saturate the clearing ponds and jeopardize the river below where people fish.
If this happens, Rick is facing a huge fine and penalty.
Monster Red settling pond has burst its banks after a strong rain and the damage is done. We open our exclusive clip with Ness’s man Carl Rosk, who radios his boss, Rick Ness.
Surveying the crumbling walls of dirt, Rosk radios and says: “Holy sh**! Rick we have a situation buddy… this is bad get down here now.”
Rick radios immediately back and confirms: “Roger that.”
He arrives on the scene and is mouth agape and says to Carl: “What happened?”
This huge plant called Monster Red discharges 180,000 gallons of silty water an hour. To clean it, Rick uses gravity and a filtration system. He feeds the water through four ponds that slow it down, allowing the silt to settle out before the water is released into the creek.
Rosk says: “It’s just things gone man we’re hooped…It had to be the rain last night man.”
Heavy rain has broken the berm on the very first pond, and dirty water has flooded the lower three ponds. If any more enters the system, it could overflow and illegally contaminate the creek.
Ness agrees that this is a “big-time” catastrophic failure. Understanding the legal implications as well as the financial ones, Ness adds: “I don’t want to be sending a bunch of dirty water into the streams. It’s just ugly and it’s not safe for fish and all that.”
His plant is called Monster red and it is a beast in size and capabilities. The enormous 50-ton wash plant processes a yard of dirt every 12 seconds. It also includes a nugget catch — perfect for Rick’s Duncan Creek operation.
This filtration system that Ness created is vital to keeping the environment from being contaminated.
Hopefully, this setback will be fixed tonight, as Ness has been turning in some impressive numbers considering he is relatively new at being a mining boss.
Fans already know that he stepped up last year after Todd Hoffman left the series. Ness resigned his role in Parker Schnabel’s crew to stake a claim for himself, bringing in his buddies from back home and even his dad to help him get a leg up and begin his fortune making.
Ness is active on social media and posts a lot of funny stuff including some great GIF’s of him holding gold nuggets:
Yes please! https://t.co/mZDDpf9RvF
— Rick Ness (@GoldrushRick) October 19, 2019
Make sure to tune in tonight to see how Rick Ness is doing in comparison to veteran Tony Beets and his family crew. Plus, Schnabel, who inserted a spy into his ranks to see where the work log jam was in his own operation, causes a lot of bad feelings among his overtime working crew.
Gold Rush airs Fridays at 9 p.m. on Discovery.