Good help is hard to find — never were truer words spoken as tonight’s Gold Rush reveals a huge mistake made by Hoffman crew member Kevin Hiatt.
In Monsters and Critics’ exclusive clip, Hunter Hoffman is in charge and is trying to figure out why his trommel is no longer functioning. The answer? Human error!
Hunter is loading all the pay dirt he can through the Holy Roller when Kevin spots something wrong, and asks over the radio: “Hunter, is there ton of water coming out of the feeder?”
Hunter runs to the spot and immediately knows something is wrong. He radios back: “There’s water coming down the hill…okay, the trommel stopped…the trommel stopped, that’s why there’s water flowing! This cannot be real!”
He asks: “Did our pump shut off? Did we lose some of our water or what? Because the trommel just stopped spinning.”
Hiatt says: “I have no idea. We got a ton of material on our end.” Walking around the equipment, a light bulb goes off in his head and he says: “Oh, this is why was it overflowing…”
Talking fast, Hiatt explains the situation admitting: “Okay, look…the trommel wasn’t open. the trommel was closed.”
Not a good situation for a machine that only works if water goes through it. Now Hunter is angry. “Really, there’s no water going in that?”
Hiatt is now scrambling for words, and says: “I don’t know how this stopped though…”
“Cause it’s it’s f****** full of dirt dude!” says Hunter.
Hiatt the comes out with the obvious, telling Hunter: “We did something that you don’t want to do to your trommel — we filled it full of dirt.”
He adds in an interview with producers: “Now it won’t spin, it won’t puke the dirt out. There has just been one thing after another, we can’t get going.”
The trommel is simple, as an animation on the episode explains: 1,500 gallons of water a minute push paydirt from the feeder into the trommel. Another thousand gallons of water from the spray nozzles then wash the gold off the rocks and push the tailings through the trommel.
But, Hiatt forgot to turn on the water for the spray bars and the rocks piled up until their weight stopped the trommel.
He says: “I had to go get some shovels…we’re gonna dig up the roller. I think God is saying ‘don’t call your trommel Holy Roller.”
Annoyed by Hiatt’s incompetence, Hunter says: “No it’s not like holy s*** this thing never runs. We can never run two hours without something stopping.”
Tonight’s Gold Rush also sees Tony Beets facing big issues with his dredge teardown, and he stands in the way when Parker Schnabel makes a bid for independence on his own claim.
Watch Monsters and Critics’ exclusive video clip below!
Gold Rush airs Fridays at 9/8c on Discovery.