Reprise of Farf's post: *Credit: Dropzone.com
Farflung
Oct 30, 2012, 7:30 AM
Post #37335 of 58140 (53689 views)
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As if there isn’t enough mental frustration with all the bullshitting, fabricating of lore and misunderstood purity, I caught myself breaking one of the commandments analyzing the Tena Bar Tome. I didn’t start with a fresh sheet and partially digested some of the Citizen Sleuth’s tale.
So I’m reading their ‘analysis’ of how it could be this, and it couldn’t be that, and having a gay (in the non-lavender sense) old time, but couldn’t find anything about their dredge tests. I mean for all the fawking talk about what this team did with dredging, I figured there would have been a burlap sack of phone books thrown into some sort of dredging device. Or at least list the dimensions of the “wiper bar” and just how one of these things prevents rocks from entering. A 24 inch pipe is pretty large to me, but who knows what experience exists on that team or this thread?
So I find an image of a 24 inch cutter/suction dredge that has a person in the photo for scale. This is not some garden hose cleaning the fish tank here. Plus the volume performance is astonishing at hundreds of yards per hour. This thing can move a great deal of material.
Next I was looking at the Fazio operation where 90,000 yards were delivered to the site in a matter of days. The Citizen Sleuths described the money site being high on the bank and 150 yards down river from the spoils delivery point. It was too high on the bank and too far for a dredge discharge or bulldozer to push the money, and the money had rubber bands and only three bundles together. So I got hung up on the bulldozer and dithered and fretted about dump trucks and front loaders, and how that operation would appear. It was already very complex, and with all the supplemental garbage which was added it was impossible to follow. Then I had a stiff one and decided to have another, and marvel at the raw stupidity which creates this type of mind morass. Why was I worried about the bulldozer? I hadn’t eliminated other possibilities before adding a specialized piece of equipment, when my laziness should have ruled the moment.
OK, so the dredge is spewing all its semi-solid wonder on the river bank and drops the bag of money right in the pile. I would imagine that a suction dredge with a 1700 horsepower system may be quite capable of compressing a bag of waterlogged money into an impressive state. All the mens with their equipments begin to scoop and move 91,000 cubic yards of material, then do the tidy-up of the area and park their equipments for the next few years. That bag of money is still lying on/in the dredge deposit fan. Less noticeable with some wear and discoloration, but it is right in that funky fan.
Looking at the available photos of Tena Bar allows one precisely four or five, snap-shots of the last 40 years. Some may consider that a paltry sample rate and I’m one of them. But the money was found on the tree line, past where dozers operated and slightly under the surface. When I registered the images from ’74, 79’ and today, I found the bank to be extremely amorphous. Checking for floods listed the ‘big ones’ but nothing about the normal flow or discharge rates. In fact, the money discovery site appears to be submerged in the modern Google map images. The tree line on the bank serves as testament for the levels which the river commonly experiences, as the line is nearly the same from 1970 to today. So I cut some key-holes in the images and laid them over each other and could see a much simpler solution.
During some unknown amount of time, those fans were eroded and the bank went back to a linear profile. While the river was cycling through its normal level changes, it pulled away the overburden which covered the money. When the whole bag broke free it drifted briefly and snagged on some roots or branches on the river’s edge. The bag decayed (whatever) and three bundles were left behind with the rubber bands, and were eventually covered with a paucity of sand. Then it was found by Brian.
No bulldozers, no active travel from the spoil site to the discovery site, the storage yard becomes irrelevant, normal accretion buries the bundles, no need for big floods; no need for other dredging, rubber bands could survive a 150 yard journey, just two touch-points now. The dredge picks up the money bag and perhaps some other gear, the dredge deposits it on the bank, then natural and passive forces work from there.
Simplest Model (to me):
1. Cooper Jumps on V-23
2. Lands in Columbia No-pull
3. Beaches at Tena Bar
3a. via dredge removal from place other than Tena Bar
3b. via dredge deposit on Tena Bar
4. Discovered by Brian
Or…. I’m just trying to steer and push this thing because I like simple stuff first. But that’s my latest thinking, unless someone has a simpler version or more complicated solution since something proves this couldn’t happen. Again (Again for the insecure types) this is not THE solution, just the fallback when exploring other possibilities, without having to consider probabilities.
Attachments: The River's Edge.jpg (176 KB)
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