Gold Rush: Rick Ness’ Operation Halts In New Season Sneak Peek

Rick Ness is ready to reopen operations at his mining site, but it’s not going as smoothly as he would have liked on this season of Gold Rush.

In a sneak peek of Friday’s all-new episode of the Discovery Show, we see the “Gold Rush” star and his crew struggle to get operations up and running smoothly. As fans already know, Ness loves measuring his success by creating timelines to reach a certain goal, but it’s going to be harder for him to reach it this time. Here’s what we know.

Gold Rush – Rick Ness And Crew Struggle With A Broken-down Water Pump As They Race To Mine 20 Ounces of Gold

In the sneak peek, we see Rick Ness and crew struggle to reach their goal of mining 20 ounces of gold by the end of the week. The problem? A broken-down water pump has completely shutdown the entire operation.

The pump that broke happens to be the one that feeds water to the washplant, so it’s a race to get it up and running again. The first thing Ness did after realizing that there’s a fault in the system was to pull up the suction basket out of the river to see if it’s gotten clogged. When he did, he realized that his theory that the basket must have become entirely buried in sediment was right.

“Right now this river’s running really dirty because [of] the spring runoff so everything’s coming down the river right now,” Ness explains. “Dirt, sediment, sand … they’re all getting caught right here in our suction hole. So all I can do is dig it out and clean the dirt off it. That’s what we get from trying to run this time of year.”

Adding exasperatedly, he said, “You know what pumps have to do – water pumps? One f-king job: pump water. You know what they almost never f-king do is their job.”

Gold Rush – The Pump Still Doesn’t Work

However, even after the suction basket was cleared of all debris, the pump still isn’t priming. Turns out the airlock might be the culprit.

Morgan then suggested to the crew to install a small second pump that will assist in pumping more water into the system, thereby creating extra pressure to push out the air and allowing the water to once again flow to Monster Red. “So we think we had an airlock. We weren’t getting any suction out of this one,” she explains. “So we’re gonna try use the little pump and hook up over here and just kind of start force-feeding water into it. See if we can get it flowing again.”

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