Reef Tank Disasters!

[Paul B]

Damn! Is there any way to remove the zinc from the water?

It exhausted my resins right away and I assume the RO let in enough to kill the corals. Now I have special resins for zinc.

 

[bobbychullo]

Now that is a story!


Not a reef disaster but back when we had the Northridge earthquake in 1995, I had a 240G system with White tip reef sharks, a leapord shark and a very large 5' green morray eel.

The quake was a rolling one that cause the walls of the house to sway enough that they hit the pvc plumbing lines on the back on the tank. Those lines were about 4" away from the wall. The wall hit them so hard that they embedded themselves into the drywall breaking them and leaving a cut through the wall all the way up the wall where the pipes were behind the tank.

When the quake hit, my wall unit around my bed came tumbling down on me. I raced out of the room and ran or stumbled (in my birthday suit) down the stairs to the tank to find the water pouring out of it. As I reached under the tank to try to figure out where the water was coming from I got the shocks of my life as the water was pouring all over the power outlets and I standing on wet carpet.

In a panic but also a moment of clarity, I ran to the garage for a couple trash cans that I used to mix up water and siphoned enough water out of the tank to save the fish. I reached in and grabbed the sharks and the eel (by hand) and put them into the trash cans. My eel was used to being handled so that part wasn't a big deal and I was in such as state of shock that the thought of getting bit didn't even register. Fortunately the sharks and eel cooperated.

The end result was no fish lost. 200+ gallons of water on the floor to go along with an empty tank. The fix was easy enough once I pinpointed what broke and I had it back up and running a day or 2 later.

I will never forget that as long as I live.

what a great story, i probably would have lost it! i've heard so many stories from that quake...

 

[ChanyB]

A little over a year ago I bought a 150g from someone on a forum. It came with some fish and a couple corals. I put them in my 75g, which meant a little crowding until the 150 was cycled. At the time I had a very temperamental RBTA in the 75 that was constantly crawling across the live rock and walls.

To keep it short, we got home one day and could see nothing more than a cloud of pinkish gray water. We started syphoning and mixed new water, practically emptied the tank and refilled it with fresh stuff. As the water cleared we found 11 fish floating around or lying on the sand. A majority of the coral pulled through, but we lost 11 fish and one anemone.
Moral of the story- don't keep anemones. Just kidding, but cover your powerheads or something. Seriously.

 

[coralnut99]

I had met a guy who had a gorgeous 210 in his living room. It was plumbed to a huge refugium and sump in the basement. Well one day his daughter was doing laundry in the room directly behind the display tank, and knocked over a bottle of laundry detergent and didn't realize it. The detergent spilled all over the floor and somehow ran into the hole in the floor where the plumbing went into the basement sump. In about an hour there was suds everywhere, the huge display upstairs, the sump and refugium downstairs. If I wasn't a reefer myself, I would've laughed at the pictures, but it made me just as sick as he was. No, he's no longer in the hobby.

 

[Ninja1]

Detergent and tank just sounds awful! I honestly don't think anything is fail proof- freak accidents always occur.