Turtle Explodes!!!

The turtle pictured to the right is no more. He was a good turtle and did his job well. His job was to fill the pond 3 times a day. Not all that demanding but something the turtle, named Alejandro, did every day when it wasn't freezing.

The story of his demise isn't all that long so I'm going to sate your curiosity.

On Monday evening we were watching the news when the weather man said we were going to have our first "hard freeze." Anyone who has ever lived in cold country and also has a sprinkler system will understand that this means you had best blow the water out of the system or come spring it will be squirting water all over the place. On top of that your anti-siphon thing-a-ma-jig (as in expensive) will probably break from the ice. Anyway, I had to blow out the sprinkler system.

I fired up the compressor and started in zone 1 and worked my way through all the zones. The last chore was to blow out the water line that fed the pond. I blew out the water in the line but wanted to blow out the lines leading to the turtle.

To shorten the story a bit I'll just leave it to say I guess a hundred pounds of air was a bit more than 'ol Al could handle.

The pictures left and below show all that remains of him.

With the water line full of air I opened the valve with the intent of letting the air blow out any water left in the line between the valve and Alejandro. As soon as I opened the valve there was an explosion. Not just a pop like a balloon but this turtle exploded!

BOOM!!

Lucky for me I was about 3 feet away from this, has been, turtle. I looked around to try and see what had happened and I saw the turtles head, internal hose and cute little tail dangling from the water line.

The largest piece of the turtle surviving is what you see in these pictures. I think most of him is now residing at the bottom of the skimmer pond. What I could find were a bunch pieces of the turtle no larger than about an inch.

I decided to do my own investigation as to why Alejandro blew up. It wasn't all that hard with his shell was out of the way. When the valve was opened the volume of air was such the green hose blew up like a balloon and 'ol Al wasn't up to working under pressure around 100 PSI.

So here's to Alejandro. His service now complete. He just couldn't handle the pressure.

R.I.P.