Tank Break 7th December
Posted on Sunday, 10 December, 2006 at 1:57 PM by miskairal
Well what can I say. I was gobsmacked and devastated. I woke on the morning of the 7th to the sound of water that was not normal. I went downstairs to discover the floor totally covered in water. I can't remember the exact sequence of events next but I know I headed around the water to get to the power point and as I reached to turn off the power I heard water start to cascade. I knew instantly what that sound meant. All the water was pouring ut of my tank. I can remember screaming NO, not my fish!
I grabbed a net and started fishing. Tony came down and helped having been alerted by my yells. The 4 foot Peregian tank was only a couple of feet away. I managed to net both clowns and get them dumped in the Peregian (P) tank. I was shaking like shit, hand and legs like jelly. I couldn't stop shaking and couldn't work out where to start. I could not let my fish die. Tangy was round the back in just enough water that he was covered so was easy to catch and over he was thrown into P tank. At some point I saw Gollum and one of us managed to catch him as well as Ziggy the shrimp.
At this point remember it is very early in the morning and dark as the power is all off. It is eerily quiet as all the pumps and stuff are off. We are working in the dark in a lot of water and sand in front of a tank with a 6x2 pane of glass that could fall out at any minute and I was still shaking. Shaking to the point I would have been flat out lifting a cup of water without spilling the lot. I couldn't even remember how many fish I had, what I'd found and what was still missing. My guess is that within 10 minutes all the water was gone from the tank. We both had to stand on ladders to reach to the bottom of the tank.
Still missing the Coral Beauty and the PJ cardinals. I started moving rock but remember it is darkish and all the corals have closed and I can't even tell where the coral all are anymore so I'm trying not to totally destroy them as well. Within a minute or two I found the coral beauty under some rockwork laying on it's side in the sand. I grabbed him in my hand and as I lifted him over the top of the tank he jumped and landed on the concrete floor. I'm not a fish in hand sort of person. I don't like handling things like that and am even worse when they jump (like frogs do) but I knew if I didn't pick this darn thing up again it would die so I got down off the ladder and scrambled around in the wet and got the fish and dropped it in P where he swam off and hid behind a rock. Can't say I blamed him.
2 PJ cardinals still missing. We found one over Tony's side of the tank but it took him ages to actually grab it out of the sand. Chucked it in P where it didn't look too good but swam. Then I found the last fish under more rock. It appeared dead which was not surprising because it would have been another 7-10 minutes since all the water was gone. I grabbed it anyway and held it in the Q tank and pushed it back and forward and after a minute it's gills started moving and it kind of swam upside down.
The mess! You would't believe the mess. One sixth of the dsb was on the floor along with probably 500+litres of saltwater. Thank god I don't have carpet down there. One coral was wedged out through the gap in the front of the tank, the rest were all dark and deflated and tumbled around. I rang a friend and asked her if she could help me clean up and they brought out 3 big tubs as well that gave me somewhere to keep the coral under lights. (Thankyou Anne and Rod!). Where do you start to clean up after that? All the junk I'd been storing under the tank was wet as well and scariest of all was that my Tunze multicontroller was wet. I discovered later it was fine though. We stripped the tank down with some of the coral going into the Q tank and the P tank and the rest going in the tubs with the power heads again. I setup some NO fluoros over the tubs later that day.
Turns out I found every single coral and morph and after it all the only coral I lost was my Alveopora which died over the next fortnight. I think also that a few other corals have not flourished like they should have in particular my original galaxeas, my Candy cane and my green brain. Rod and Tony worked on getting the sand bed, what was left of it, out. It stank so bad. There was no way I was going to be able to store the sand bed in a healthy state so it all got dumped into eskies as there weren't a lot of containers left by this time.
Next morning the PJ cardinal in the P tank was dead and the other died around midday. All other fish appeared ok although the coral beauty had a patch of purple missing. All were eating. No sign of white spot. Yet! Yep, that's right. That tank had only 11 weeks before had fish die of white spot. Eek.
Edited on: Wednesday, 02 May, 2007 4:00 PMPosted in Tank in general (RSS)