Tricky Flood Tunnel Traps *Watch Out!* | The Curse of Oak Island

I think we’re all quite excited that it could be the so-called flood tunnel booby trap system. Of course, we’re going to investigate. We have to see what it looks like. That’s amazing!

Two things. I’m going to look, but he’s done. He’s undermining right there. There’s hardly anything left. Ah, [bleep]. That’s not good. Where’s your rock? Over in that corner? No, it was right– it was– Right here, right? I heard you hitting on it. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was a rock. I’ll look.

Well, you basically got a slit down below. There’s wood on the left– your left. And it looks like a tunnel to me, going that way. But it’s probably 15 feet off bottom at least.

NARRATOR: Has the Oak Island team finally found the main flood tunnel? The one which searchers have been trying to locate and shut off for more than two centuries?

RICK LAGINA: This is obviously not very stable. Yeah. I don’t like the looks of it.

MARTY LAGINA: All right. Well, maybe we should try mounting the camera on the side of the bucket right now.

RICK LAGINA: I think that’s a great idea. Can you rig that up, Scott?

SCOTT: Yeah.

RICK LAGINA: The problem with doing this the simple way, with a long reach excavator, is that we do not have a stable hole. I mean, if we had dug a big pit with stable sides, then we could go down and look at it. But it’s not safe to do that. So we’re going to lower a camera on the excavator arm itself. The object is to find out what’s going on here.

MARTY LAGINA: Tell me which way you want to go.

BILLY: In a little towards you. Yeah– no, don’t! Still in the wall. He’s got to go lower, OK? Down!

RICK LAGINA: Look at that. There’s all kinds of wood everywhere. There is definitely structure on the left wall.

STEVE GUPTILL: Yeah. He’s got to go this way.

MARTY LAGINA: Stop! Doesn’t that look like it’s a hole?

RICK LAGINA: It’s a hole, but is it a tunnel?

MARTY LAGINA: Well, it looks like it’s braced with wood to me. If it’s a tunnel, it’d be great.

RICK LAGINA: Well, I think it is. Man, it doesn’t look good under there. Let’s get out of here.

MARTY LAGINA: I think we got what we need to get, Billy. Come on up!

BILLY: All right, Rick. We got the data. We need to put our heads together to see what the heck this means.

RICK LAGINA: Yeah. Let’s convene in the war room and discuss all this.

MARTY LAGINA: OK. Pretty cool. Real cool.

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MARTY LAGINA: Gents, we’re here to talk about the uplands, and what we’ve done, what it means, where we go from here. So I think we’re going to start out with that video that we took. Here we go.

RICK LAGINA: This is down 30 feet. There’s a lot of rock in between those.

MARTY LAGINA: OK, so what are we looking at? What is that? Is it a tunnel that’s been filled with rock?

PAUL TROUTMAN: It could have been a collapsed tumbler shaft. That’s what it looks like to me. That’s wood on either side. And you have this– this piece right here. That looks like a beam. I mean, you can see the wood at the bottom coming out, so I’d say it’s probably a shaft or a tunnel.

RICK LAGINA: Wow. You see the– You can see the double layer there. Double-walled.

MARTY LAGINA: That looks like a tunnel to me. I mean, it goes in there. It seemed like you followed wood the whole way down. How thick are those boards? Two inches, plus?

RICK LAGINA: Yeah, the ones on the right were. The ones on the left were a little bit narrower. The ones on the right were much more substantial.

MARTY LAGINA: Which one? This one?

RICK LAGINA: No, to your upper right. Keep going.

STEVE GUPTILL: What I got tagged this year, we’ve got this little– you can see up on the screen. Right here. You can see it lines up, calculated by Craig. Purely going off of the U-shaped structure. Assuming that the U-shaped structure was put in there with a specific purpose.

MARTY LAGINA: It looks more tunnel-like than shaft-like.

PAUL TROUTMAN: Yeah, because it’s just hard to picture that being a searcher effort, isn’t it?

RICK LAGINA: What I’m getting at is the 1769s, which means that if it comes back old, it almost has to be original works.

MARTY LAGINA: That’s right. That’s right. The dendrochronology, if it puts that wood that we got, if it says that’s, you know, pre Money Pit discovery, then, yeah, then you pretty much have to say it. Geez. Very good chance part of the flood tunnel.

RICK LAGINA: If that data comes back old, we’re right back at this thing.

MARTY LAGINA: That’s where the bad news comes in. We have to pull the sheet pile, and we have a timeline for that, a very specific timeline. But there’s still great hope for Smith’s Cove. I don’t think we can put an X through it. So you know, Smith’s Cove isn’t done.

NARRATOR: Although the team has found promising evidence of the main flood tunnel, they are faced with a disappointing and unfortunate reality. In less than 24 hours, representatives from Irving Equipment, Limited, are set to arrive and begin staging heavy equipment at the Smith’s Cove area in order to remove the massive steel cofferdam.

NARRATOR: Because this operation will take several weeks, and will make working at Smith’s Cove and the nearby uplands virtually impossible, Rick, Marty, and the team will now have to suspend their search activities in the area for the rest of the year.

RICK LAGINA: Look, you know, it’s obvious, isn’t it? If you have undisturbed soil, and then a bunch of wood, and then undisturbed soil, that sure sounds like a tunnel to me. It’s about where the so-called flood tunnel needs to be. We aren’t going to give up on something like that. But having said all that, our permits aren’t going to allow us to do any more excavation this year. We’re done.

MARTY LAGINA: OK guys, well, here’s what I heard. Lots of interesting stuff, but the key piece of data is yet to come. We’re all keenly interested in the dendro results on the question mark shaft. And that could lead us– well, it could lead us just about anywhere. But in the meantime, I know, Billy, you got a lot of work to do, because that sheet pile has to come out. So back at it. Good meeting.

BILLY: All right. – All right. What do we got? What do we got?

STEVE GUPTILL: I think we’ve opened up a wooden Pandora’s box here. I mean, look at all these timbers. All different sizes and shapes. I think we might have hit a collapsed tunnel. Some sort of linear feature of wood that got disturbed.

RICK LAGINA: Huh. Excuse me, I’m going to go have a look. We’ve only just got into it. So we figured we’d give you a call and see what you make of it before we dig it here. Maybe we cut through the fabled flood tunnel. Now we have to follow it back. It could be yet another clue as to where the original money pit was. So let’s go dig it up.

BILLY: Come here, look at this! Is this coconut fiber?

RICK LAGINA: Think there’s big chunks of coconut fiber. That is very interesting.

BILLY: Look at this, Rick. Think that’s coconut fiber?

RICK LAGINA: That is interesting. Well, it’s hair-like. Yeah. And it’s clumped, as well.

BILLY: Yeah, no. That is very interesting. The presence of coconut fiber is curious. Not only because the nearest indigenous coconut trees are more than 1,500 miles away from Oak Island, but also because it was discovered by Dan McGinnis and his team some 60 feet deep in the original Money Pit in 1804, and then by members of the Trudeau company at Smith’s Cove in 1850.

NARRATOR: It was there that a massive layer of it was discovered, covering and acting as a filter for the five stone box drains, which converged into the main flood tunnel that the team is currently looking for. If the material the team has found can be scientifically verified to be coconut fiber, it could mean the team is closer than ever to finding and shutting off the booby trap that has thwarted efforts to excavate the Money Pit for more than two centuries.

STEVE GUPTILL: How much of it is there, Jack?

JACK BEALE: There is a lot of it over here. You’d need a lot to pack a lot of treasure. We need to bag this. So let’s try to get a sample without touching it.

BILLY: Yeah.

STEVE GUPTILL: Yep. I can do that. Open the bag, and use the bag like a glove.

BILLY: Oh, yeah, there’s a big chunk of it. Grab a big clump. There’s still a bunch more. Whole bunch more right there.

RICK LAGINA: Yep. This bit of coconut fiber makes me think that we might be into original works. There’s a lot going on right here. Rather massive structure going on here.

STEVE GUPTILL: Yes. There are only a few things that I find absolutely unique to this quest, to this search. And one of them is coconut fiber.

RICK LAGINA: I want a definitive test, science-based, that it is indeed coconut fiber.

MARTY LAGINA: So do I, Rick.

NARRATOR: As a new day begins on Oak Island, and as the excavation of what could be shaft 5 continues near Smith’s Cove…

MARTY LAGINA: Guys, thanks for assembling on quick notice. I appreciate it.

NARRATOR: –brothers Rick and Marty Lagina have gathered members of the team in the War Room to hear a scientific report via telephone conference from geoscientist Dr. Ian Spooner regarding the potential coconut fiber found there two days ago.

MARTY LAGINA: Yeah, Ian, you’ve got Marty and Rick and Doug and Steve and Alex. Well, we’d– we’d like to think so. Sure. Anyway, I know you had some information.

DR. IAN SPOONER: OK. Wow, so it’s coconut fiber. That’s cool.

NARRATOR: News that the material that the team has found is, in fact, coconut fiber is a potentially historic development. It suggests that after years of searching, Rick, Marty, and the team may finally be on the verge of locating the main flood tunnel, which was constructed more than two centuries ago, in order to protect something believed to be of great value buried in the Money Pit.

MARTY LAGINA: You’ve never seen anything like it. You’ve dug a lot of stuff out of the walls of soil, right?

DR. IAN SPOONER: Wow. No, that’s fabulous. I mean, We found lots of structures in Smith’s Cove. But the difference is, this one we found now has all this coconut fiber, and that’s a pretty key difference.

RICK LAGINA: Absolutely.

MARTY LAGINA: Hey, thanks for the quick info on that. That’s pretty cool.

DR. IAN SPOONER: OK, good deal. Thanks. Cheers. Bye. Bye.

RICK LAGINA: You’ve been questioning the lack of coconut fiber, so it’s kind of cool to come up with. At least that says at one time there was some of this here.

MARTY LAGINA: It’s something different. It’s confirmation of the old stories that they found tremendous amounts of coconut fiber when they were looking for the box drains. And it appeared to have been placed as a filter.

RICK LAGINA: Restalls noted that there were just gobs of it. Not only that, but nobody else put a bunch of coconut fiber down while they were doing anything in Smith’s Cove. So it represents original work. It represents original work.

MARTY LAGINA: Yeah, very cool.

RICK LAGINA: At the end of the day, we were looking for evidence that would corroborate or confirm the old story.

MARTY LAGINA: Yes.

RICK LAGINA: Right? Now we have this evidence that it is indeed coconut fiber.

MARTY LAGINA: So there’s some kind of original something going on here. We’re certainly finding what people were originally looking for. I think we’re absolutely closing in.

RICK LAGINA: OK, let’s go. We’re going to find it out.