One recent morning, while I was still in bed, our pool pump turned on. It sounded "wrong." I went out and found water gushing out of a pipe attached to the pump. I turned the pump off.

The pipe appears to be the pump's outflow. An externally threaded hose bib attached to a joint in the pipe had broken off just below the end of the threads. Presumably this was caused by constant pressure and vibration from the pump during the hose bib's life (about 10 years).

The hose bib looks severely corroded around its base and the tube that attaches a hose, but I don't think the corrosion caused the failure, because it doesn't extend down to the threads where the break occurred. (You can't see this in the photo because the shoulder of the threaded section obscures it.)

Something similar happened to me a couple of years ago: a fitting broke that attached a PVC pipe to the pool sweep pump's outflow. In each case, if I hadn't been around to stop things the pump would have emptied the pool to the point where its intake was above water, and the pump would have run dry until it shut off or burned out.

In the case of the pool sweep pump I prevented a repeat failure by re-attaching the PVC pipe to the pump's outflow through a purpose-made hose, which absorbs the vibrations. For a hose bib screwed directly into a vibrating pipe, that isn't possible.

To clarify: The solutions for fixing a noisy pump will not help here, because the pump is not making an unusual type or amount of noise. The vibration is coming from normal operation. The only way to make the pump vibrate less would be to run it less.

Is there a way to prevent this kind of incident?