going in the hole to make a few bucks

Halliburton

You Have Got to be Fracking Crazy to Work There.

         Well if the phrase, “Don’t tell momma I work in the oilfields, she still think s I am a piano player in a whorehouse,” ever applied to anything it was working at Halliburton. Back in the mid to late 70’s after my farming career was beginning to look like I needed some agonizing reappraisal as to whether I should continue to work for nothing or find a better paying job, well the oil field was booming back then also. Living in Wooster at the time gave me a front row seat to new jobs, as Wooster was in the heart of the oil boom country with several different oil companies headquartered there.   I was quickly losing interest in farming and wanted something else that paid better and offered me a chance to see something new. Working at Halliburton offered all that and made sure that was my priority.

       In fact, I never had to worry about having fun or taking time off to spend my money, or in fact worry about having a girlfriend as that was all out of the question once they had their hooks in me. It was nonstop work 12 days on and 2 days off, if you were lucky enough to get the days off as there ere no guarantees on anything since there was no union. One day you would be in Marietta, Ohio and then the next you were headed to Youngstown, Ohio. I first started on the frack crew heading out to jobsites and helping lay heavy duty steel pipe they used in the high pressure fracking operations.

     It is basically a bunch of trucks water, and chemicals under intense pressure as they force this slurry mix down the drill pipe to almost a mile below your feet, and blast the rock strata apart, then they pump sand into those cracks formed by fracking to prop open channels in that same rock strata we just opened by fracking, to make pathways for the oil and gas to return to the surface through the drill pipe and later a pump head. Fracking is basically fracturing or breaking apart rock strata to create channels for easy removal of crude oil and natural gas. We were doing the same thing in 1977 as they are doing now, only in a lot more cruder fashion, on shallower wells.

      I started out on an acid truck hauling hydrofluoric acid, so corrosive it would eat the skin off your hand if you allowed it to have any contact. I used gloves and a respirator and still ended getting burned by that stuff. Eventually I was transitioned into one of their tear drop sand trucks and would haul the sand from Wooster to the job site wherever that may be. You would back your truck into a line at a well site and then we would hook the lines up, and you and a bunch of pumper trucks and a blender truck would mix the materials in water and begin pumping the mixture down the hole. The equipment did most of the work when set up, except opening bags of chemicals and stuff to be added to the mix. Sometimes before we started we would dump the hydrofluoric acid down the hole to let it sit and clean things up before we started.

     There were no MSDS Material Safety Data Sheets, alarming you or making you aware of what chemicals you were pumping down the hole into the earth, as at that time we didn’t care, or know enough to care. It was a whole different world back then in 1977 compared to now. And still the company Halliburton refuses to share trade secrets with their workers, or the general public, to allow them to know exactly what the harmful effects of what they do, are doing to the environment. It seems the oil and gas industry has enough power over Washington to withhold this information when other industries using toxic chemicals are forced to disclose this information.

    Fracking is a noisy dangerous job to say the least and if a high pressure line would burst while pumping this crap down the hole it could easily kill you or inject water into your skin, and cause you serious problems, or it may cause you harm if you are standing beside the pipe and shrapnel from an explosion of high pressure is produced. The noise is enough to drive you crazy as you have about 15 high revving trucks all going full tilt pumping as much of this slurry down the oil well as fast as they can. It is deafening to be in the area and listen to this roar of machinery. There was no ear protection then, as I say workers didn’t even think or know what the effects of being exposed to high decibels of noise could do to your hearing.  Somehow though when we had the well fracking operation started and you were not needed to be there to operate a truck you could walk away or in some cases catch a much needed nap, with that thunderous noise making operation going on around you if you could imagine as there was no escaping the noise. Your days would start at around 5 am, and you would be needed to be at the shop and check your truck out.  Then usually you would stop and eat somewhere along the way, to be on the well site around 8 and begin operations. So getting a little snooze on the back of a flatbed truck or in the cab of your own truck sitting in the seat, made the time go faster and helped you make up for what you lost by going to bed late and getting up early.

     Once you were on the job you couldn’t leave till they were done, and it required everyone to make sure everything was stowed away. I look at these well sites they are building today and see all the gravel and flat area around the well head and I am amazed at the expense they go to today as compared to back then. We couldn’t just drive to the well head as they do now, instead we would have dozers waiting for us on especially bad locations and they would hook a chain to us and drag us into wherever we were to set up. Then when we finished they would drag our trucks back out to the road.  There were several times as I sat helpless in the truck seat and  I could reach out and touch mud they had pushed up from the road they were dragging me in, or out on and still be pulled along in 3 foot deep mud.  It didn’t make any difference if your truck could move on its own. Once you were hooked, it was up to the dozer operator to get you where you needed to go. Sometimes by the time you were back to the hard road you would have your air lines ripped off from under the truck and would have to sit for a couple of hours and wait for a mechanic to show up and repair them before you could head home as you had no brakes till he did. This is just what you wanted to do after a day’s hard work, and that was sit and wait on someone else.

     It didn’t matter what the field conditions were, you went anyway. Rain, snow, wind, and mud, or a raging thunderstorm and lightning bouncing and cracking off the trees beside the well head, you stood out there and braved the conditions with freezing numbing hands. Or have your body so parched by the heat and no drinking water on the site that a mud puddle even looked like a cooling option to you to quench your thirst and cool your brow, until you could leave and roll down the windows of your truck and feel the breeze of wind flowing in through the windows finally offer you some relief from the heat. As a friend of mine summed it all up for me one time when an engineer was in a hurry pushing us to get moving to a job site, he said ‘relax man , that oil has been down there 60 million years , a few hours one way or another isn’t going to make much difference.’ He was right but then that isn’t how the oil field management looks at it, everything you do should have been done yesterday even if it wasn’t ready to do it.

     The trucks were junk compared to now, as they had no air conditioning or any amenities like even a radio to help you as drive along unless it was a company radio.  The only reason that it was in there was to make sure they could contact you anytime they wanted. Most likely you would rather have it off, but they insisted on you leaving it on. Sometimes we would do 2 frack jobs a day with the same crew, and this usually involved an all-day job resulting in you not getting back to the shop until about 6 in the evening. Then you would have to have your truck ready to go in the morning still. If that meant pressure washing the mud, adding oil to the engine, or anything to do with the maintenance, this was done by you the truck driver before you went home. Some days it was dark when you started work and it was dark when you quit working.

     Now you would think that a guy in his right mind would just go home and get ready for the next day. Well you could see easily if we were in our right mind I would have finished college and sought out a manager’s positon in a feed mill somewhere and would be doing something else besides the oilfield. I needed a break and alcohol and partying would be ours, as we would head out in our dirty clothes to the bar and proceeded to get shit faced as we liked to call it, and then head home to wake up in the morning feeling like crap to do it all over again.

     It was like the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ to us as day after day we would repeat the same routine and wonder why we were alive. It should have killed us, instead it strengthened our resolve to push harder in exposing our bodies to more torture on behalf of the oil companies, to increase their profit. They could care less what we felt like; we were a number to them. As long as we showed up for work and played their game, our bodies and soul were theirs. Screw up and lose your license, you were gone tomorrow. That was just the way it went.

    Everyone is making a big deal out of fracking now and my opinion is it should be rightly so. We need a lot less of any kind of that stuff going on in our environment. We have alternatives to this kind of environmental disaster we are inflicting on our environment. They are using different chemicals and higher pressures, as well a lot more fresh water. Almost 10 times more than we did, polluting a lot more now then back then. Whatever goes down the hole eventually gets pumped to the surface again and then lies in huge retention ponds till it evaporates back into the environment, or is reused on another well if possible, or leaches out of the pond and contaminates the fresh water supplies.  Solar and wind should take more of an active role as we move along , in some case it has already made the oil barons cringe in anticipation of the day the prices of crude drop from too much supply of cheap oil. We have not seen that day yet unfortunately.