Shake Rattle and Roll
there is an oil rig under that mess of mud
In an effort to
summarize the rest of my Scumburger stories I intend to just say something
about how dangerous the job was back then and judging from the amount of
oilfield related injuries I read about today in the news, I can’t say it has
improved much but then I am not in the field. I know for a fact they take a lot more
precautions then they used to in terms of fire safety , hardhat protection and
eyewear and I imagine hearing is a priority now. As well we have the MSDS,
Material Safety Data Sheets to warn you of the hazards you are working with. How
much this applies to the oil and gas field is questionable. I imagine there are
safety programs and safety meetings as they have been in effect for a while and
require personnel to participate and this has exposed a lot of workers to hazards
they never knew existed in their line of work. Still for all the effort, things
go wrong in the oilfield more often than anyone wants them to and sometimes
that results in a loss of life.
I am glad to
have survived the oilfields when I worked in them , in fact I survived my youth
and thankfully I am heading into the realm of the walking dead as I get closer
to retirement age and the end of my life. An unknown person’s quote said “ I am
going to live the rest of my life, so far, so good. And that pretty well sums
me up. At one time I questioned whether the oilfield was going to kill me, or
if I was with my wicked ways, and drinking to excess. I have quit both none too
soon, but while I was going I made a hell of an effort to always put myself in
the forefront to my own destruction by choosing the occupation I did.
We were called
out on a well outside of Coshocton, Ohio on what they called a Rose run well. A
little deeper than a normal Clinton well and what they were looking for was a
vein of gas that just produces like the dickens if you can control it, but they
couldn’t. We arrived to watch the well as it unloaded the mud and chemicals
they use to create a head of fluid above the gas in the pipe to control it, assuming
you have more weight in mud and a stiffer mud to prevent the gas from escaping
the well. If you fail, it all gets blown above the derrick and comes raining
down much like the old wildcatter oil wells you would see in the movies. Once it
starts unloading or blowing out of the hole, little can be done to stop it. Really
you are better off just evacuating the rig and making sure there is nothing to
start a fire. Natural gas is causing all this pressure and if picked up by a
diesel engine it will cause an engine to race and blow up uncontrollably, maybe
causing sparks from flying pieces of metal. It is best to shut down all diesel
and gas engines as well no smoking in the vicinity of the drilling derrick.
The mud with the
gas blasts out of the hole so violently I have seen it shake the drill floor
and substructure so hard, it just trembled and shuttered and shook as if the
whole thing was coming down. As soon as
the pressure in the well blew out sufficiently it would die down until it once
again it would burst forth from the well in repetitive cycles. In between times
the rig hands would do what they could to try and calm the well down. This well
had a BOP or blow out preventer but it wasn’t working and was more for show
than anything so shutting the well in with it was out of the question. They had
tried to mix mud and cement to pump down and create a head and that wasn’t working.
They needed to be able to shut it in once it had a head on it and so they
thought if they could throttle it down with an 8 inch to 2 inch reducer off their
flow line to the pit they could put a valve on it and close it in and hold the
gas once it had been contained. I watched as they installed the 8 to 2 inch
reducer and installed the valve as the well was resting in between times of spewing.
They had time to wrap a chain around the reducer and began to load the well
with mud and cement. We watched from a safe distance as we saw the well start
to unload and then we saw the chain tighten around that reducer and actually
pull in two pieces and more from stretching, and suddenly that metal reducer
shot off the end of the flow line and flew a good 400 yards into the valley
below, as well the chain never had a piece recovered larger than 3 feet long
and it was stretched to no end.
The well was out
of control and we never did log the well as it was too dangerous to even think
about putting our equipment down the hole. They probably just hooked up a gas line
to the well after pulling the rig off and let the flush or first production run
out. Or just kept trying to pump heavy
mud into it, hoping to eventually tame it, but without some sort of a valve or
gate system on top of the well they never would be able to complete the well as
it should have been. This is similar to the type of wells they say they are experiencing
now, the gas production is really high as well there is a lot of fluid produced
also but these wells today have BOP’s, blow out preventers, that work and
spotless rigs and workers who are so common and look like anyone else as
compared to a definite stereotypical grunge worker that existed when I worked
in the oilfields. It seems as I hear about explosions and fires making up moist
of the injuries and death now in the oilfield.
As well where the trucks are driving on the road more there seems to be
a lot of oilfield trucks in bad wrecks now. We should have had more of that
back when I was working but it never seemed too bad, fender benders but nothing
major or out of the ordinary.
Mostly we heard
about rig deaths and burns. In fact I had a supervisor who walked into an open
stream of natural gas blowing off a well pipe with a lit cigarette in his hand.
He knew better but claimed the cigarette couldn’t have caused the flame that
consumed the upper half of his body and resulted in plastic surgery to correct
the third degree burns to his body, as his shirt melted to his skin and later
peeled off. He returned to work vehemently denying any involvement, yet it was
his cigarette that was determined to be the sole source of ignition of the
flame. Some people are just ignorant and bull headed, and both those attributes could have been
easily weighed upon him without regret. Instead of setting an example we could
live up to, he set one we tried to forget,
and yet he remained a boss, purely because he was burned.
No comments:
Post a Comment