Schlumberger
People used to
see our huge blue truck decked out with a huge winch on the rear and white lettering
with a simple Schlumberger on the side in huge letters and ask what a scum
burger is. And of course I would reply with a smile, which would be a hair pie
on rye with day old mayo on the side. Sometimes they would see the radioactive
or explosive signs turned out signifying explosives on board the truck, and ask
what we had on the truck. My usual answer would be the simple answer, the bomb.
Normally it would lead to further discussion but in one instance a fuel pumper
at a truck stop refused to fill our tanks and I had to drive 40 miles out of
the way just to get diesel fuel, even after I insisted it wasn’t the bomb he
was thinking of.
Schlumberger was
an oilfield logging and perforating company with an international reputation
for being the Cadillac of all wire logging companies. Their trucks were the
latest technology in the field of oil well logging. Logging is the process of
determining on a foot by foot basis exactly what type of rock and strata you
are encountering when you go down hole in an oil well. The trucks were
outfitted with 15000 feet of wireline capable of sending 7 different signals or
electronic pulses in each wire contained in the cable, and this could be
bundled or paired to create even more signals. All this amounts to being able
to use a variety of different tools for different purposes to determine
physical characteristics of the rock. Combined with sources of radioactivity
from sources of known radiation, signals could be transmitted through the rock
strata and returned to the same tool and recorded as to their average count. This
information when compared to other known samples of rock extracted from wells
of known production through core samples would yield information as to where
the oil was, and how much there was of it.
We had temperature
tools and a tool called a dip meter, which measured the accuracy of the drill
hole as to whether it is going straight down or cork screwing as they sometimes
do. One tool used a cesium source of radioactivity so powerful, we were told to
always aim it away from people as it could easily cause radiation sickness from
just being in the path of the radiation coming off of it. This was determined that it had a specific count of
radioactivity and when it was installed in the tool and sent down the drill
hole , it would send out x amount of radioactivity and receive back y amount of
radioactivity. The difference between the two values amounted to the density of
the rock and was quite accurate and I am sure in use today in modern oil well
drilling as a means of determining exactly where the specific oil or
hydrocarbon layer of oil was and could give a fair approximation of how much
capacity it had to produce oil or gas. Our information made or broke an oil
producer as we were reliable in our results and expensive also.
On top of that we
had more capacity to do deeper wells than normally found here in our region. This
sometimes required us to travel to New York and Pennsylvania and as far south
as West Virginia to service the needs of oil producers on a regular basis. Our trucks
featured a photo lab and a dark room where we operators would develop film from
electrical impulses from down the oil well that would transmit into values of
light that would dance across the film and expose it. We needed to develop the
film to leave the customer with a copy of the log or recording of all the
information we observed while logging the well. This information also included
where the oil was in terms of positioning in the well. After we were done then
they usually ran a long string of pipe that would be cemented in place and
eventually would have holes blasted through the sides of the steel casing to
allow oil to enter the casing. It was important to be able to place these holes
exactly.
This is another
job we did, and we always carried dynamite as well as radioactivity sources on
the truck in case we had to leave one job and head directly to another as was often
the case. It allowed the trucks to have more flexibility to do work needed in
the oilfield. Seems like Schlumberger had everything figured out except how to
motivate workers after you have been out for 36 hours dragging butt across
three states, doing four different wells, and making them a ton of money while
paying you next to nothing. I think it was Dick Cheney that was working there
at that time, I knew he worked for Halliburton and was CEO there for quite a
while. Now Schlumberger owns Halliburton and all its subsidiaries including
Brown and Root, the next largest construction company in the world with the
most equipment next to the Army Corp of Engineers. At one time they owned one
of the largest landfill operations in the United States and started the
landfill at Bolivar, Ohio, we casually refer to as Mt. Trashmore , which recently caught fire
because of legally dumped aluminum dross material that reacted with water and the garbage and smoldered with fire for months
resulting in lawsuits.
Schlumberger is a
huge company and one of the fortune 500 leaders in the USA and in the world. You
would have thought that they could pay you more and give you better working conditions.
But then I believe that is part of their strategy in dealing with employees in our
particular line where we were exposed to radiation, as they didn’t want us to
become lifers, and a liability when we started to develop goiters and unexplained
masses of cancerous material from being exposed to radiation so much. They would
burn us out in a couple of years and very few employees made it 10 years and
some with 20 I knew, ended up being killed on an oil well out of control.
Schlumberger must have been headed up by
a bunch of bean counters who would take stats of all the employees and
determine the average working span of each employee, and could potentially
guess when you would have enough of their stuff to tell them to cram it up
their . Well you know where I am headed, and it isn’t down an oil well. I lasted
there for two and a half years and saw a lot, including the death of my friend.
I didn’t actually see him die but it had a profound impact on me as I eventually
quit that job. What had happened to him could have easily happened to me
anytime. It was just a matter of when and where.
Unlike me, Claude
Denton was a family man and was needed at home, but unfortunate chance took him
out as he was helping set a bulkhead on a producing well when gas pressure
exploded the bulkhead off the well smacking him off a derrick, where he was
trying to align the bulkhead and then swinging over and knocking another
employee out before the wellhead valve was turned off and emergency personnel
arrived. I have been to oil well derricks that have been pulled over, set on fire
and a multitude of different events happen to them. One night we went to one
well where they were throwing chain tightening the drill pipe when a rig hand
was caught in the chain and it ripped him in half. If that wasn’t enough to stand on the same
rig floor and in the same place and look at the sorrowful faces of all the rig
hands left and know that they knew it could have been any of them. But then we left that job, and on the very
same night ended up on a different rig in a different area where another rig
hand was standing pipe back in the derrick and reached out to grab a stand of
drill pipe and lost his grip and fell 40 feet smacking the Kelly bushing, as it
was called, and peeling his faceoff. It wasn’t a good night to be anywhere
around the rigs.
We were
visitors on the drilling rigs and knew quite a few of the rig hands and drillers
and were part of the family. They were always hitting us up for hats or a pair
of our fancy, as they called them, overalls in traditional blue color with scum
burger over the pocket. These guys were rough and they played rough, drink all
night and work all day. Slogging through mud asshole deep to a proverbial well driller’s
ass, in the rain and cold and snow to punch that oil well out so we can make another
trip to the store or go pick Tommy up at basketball practice. These were the
guys that made that happen and put gas in your tank or kept your house warm. I thought
I had worked hard just being on the same site as them sometimes, but I was able
to leave and go somewhere else where it wasn’t so bad. These guys had to endure
the hell they created in the name of having another tank of gas.
I have plenty of stories
from my time there at Schlumberger and intend to share some with you as I go
along on the next few days.
No comments:
Post a Comment