Dangerous poetry in motion. Oil rig floor hands


https://www.facebook.com/drill...os/1926269317685230/

One of my brothers did that back in the 70s. It’s a very hard and dangerous job.
His son did this until about two months ago when one of those big hunks of metal hit him in the back and severely injured him.

Over the years I have known quite a few folks that did that type of work, some of them died many of the others were basically crippled for life.

When times were good they made good money, but few if any of them ever bettered themselves in the long run.

We are still driving. Thanks and hats off to the people who get the job done.

As mentioned above, if it wasn't for thousands of men working like in the clip above, we'd all be riding bicycles. Good for them, good for us.

quote:

Originally posted by Gatogordo:
As mentioned above, if it wasn't for thousands of men working like in the clip above, we'd all be riding bicycles. Good for them, good for us.

+1


Mike

That clip brought back a lot of bad memories. A spinning chain took off more fingers than I care to remember. The only part of that clip that looked "modern" were the coveralls the men are wearing. Other than that it looked like 1970 all over again. Iron Roughnecks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1E9A_tWL5w and Topdrives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_iPgaWkE88 took care of some of the dangers, although the first iron roughnecks were about as dangerous as a spinning chain.

The first crews I remember watching around Graham, Texas wore flip-flops, no hardhats, and were shirtless on the drill floor. The smaller the drill floor, the less space to work, the less chance to get out of the way when shit happened, and it happened often. (The drill floor in the clip is tiny.)

Safety wasn't a consideration; speed was. Operators wouldn't put you on Daywork. You were on Footage or Turnkey. The faster you worked the more money your company made. If you were good (lucky), you attended one funeral a year. Cactus Drilling Company/Corporation was known as a death trap. They killed upwards of six to eight men a year in West Texas. Noble Drilling Company was about as bad. No chain guards or guards on drive belts. You were supposed to avoid getting caught. If you made a mistake, you were killed or maimed.

If you were a "good-hand", you could find work on the larger rigs, better companies. If you weren't, you got work where you could, small workover rigs. In many cases your drill crew may have been together for ten to fifteen years. That was the best case. You knew what your driller might do. You were a team. You looked out for each other. If you had a "worm" on your crew, every one watched him. He was most likely to make the mistake that would kill someone.

We had a man accidentally kill his brother one time. A letter came down from the corporate office saying that relatives were no longer allowed to work relatives on their crew. Pretty dumb response. Who is going to watch out better for you if it's not your father or your brother, or your cousin, or your brother-in-law. We made that rule go away after a while.

Guns and alcohol were common on the rig. A good driller was one that wouldn't allow his crew to drink until they were on the ride home. If you saw a deer from the drill floor, you scrambled for your rifle. Didn't much matter whether it was deer season or not.

Things started changing in the late 80s, early 90s. Drilling companies that had poor safety records couldn't get work from the majors (Exxon, Chevron, Shell, etc.). Guns and alcohol were banned from location.

Hands still die more than they should. Usually it is due to inexperience by someone, or a failure to recognize a dangerous situation by a supervisor. Some oil companies still don't put safety first. (I hope Apache Corporation has changed.) As a supervisor or a manager you had to stand-up to oil company reps. that try to force you to take risks. You got threatened with being fired, losing the contract for your company, etc. You had to hope someone up the line had your back. National oil companies were the worst. ONGC, Pdvsa, Petronas, etc. never gave a shit about you or your people. Kill someone, and that was on you. Get a replacement. That was their philosophy.

I wouldn't want to go back.

What I liked about it, was working on a rig evened the playing field. You didn't have to have a college degree. You didn't even have to know how to read. (Someone on your crew knew how to do the paperwork for you.) If you weren't lazy and could find a way of making your company more money, and keep your people safe, the sky seemed to be the limit. You might have graduate engineers working for you, but you could still become, drilling manager, VP, or even a rig owner.

If you were all blow and no go, you would be found out. Take a kick and either not know how you were supposed to react, or worse, run, and your opportunities were going to be limited. As long as your supervisor stood in, you were supposed to run towards the problem. A good driller or toolpusher would tell you the first day; "if you see me run, you run", if not, when I look over my shoulder, you better be there".

Years ago, in the 80s, I used to shoot trap with a rig hand who was a really nice guy who still had all his fingers and toes. He had graduated from rig work and owned his own company. At the time, he was probably in his 70s, which seemed ancient, but as many of us have found, ain't nearly as old as we thought it was. Great guy, used to tell war stories of working on the rigs, such as they were, in the Caddo Pine Island field (huge oil field brought in 1905). One of his sayings was that if you were on a rig floor and heard steel rattling, run. Another time, he told, pre-steel toed boots, of a hand who was next to bore, and a stem slipped and cut a perfect half moon out of end of his boot, which, of course was covered in drilling mud. Everyone waited for the blood and, like pink bugs, his toes uncurled and stuck out end of boot. His innate reflexes had sucked them up and saved his foot. Helluva nice guy, I'm sure he's gone now, but he could tell some tales. Caddo Pine Island made a lot of people in Shreveport rich with its over 300 million barrels production, some very rich, but it is mostly depleted now and while still producing is mostly strippers today.

How times change, when I was a kid, around real wildcatters, the "normal" find was 1 productive well out of 1 to 12 drilled as "cats". Now with modern seismic, they hitting 95% in some hot areas. Of course, those are mostly not what I'd call real wildcats.

Apache Oil mentioned above, just brought in a well in British North Sea with 10 million barrels est reserves. Damn.

Shit. And I thought logging was dangerous.

quote:

Originally posted by Bill/Oregon:
Shit. And I thought logging was dangerous.

Throw in a drunk driller, not uncommon in the old days and it becomes scary. Had the option of doing that in my late teens, did seismic instead, working with dynamite is safer.
Grizz

I drilled water wells for a couple years a lot smaller scale.

The boss was never is such a rush not to safe.

Another fellow and I ran our own cable tool rig he didn't have all his fingers.

Maybe that's why by the time I was working with him we were very safe.

Many moons ago I worked industrial construction and in between jobs once a friend called and asked if I would come fill in on his rig since they were short handed. I worked as a Worm on a triple that was drilling to around 18,000' for a few months until I got a call to go build a power plant. Another time between jobs I worked as a Derrick Hand on a large work-over rig and a Floor Hand on a small work-over rig for the same company.

That same friend that asked me to work the rig with him a few years later had the BOP dropped on him when they were dismantling the stack to move to the next hole. It almost cut him in half, he spent months in the hospital has had multiple surgeries to remove sections of his bowels that kept dying for over a year after the accident and for the rest of his life he will suffer from chronic pain from the spinal injuries and malnutrition from the loss of intestines and all kind of other lessor problems.

Those experiences taught me all I needed to know about oil field work...I decided I would stick to construction, pipelines, refinery expansions, chemical plants and power plants the work was safer and paid the same or better.

quote:

Originally posted by Gatogordo:
As mentioned above, if it wasn't for thousands of men working like in the clip above, we'd all be riding bicycles. Good for them, good for us.

Damn straight. Hard, very hard, but essential work!


.

quote:

Originally posted by Bill/Oregon:
Shit. And I thought logging was dangerous.

It is.....!

Another rig hand story...I was coming home from, I think, Paris and a connecting flt dumped a bunch of oil workers, fresh from Kuwaiti oil fields (war just over) and they boarded our flt. Not surprisingly, they were already 3 sheets into the wind (no alcohol in Kuwait), and pretty loud. I fit right in, we talked about their rigs, etc and suddenly this bunny hugger type lady stood up and started lecturing all of us about the evils of a petro based world. Finally, after looking at her like she was an extraterrestrial for a while, an older driller leaned over, poked her in the chest, and pointed out the window, saying, in a loud voice, "Lady, what do you think those fucking engines are running on? Carrot juice?" Plane broke up in laughter and she sat down and shut up. I loved it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40xWRyYbluA

Companies selling rockbits keep "Bit Records" on the wells as they are being drilled. They were great for offset information whenever a new well was being drilled. You would get the bit records from surrounding wells and you could predict where the new well might start getting crooked. That was useful back in the day when the Railroad Commission in Texas required that your well stay within 5 degrees of vertical.

If it wasn't too old, the record might help you with bit selection for the new well.

I once found a bit record from the early 50s. It required about 200 bits (below intermediate casing) to drill the well to about 11,000'. That means 200 times the rig crew had to pull all the drill pipe from the hole, put a new bit on, and trip it back to bottom before starting to drill again. That old well was a rank wildcat at the time. The well took almost six months to drill. We drilled the offset well in the 70s with four rockbits and less than thirty days.

That old bit record showed that every day those three drill crews were tripping pipe. None of the old bits stayed on bottom more than five to fifteen hours. (A trip took one hour per thousand feet. If you brought that bit off bottom at 10,000' you would pull or run pipe for 10 hours straight to get back to bottom.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiNYCfx-QMs

Maybe those three rig crews never made any of those trips. Back in the 50s, particularly during the "booms", like Snyder, Cisco, Kilgore, etc., there were what was called trip-hands. They would cruise the oilfield looking for "black-leg". That was a derrick with pipe standing in it, meaning that they were tripping pipe. The trip-hand crew would race to that rig (hopefully outrunning other trip-hand crews in the area) and offer to run pipe for them...for a premium. The normal rig crew could take care of maintenance, or just catch a break, or a nap, while the trip hands made the trip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_H4w1Id7yE

Offshore is another thing entirely. Some hands used to working land rigs (8 hour tours) go stir-crazy on an overseas, offshore rig. You're there for 28 days, thousands of miles from home, working 12 hour tours each day, maybe a couple hundred miles offshore, and the farthest you can get away from where you are standing is just staring at the horizon over the handrail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCyA_Tm0T08

It was interesting; met some real characters. Early in my career I met an old roughneck on a rig near Levelland, Texas. He liked wearing a metal hardhat at the time (they were later outlawed). A friend introduced me to him. He wore his hardhat without suspension, just a liner; sat down nearly over his ears. Above his right eye, his hardhat was bashed in, more or less the size of a baseball (half buried) but with irregular edges. When he took his hardhat off he still had a bashed-in portion of his head that exactly matched the bashed-in portion of his hat. He had almost died after an oilfield accident years earlier. They had to remove a significant portion of his skull. He thought it was funny to startle people by taking off his bashed-in hardhat, just to showoff his bashed-in head.

As to that last story Kensco,I have one to relate. Years ago we were sitting in the electrical supply house at the counter drinking our coffee + waiting to get our order filled. In walks this older fellow + tries to butt in + get special service.Then he goes off about how no one cares about him anymore,gets ignored even though he used to be the best electrician that God ever made but now nobody notices him.(getting louder all the time) He says,"Hell ,they would'nt notice if I whipped my dick out + backed out the door just like I was trawling for cocksuckers." At which point he did.After he left,the counter man said,he's never been the same after he fell off that pole on his head.