The oilfield is a dangerous place. As I mentioned in an earlier post everything out here is heavy. If something falls on you, chances are it will weigh hundreds or thousands of pounds, and a hard hat isn’t going to cut it. A story today on MSNBC.COM http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26645108/ talks about it. They mention that there are a lot of inexperienced people working on these rigs and they are right, but the rampant drug use mentioned simply doesn’t happen. There is no difference between this boom and any other boom in the oilfield – these are good jobs and in a boom hiring goes way up to satisfy the demand for workers.
Thirty years ago I was in a video arcade playing a game of Asteroids and a guy I didn’t know walked up to me and asked me if I wanted a job. “Umm, sure”, was my response, “What kind of job”? ”Roughneck” was his reply. I didn’t really want a job, but they were paying $13.00 an hour which was pretty good money at the time. I hired on, showed up for work and poof, I was a roughneck. Today roughnecks make $20.00 – $30.00 an hour. Back in those days the oilfield was a lot more dangerous than it is today; The loss of a finger was a mark of distinction. Today, the oil companies who fund the drilling are much more concerned with safety, and you don’t see as many people with missing body parts working on rigs.
Back in the old days a car full of roughnecks going to work might pass a bottle of Crown Royal around on the drive into work. These days that will get you run off as quick as anything. In the old days, I had a driller who could roll a joint with one hand while tripping pipe (pulling the drill string out of the hole, or putting it back in) and we would take a five minute break to smoke it. We looked forward to that break because it was the only one we would get in the next eight hours. I would argue that it helped us concentrate on the job at hand and we never had any accidents, but that is for another post.
These days the drug of choice is crank (methamphetimine) as the shifts are normally twelve hours and coffee just doesn’t do the job for many modern roughnecks. Back in the day coffee was the drink of choice, with a little Crown mixed in for luck. The cranksters proliferate the oilfield, and increases the danger for everyone. I do not mean to suggest that everyone in the oilfield uses meth – they don’t and if you get caught the only statement you’ll likely hear is, “Take your clothes home”, which is oilfield speak for “you’re fired”. It is a dangerous place, and it requires your full attention to stay alive and unhurt.
The rigs themselves are a source of danger not only because of the weight and power of the accutrements, but because many of the rigs are very old. It is not unusual to find a rig that was built in the 1940′s. Huh? We don’t even have any cars from the 40′s still on the road. Because these rigs are built so tough and constantly upgraded, they may last indefinitely, therefore it is possible to find yourself on a rig without modern safety measures and aforethought of design. The older rigs were built to do one thing: Drill. Drill fast, drill straight and not stop until the hole is through. I am not saying these rigs should be scrapped – they cost way too much money and frankly, we need them to keep drilling so that we can keep foriegn oil at bay, if only for a little while. It is tantamount to a workers life that they be trained well and keep their wits about them to avoid injury, however. When I roughnecked I coined the phrase “Total Bodily Awareness” which simply meant to be aware where every part of your body was at all times. This helped me avoid injury.
Even now as I sit in my air conditioned trailer chock full of computer equipment writing this post, I am about forty feet from a six-inch pipe designed to vent the natural gas we might encounter on the rig. If things go wrong, and I will do everything in my power to see that they don’t, gas might be vented and accumulate around my trailer which could lead to an explosion. Usually a rig will set up a flare, which is attached to this pipe and sticks up in the air thirty or forty feet and has an automatic igniter designed to burn off the excess gas. We don’t have one and I’m not sure why, but I’m not really worried about it. If gas starts coming up the hole, I will be the first to know and my car is pointed towards the rig road for a fast getaway. This is just part of the job and we all know that every job has inherent dangers associated with it.
Part of the reason I feel so comfortable about it is the Company man. The Company man is the representative of the actual oil company who owns the lease and hired the drilling rig and is in charge of every aspect of drilling on the location. They are usually guys who started out as a “worm” roughneck and have worked their way to the top of the food chain. Our particular Company man is one of these. Dale is around retirement age and actually was retired from a major oil company, but got tired of puttering around in the garden and came back to work. He is a jovial sort which is not common to Company men, but all the better. He wears his experience on his face, and garners trust and respect through his knowledge and actions which says to everyone on location that he can handle it. Dale has done this for a long time and he will make sure that everything within his power is taken care of, and everything is within Dale’s power. Out here he is the ultimate authority and if he says “froggie” you jump.
Up on the rig floor is a different story. There are a couple of worms, but they are looked after by the experienced hands whose job it is to keep them alive (and working). Worms are just part of the deal, and they usually don’t last that long. Roughnecking is a hard job and the worms that make it are not afraid to work and take orders. I’ll describe to you part of a roughnecks job – the trip – which the hands are doing right now as I write this post.
TRIPPING PIPE
We had a mud pump line washout, which means that an eight inch steel pipe attached to a pump and motor each bigger than the biggest SUV sprung a leak and must be welded. Oil rigs have welding equipment on hand, but this is a job that calls for a real welder with years of experience. Why? Because these pumps can spew mud through a tiny crack at over two thousands pounds per square inch which can easily penetrate the skin of some hapless roughneck standing too close when it blows and kill them. Here comes the trip:
On this aged rig the driller’s station is outside next to the cathead (a spool with chain attached to it for lifting heavy objects) and he has an array of gauges and levers around him. Newer rigs have all the controls inside a “doghouse” on the rig floor. The kelly (a swivel which the mud runs through attached to the drill string) must be set back. A set of giant wrenches called tongs which are suspended from cables over the rig floor are attached to the kelly and the pipe, the driller applys torgue and the connection breaks. A device called an “air tong” is pulled up to the pipe and spins it free. Mud comes out of the kelly and gets all over the place. The roughnecks set the kelly off to the side, and hook up the “elevators” which are just a large steel clamp which goes around the pipe under the joint so that it can be pulled up. Elevators clamped around the pipe, the driller brings the blocks up (blocks are a giant block and tackle setup) to a little over ninety feet (on this rig which is a “triple” meaning three joints of pipe to a stand”) and the floorhands stand ready to put in the “slips” as he lowers the string back down a little. Slips are a multisectioned steel wedge with hardened steel grippy things attached to it that are set into the rotary tables (rotary tables spin the entire drill string for drilling) and keep the drill string from falling into the hole. Some of the newer rigs have hydraulic slips, which means that roughnecks don’t have to lift them, but this rig doesn’t, so the roughnecks have to pick them up and put them around the pipe while the drill string is on the way down. Slips weigh between a hundred and two hundred pounds. Slips now set, two sets of tongs are put around the joint to break the connection. These tongs are about five feet long and weigh several hundred pounds apiece. They work like vice grips (sort of) and are hooked up to cables attached to the catheads. The driller applys force to them and the connection breaks, then the airtongs are used to spin the pipe loose. Derrickmen at this juncture are ninety feet above the rig floor standing on a “board” next to the “fingers” where pipe is slid into and tied off. He will have a length of rope wrapped around the top of the pipe, and after the roughnecks grapple the bottom of the joint and push it over to a section of the floor covered in thick wood (to prevent slippage) he will release the elevators and pull the pipe towards him and put the top of it in the fingers. These fingers are several inches in diameter of extremely strong steel. He then ties it off and the driller lowers the elevators to pull up the next joint of pipe. It is worth mentioning that the drill string is full of mud, and many times you must pull up a “wet string” which means that for one reason or another you are coming out of the hole with mud coming out of the pipe at every joint. The mud gets everywhere, and unless you are using a device to contain the mud somewhat, the roughnecks are covered in it from head to toe. They continually wash the floor with a high pressure water hose to avoid slippage. You do that a hundred or two times to get the drill string out of the hole. Talk about your dirty jobs.
This, my friends is why most people won’t work in the oilfield. Although the pay is much better than average, the conditions are much worse than average. It takes a special kind of hard working maniac to be a roughneck and there just aren’t that many people out there willing to do it. If you ever meet a roughneck maybe you’ll have a newfound respect for what they do, because trust me, you probably wouldn’t do it yourself. Be sure and check to see that he has all his fingers.