Job 20

September 1979 - November 1979

Gascombe Drilling (Later named New Discovery Drilling) - Roughneck, Motorman

Exactly one day after arriving back in Alberta the two of us were hired. I started out as a roughneck. After about a month with quittings and firings I was promoted to motorman. Motorman was still a dirty, dangerous, backbreaking job. But as motorman you could now scream obscenities at "your" roughnecks and order them around as if you were now a drill sargant.

I managed to get through the next three or so months without any major injuries. I did have a few close calls of the sort common on the rigs in those days. I came close to having both legs amputated while working in the pit at the top of the hole while installing the BOP's (BlowOut Preventers).

It is difficult to know what kind of injury may have resulted from another incident on the rig. As motorman it was my job to "spin chain". Without going into a lot of detail, spinning chain involved putting three loops of steel chain around the drill pipe and using it to spin the next piece of pipe to the drill stem.

A malfunctioning piece of equipment on the rig floor was spewing hydraulic oil everywhere including the chain I was using. The driller, who controlled the makeup cathead was a raving maniac with the strength of several ordinary men. He used all of this strength when activating the makeup cathead so let me tell you, that chain just burned around the pipe.

During one such maniacal operation and due to the hydraulic oil smothering the chain, I lost the chain completely... ten feet or so of this chain shot through my hands in a split second. I thought little of the event at that time but years later I asked myself what would have happened if the chain had looped around my arm or wrist... in the event, I suppose I would have been lucky if my body inertia was sufficient compared to strength of the bone and sinew of my arms, to have the chain simply rip my arm right off. It seems the only alternative to this picture is one in which I would have gone along with the chain, three times around that 3 and one-half inch pipe in the space of a few milliseconds. True, the second scenario would probably be least painless since it would certainly result in instant death.

Having your arm ripped off at the shoulder would be a lot more painful... and you would have to sit around the rig smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee with your good arm until an ambulance arrived from town... which could take a while.

Other close calls I experienced during this phase of my career life included:

• nearly falling into the surface hole before casing had been run. At this point, the top of the hole was a good three feet in diameter. Most of the hole was filled with drilling mud but it rose only to a distance of about twenty feet from the top of the hole. A man falling into that bottomless mud hole might never be found. Certainly cries for help would not be heard because of the deafening noise that attended all rig operations.

  If you were lucky, you would simply drown in the mud before drilling recommenced and your body would be turned into mincemeat. If you were unlucky, drilling would recommence before you were dead.

• Several incidents of various oil rig equipment falling from significant heights. One time the crew had to scramble for some form of shelter knowing that the twenty-foot long steel pole that had just shot through the top of the derrick would be coming back down somewhere! Another time it was a simple cotter pin, about five pounds worth of solid steel, which some idiot (ok, it might even have been me) had left in one of the beams while the derrick was still horizontal. One other time, an inexperienced roughneck had used five wraps of rope on the cathead (a definite no-no) which resulted in three five-hundred pound drill pipes ascending to the monkey board at a very rapid speed before hitting the pulley, snapping the line, and returning earthward to where the crew normally worked.
• Strangulation, amputation and/or decapitation when the driller, impaired from a night of partying forgot to turn off the drum from which the steel survey line was unwinding.
• Electrocution, which occured at the end of a job while dissassembling the rig. Lucky thing I had my leg wrapped around the ladder I was on or the jolt could have led also to a fall of about twenty feet onto the steel floor of the rig. I was just unplugging a set of rig lights when this occured. For a split second or so I knew exactly what it was like to be literally stuck to the source of the problem. I am not really sure how it was I managed to pull myself away from that circuit. Whew..
• Sour Gas poisoning. One of the gung-ho drillers, eager to impress management, wanted to separate the drill pipe even though it was an area where sour gas (hydrogen sulfide) was a known risk. Cooler heads prevaled and the pipe was tested prior to breakout. Indeed, there was sour gas.

By the time the end of November rolled around I had already had enough of this shit again, so I quit. It wasn't as bad as it sounds... by the time I quit after about two to three months, only one other guy out of the original five on my crew was still working there. I can specifically remember four other guys who started working there after I had and who quit working there before I quit.

By the time I quit New Discovery Drilling I had accumulated perhaps nine months oil rig experience. In some ways, I was already becoming an "old salt". It had honestly come to a point where all I had to do was take one look at a new hire and, without even asking them where they expected to be in five years, I could almost always accurately predict they would not last a single week.

With respect to the four guys who started and quit during my own short tenure I was correct three out of four times. The fourth guy actually lasted about a week.

One of the short timers ended up being a source of jolly good entertainment for "old salts" like me and the two guys from somewhere in northern Ontario who had accumulated several weeks of experience.

This tall lanky, sort of clumsy character showed up one day and managed to secure himself the position of lease hound. He walked over to the rig to start work. One of the northern Ontario roughnecks noticed he was wearing only his normal street clothes. He approached the guy and initiated a short conversation.

He said to the guy, "The change shack is right over there if you want to put your work clothes on."

The new guy gave him a dozy look and asked, "Why would I want to do that?"

I remember the roughneck giving him a funny look and shrugging.

While the guy was walking around the rig with his spraygun he would occasionally pause to observe the work we were doing on the rig floor. I guess he was somewhat awed by the procedures which, to the uninitiated, tend to appear quite ... well, insane. Then he made the biggest mistake of his budding oil patch career. He told one of the Ontario roughnecks, "They'll never get me up there doing that!!"

The roughneck came straight up to the doghouse where several of us were gathered and promptly told the driller, "Do you know what that new guy just said to me?"

"Oh, yeah," said the driller, "We'll see about that. We'll get him up here for the next round."

It turned out that night we were charged with performing one of the more unpleasant operations on the rig floor. The "jets", three holes in the drillbit which allow high pressure drilling mud to be sprayed into the hole had become plugged. We had to pull all of the pipe out of the hole to replace the bit or clear the jets.

Ordinarilly, when the pipe is pulled out of the hole, gravity keeps the mud out of the pipes we unscrew. When the jets are plugged though, the mud remains in the pipe. If you unscrew the pipe while the mud is still in the pipe, about eighteen meters worth, it comes splashing out like Niagara Falls.

To avoid this splashing mud a "mudcan" is employed. The mudcan is wrapped around the pipe above and below the tool joint (where the pipe is screwed together,) and the pipes are separated. A five or six inch hose connected to the mud can directs the mud off to the sump.

Our driller decided, for some reason, that upon this particular occasion, the work would be best performed without the mudcan. We all got ready for the task by putting on those yellow rubber suits... all of us that is, but the new guy. He came dawdling up to the floor in his denim jacket and jeans.

Experienced drillers eventually develop quite a sensitive touch when doing the final pipe separation. On this particular evening the driller was "popping the stands" in such a way as to maximize the deluge of mud. The result reminded me somewhat of what it must have been like for the men on the last voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Pulling the pipe out of the hole that night turned into a raging, royal mudfest. When those stands popped the mud would swoosh all over everything, going as high, I am sure, as ten feet at times. And all along, here was this new guy in his casual street attire, covered in grey mud from head to toe, from the popping of the first stand.

Since he had no rig experience, there was really nothing he could do but stand around getting soaked in this stuff. While getting ready to pop one stand, a narrow stream of mud started squirting out of the pipe toward the driller. Some of the mud was actually splashing onto his own clean coveralls. At this point he finally found a "job" for the new guy to do. The new guy had to stand in front of the driller to block the spray thus keeping the driller's coveralls clean.

To this day I can still remember the sly smile the driller directed at the rest of us when he said to the new guy, "Hey you, stand right there."

Now I know it is not nice to have fun at someone else's expense but I still can't help a sly chuckle myself when recalling that night. Of course, while it was actually going on, the rest of the crew were almost pissing themselves.

Amazingly, the new guy worked through the whole shift. After that, we never saw him again. Yup, one look was often all it took to know whether a new hire would last a week.

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last modified:Monday,June 9, 2008 at 04:21