Job 22

February 1980 - May 1980

Loffland Brothers Drilling - Roughneck, Motorman

The first time I saw Loffland Rig #89 I was awed. Unlike the battered "doubles" I had worked in southern Alberta, this rig was a brand new deisel-electric "triple". This thing was massive. Even the tongs were bigger than I had seen in the south. When I first walked onto this rig I felt like I was in one of those sci-fi flicks where the person is shrinking and the world around starts looking bigger and bigger.

There were also a lot of extra machines which replaced a lot of things I was used to doing by hand on the smaller rigs I had worked on previously. For the first time I started gaining rather than using weight on an oil rig.

This rig was drilling something like an 18,000 foot hole, about five to six times deeper than anything I had worked on near Taber. Once we were at a serious depth it would take about eight hours to drill nine meters... so during normal drilling, roughnecks and motorman would only have to add a pipe once or twice per shift. The rest of the time we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the change shack and catch some much needed sleep.

I got fired from this job after about two months because I made a mistake while filling up a fuel tank. It was the tank that supplied fuel to the deisel engine that generated electricity for the camp. It was an honest mistake which left about 500 gallons of deisel fuel all over the lease road.

When the driller, Carny, fired me he offered to give me a ride home to Calgary. I got my stuff together but when I went to ask Carny for the ride he promised he decided to hire me back. It was the second time I had been fired from a job but the only time ever I was fired and hired back to the same job in the space of about half an hour.

About a month after that, I quit anyway. It was a good thing I did... I learned during a casual visit to the rig some months later, that my replacement had received a few minor injuries when crushed between the main drill stem and the "iron roughneck"... which included a broken neck and punctured lung.

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