Rig, Redux

This is Part II of a pretty bad photo series and commentary. If you want, you can read Part I

I got permission - and the very generous loan of a hard hat - to go up on the rig floor but I couldn't get past the doghouse door. (the "doghouse" is the rig floor level "office" and sometimes changing room for the drillers and sometimes, on smaller rigs, the entire crews)

Couldn't help but step just outside the door as soon as I got up there to take a quick shot of the derrick looking straight up. The line at the top right leading off to the edge and beyond the picture, is the "Geronimo" line, aptly named that because that's what the derrick hand would ride down in case of necessity, such as some sort of catastrophic derrick failure (as if you'd have time) or a blowout (think you can outrun a fireball?). I never saw one being used in case of emergency, but I have seen guys go down them on a lark or bet or dare. Not this fat boy, I wanted to save my virgin run for if/when I ever really needed to do that. I think the better name for it would be the "Ohhhhhhh shi..............." line.

The guys noticed me standing in the doghouse doorway and I politely waited for the driller, (the guy in the red to the left in the next photo below, he's the one "on the brake" and in charge of the basic operation of the rig and of his 4 man crew, three on the floor and one up in the derrick) so I could ask HIS permission to take some photos. He looked amused and some of the things I told him and his crew about the things that have changed really amused 'em. Whippersnappers.

"Wow, yer old school, aintchoo?" drawled the young driller. (a handsome Hispanic boy, as were the rest of the crew) With a shrug, I told them they were lucky, they had their power tongs, we had to use a spinning chain to make up the connection and two sets of tongs and the rotary table to break one apart. "Hey, this is the 21st century, didntjaknow?" wagged one of the hands. I wanted to tell him the 1950's technology I was working with in the late 70's and all through the 80's was state-of-the-art still in Russia and China and some other parts of the world.

I bet none of them ever had their gonads "doped".... covered in pipe lubricant, a particularly nasty compound that's hard to wash off of NOT sensitive areas. I have had it done to me, by being a smartass like that one kid, me being a bit too cocky, telling the guys that there wasn't ten of 'em all-total that could do that to me.

I was wrong; it only took four.

The next photo shows a floorhand unlatching the elevators to "run up and get another'n", another "stand"-- an approx. 90 ft. "triple", three thirty foot joints of drillpipe (in this case, it was 4 1/2 inch) and screwing it onto the "stump", the short end of the long, long, long length of drill stem they lower into the drilled hole. This was always a fun part of running a rig, trying to run as safely and smoothly as possible, but also with all due haste. Time is money, esp. on a drilling rig. Thousands of dollars are spent each and every hour, no matter what's going on and you need to "make hole", not goof around. "Get'er done, or get gone."

The derrick hand wasn't very experienced, but bless his heart, they were deep enough to where they had to stack pipe on the near or driller's side, the "worm's corner" of the derrick, and it's hard to latch those stands of pipe* from that side. I've done it myself and it just doesn't "feel right", but maybe that was because I am right-handed, as are most people. I dunno. He seemed to be having a bit more problems than most guys with whom I've worked. I wasn't a bad derrick hand, but it just got SO lonely up there. What with all the iron around you, it is nearly impossible to get decent radio reception up there, even up that high...not that the guys on the floor would appreciate you taking something - such as a transistor radio - up there that you could drop and have it go right through their hard hat into their brain.

What's that formula for speed of a falling object? 32 ft/second² or something like that? It'd take less than two seconds to fall from the board to the floor. "Watch ou....t. Uh oh."

They weren't going very fast, not even breaking a sweat on a rather warm afternoon, and it looked to me as though there were a couple of other fairly new hands on the floor crew; they sure weren't getting excited about getting things done. I was surprised because I had worked on rigs of similar size with only four man crews, the workload on the floor increasing by 33% because of one less man. I've worked the floor by myself a few times, actually. Then again, I'm twice the hand most guys are. Honestly.

Here in the next pic. they're setting the slips, squatty but massive things that grip the pipe so it doesn't slip on down the hole. This is where I thought they had some "worms" (greenhorns) because when pulling the slips, a couple of 'em would "put on, not put out". This is where I would, after about half a dozen pulls of that nature, would inform the lazy bastards slackers I worked with that from then on we'd just take turns pulling the slips, one at a time...that way it'd darn sure even out on the workload.

This is one of the parts I liked best, running the rig. This is looking back just behind the driller as he steps on the throttles. This rig had two huge Cat engines, but I didn't wander back there as I was told to not venture past the doghouse door. I did stretch out to take this shot right between the "A-legs".

I got a rush feeling not only the vibration, but the noise sink down into my bones...again, after years and years...and years. There's also the awareness of what I thought of as "danger close", spinning things everywhere you look, catheads that want to reach out and snag loose clothing, the rotary table turning at terrifying RPMs, the cacaphonous clash of metal on metal, the big cat motor's roar in duplicate, a throaty harmony in bass notes at idle and a screaming crescendo at full throttle. You can hear the chains as thick as arms slapping in staccato rhythm through their baths of oil in the compound, the whine of the drawworks spooling hundreds of feet of drilling line on or off in mere seconds, the "pssst" of the air clutches, grabbing another gear, getting another higher one to go faster, faster, always faster if you can and even if you can't.

It's probably not as loud as sitting on the wing of a 747 or in the front row at the rock concert, but it's darned sure some heavy metal up in the air; this rig had a 20 foot substructure and the top of the rig is usually another 120 feet or so on top of that. You can see a drilling rig before you can hear them, but you can hear them before you can make out any people on them from afar. Stand at the base of one, or up on the floor while the drilling is going on miles beneath your feet and you can feel the bit as it bites into the formation.

It's something to experience when a big rig picks up off bottom when drilling a deep hole; the ol' rig, derrick and all, squats and rocks and the motors lug down and the weight indicator spins like crazy and you hold your breath just in case you've got stuck while getting ready to come out of the hole, ever ready to kick out the clutch and ram down on the brake. That *drill pipe weighs 16.6 lbs./foot and drill collars can weigh 100/200 lbs. a foot. This rig was probably drilling to around 12,000 feet and I'm not so hot at math, but a couple miles of pipe and collars can be pretty heavy. I've drilled deeper where our string weighed over half a million pounds. I'm sure this rig's string would weigh a quarter million or so. There are a few more powerful man-made things in the world, but a drilling rig is near the top of the list.

And, it's funny about that long screwed together sections of pipe, the drillstem: the darn thing has a LOT of compression and stretch for all that length. On the deeper wells, they pick up the entire string to add another joint/30 ft. pipe, but the bit will never leave the bottom of the hole! Even figuring out the weight of the string requires some complicated formulas and books of data because the pipe surrounded by the mud has some buoyancy, just like a boat in water...but then you've got mud inside the pipe, adding so many barrels per thousand feet, so much more weight. As you take the pipe out of the hole, you need to add just enough mud to keep it from blowing out, but you don't want to fill the hole completely or the mud will remain in the pipe when you unscrew the connection and will spray out everywhere.

(a fair example of this is putting your finger on top of a straw in your soda, then raising the straw up out of the drink; the straw will remain full. Take your finger off of it and let it splash on a flat surface and multiply that effect by a million. That's what happens when you "break off a wet one". Pulling the pipe fast and having the level up near the surface will sometimes create enough of a suction to keep a 90 ft. column of mud in the stand, and when the suction is broken, it will flow out of the end of the stand...very quickly, splashing everywhere, all over everyone, all over the rig, in your eyes and ears. Until you can get the level "just right", it's a good idea to tap the stand before unscrewing it with a small hammer; empty pipe rings like a bell, but if it has fluid in it, it makes a dull "thud".)

I guess the thing that really hit me was the smell, it made me feel nostalgic, almost like the perfume of a certain woman, maybe one you sometimes had a good time with but didn't particularly like most of the time. That smell is a combination of many things: the fresh caliche of the location, on windy days it can sandblast your vehicle windshield, even strip the paint off the handrails, then add a whiff of the oily aroma of diesel in the tanks, soon to be the acrid smoke in the air like a hundred idling Greyhound busses and with twice the rumble.

As you get closer to the rig you start to smell the hot machinery and grease, iron on iron violently releasing molecules of ferrous oxide creating the taste of steel on your tongue, a copper flavor like an adrenaline overdose. Then the oddest smell of all twitches at your nose, some sort of sweet-sour, a " doesn't smell horribly bad but doesn't smell particularly good" kind of aroma. All I can say to describe it would be something like rotten gardenias, dollar store dog food or your lover's morning breath, that would be the smell of drilling mud.

It smells a little better during the winter when the sun doesn't bake it as much.

Drilling mud will have to wait for another time, so I can wax poetic about it. I've seen it get guys fired, seen 'em fall off in it, seen guys get burned with the chemicals or nearly kill themselves and others by mixing two of the wrong types and creating a deadly cloud and reaction....and I have seen it kill someone.

Part III