Tru channel BLACK GOLD set your Tivo

[samintx]

If you think your job is rought set your Tivo to watch just ONE in this series of what happens on an oil rig to get your gasoline. I don't see how the rough necks stay on the job much less hire on...except the pay is great. A friend of mine lasted one week when a drill bit dropped on his foot and he eventually had to have it amputated. He hired on for the pay....

Check it out if you want to see what goes on in the world of oil drilling on land.

[pinkoos]

Looks like the first episode is available for free on iTunes:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSto...=281941176&s=143444

[NewtonMP2100]

"I drink your milkshake! I drink it up! ...

[rgG]

I've seen the ads for that show and it looks like it would be really easy to get hurt or killed working around that kind of equipment.

[MGS_forgot_password]

Matthew McConaughey's brother sounds just like Boomhauer from King of the Hill.

[mjgkramer]

In the summer of 1958 I worked for a drilling company in Kilgore, TX, just east of where samintx lives. I was a swamper working in a crew that dismantled the rigs, moved them, and put them back together again on the next "location". I was 18 years old, 6'2" tall and weighed around 135 pounds. It was a bit of a challenge for me to do the work.

Moving drilling rigs wasn't as dangerous as working on the rig floor (working area) as a roughneck, but it was extremely hard work and you could get seriously injured. The work week started on Sunday and usually we had our 40 hours by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. I remember pulling winch lines (steel cables) through waist deep water to retrieve a pump that was near a flooded stream. One of the things we had to do frequently was roll the very heavy joints of drill pipe from racks adjacent to the rig onto flat bed semis. We used special rollers with a T handle on the top and two steel rollers on the bottom. To load the pipe, two of us would place the rollers on the pipe, one on each end and then run the pipe up onto the truck on 2 by 12 boards. We had to run up the boards and hope the pipe made it onto the truck. If not we had to jump clear to avoid being hurt. Once when I jumped, the roller handle caught in the crotch of my jeans. There was no damage, but I thought it was all over for me. After the pipe was all on the truck, we used chain boomers with long cheater pipes to tie the pipe down. I remember once being thrown over the load of pipe and off the truck when unsnapping an especially tight boomer.

Prior to working for the drilling company, I had been accepted to Rice University in Houston for the following school year. After that summer there was no doubt that I was going to get a college education. I was in the five year engineering program and graduated in 1963 with a BA and a BSME. While attending Rice, I worked four summers for Shell Oil (aka Big Oil), two summers as a roustabout in a "gang" in the oil fields, one in a compressor plant, all in South Texas, and one as a junior engineer in Houston. The work as a roustabout was hot, dirty, and hard but was not usually very dangerous and the pay was good. Just before graduation I was offered a job by a new organization in Houston called NASA. They offered me the same pay that I had earned the previous summer as a junior engineer at Shell. I turned them down.

After graduation, I accepted a permanent position with Shell. The winter of my first year was spent working as a junior drilling engineer on a rig in eastern Montana. Working on a rig in West Texas as shown on Black Gold is hard, but it is absolutely miserable at 30 below zero. The floor of the rig had "winterizin" panels to keep the wind off the driller and roughnecks. Steam heat was blown across the floor, allowing them to work in relatively light clothing (jeans and sweatshirts). The exception was the derrickman, the one who worked on the little platform high in the derrick, who had to withstand the full brunt of the blowing cold. He kept warm by wearing many layers of clothing. With it so cold at 30 below, I can't imagine what it would be like to work outdoors above the Arctic Circle at ANWR.

Should any of you be curious, I worked for Shell for 36 years before retiring at age 59 in 1998. I worked as a drilling engineer, facilities engineer, production engineer, and as a computer automation engineer in a software development group for the last 27 of those years. My assignments took us to Montana, California, Louisiana, Texas, Sultanate of Oman, and the Netherlands.

[samintx]

Thanks. Very interesting. You will enjoy this program. It actually is 3 different type of rigs in a race to find oil. I just hope the "race" doesn't cause accidents.

Thanks for your story.