Oil Field Trash Roughneck Tales From the Rig Floor

Oil Field Trash

Roughneck Tales From the Rig Floor

GREIG GREY

Copyright © 2015 Greig Grey

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means-whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic-without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Oil Field Trash Roughneck Tales From The Rig Floor is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or any events, are purely coincidental.

Cover and ebook formatting by Ebook Launch

This book is dedicated to all of the roughnecks who never made it home from the rig-whose lives were sacrificed in a valiant profession, but go unnoticed for the most part.

Contents

Introduction

We Were All Worms Once

I Can’t Drive Thirty-Five

Black Ops

Oil Field Trash

Defending The Honor

Lincoln In The Holy Water

The Worm Whisperer—#76

The Bastards

Size 58

Paid In Full

The Hobby Farmers

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The stories that follow chronicle my eight years working as a roughneck in the Michigan oil fields. I broke out in the boom year of 1981, when 4,500 drilling rigs were roaring and boring across this Great Nation. Nearly everyone (and their parrots) chanted This boom is here to stay, or It’s different this time. Or both. I have to admit that I bit on that bait, although sage veterans warned me to sock away some of that cash. What the hell do they know? I muttered as I handed a clerk $800 for a pair of Justin full quill ostrich cowboy boots. But that glorious boom evaporated when crude plummeted in 1986. Iron got stacked, wages were cut, and those goofy old vets had sure wizened up in five years.

The rigs that I worked on were land based, rotary drive, doubles and triples. Iron Roughnecks were an urban legend, spoken of from time to time—like a big foot sighting—but we knew in our hearts that a machine could never replace flesh and blood. The radio was our only contact with the outside world back then. Cell phones weren’t around yet. A smart phone was a pay phone that hadn’t been vandalized. Voice activation meant barking at the worm to get him motivated and GPS stood for Green Peace Sucks.

There were no applications to fill out, or background checks. You wrote your name and number on a scrap of paper and hoped for a phone call. Farm boys made up the core of the workforce, and convicted felons were some of the best hands in the business. But anybody from any walk of life could make it if they had the mettle, grit, and determination to handle working in the most physically demanding industry outside of professional sports.

Danger lurks everywhere on a drilling rig. Roughnecking has one of the highest accident rates of any trade. More fingers have been severed in the oil patch than by the governments of Singapore and Syria combined. You will be carried away, sooner than later without a profound respect of your environment as you exit the doghouse to begin your tour. Suspicious of every component: rotting cables, cracked welds, loose bolts, 440 volt electric lines, or human error. The list could go on for pages, any one of which could give you an extended vacation to a warm room, surrounded by women wearing white uniforms and rubber gloves. Or worse… The plot thickens if you drill into a pocket of gas. Ambush from below is now a real threat.

Working around this danger, this industry, and lifestyle, over time evolves into a source of pride—when you become part of the brotherhood of Oil Field Trash.

We Were All Worms Once

Oil patch lore suggests that on the sixth day, God made oil. He rested on the seventh day, because there’s nothing easy about makin’ oil.

No oilman, from the president on down, ever forgets his first day, and it is their one common bond; everyone started out as a worm. It should be noted that worm is an actual job title for a vital position on a crew. It could be a man with many years of experience, content to spend his career in worm’s corner. He could be a demoted derrick-hand, a driller, or tool-pusher, fallen from grace. Weevil, however, is a more accurate title for a new guy: a greenhorn.

Training is the scourge of any profession and it was no different in the oil patch. Most occupations had training programs, trade schools, or internships, to prepare you for your new career. On drilling rigs there was no school to teach you to be a roughneck. Weevils were thrown in head first, baptized in salt brine and pipe dope—educated on the fly while makin’ hole. They didn’t shut down the operation to explain details.

The chain-hand is the man saddled with most of the schooling, and he knows all too well that the new guy will probably not be back tomorrow. Orientation was kept to a minimum until the prospect shows signs that he’s got the sand to make a hand. If a weevil lasts long enough to collect his first paycheck, the odds increase significantly that he’ll become a roughneck.

A weevil is introduced to the make up tongs first: slabs of iron the size of a half-grown alligator—basically pipe wrenches controlled by the driller—for tightening or breaking out pipe. Then on to the rest of his primary tools: 170 pound drill pipe slips, collar slips, wedding bands, collar subs, elevators, sledge hammers, 48s, 24s, grease guns, scrub brushes, and a worm rod. He is told the basics: Stand here. Don’t stand there. This will kill you. That will maim you. Push on this. Pull on that. Push harder! Pull harder! Make ‘em bite worm!

The physical demand is the first hurdle to jump. A drilling day will eat most guy’s lunch: grappling with the tongs, wrestling with the kelly, and jerking the slips. Then down to the ground to strap drill pipe, attach the winch’s tail chain to a joint of pipe, point to the sky and yell Suck on it. Then up the steps to beat the pipe to the floor as it’s being hoisted up the V-door, tail it to the mouse hole, and stab it while keeping it clear of the kelly and rotary table. Remove the chain from the pipe after it’s lowered into the mouse hole, then give the driller the pipe’s length. All part of making a connection as another thirty feet is bored. If you’re drilling into salt, you might make eight or more in an hour.

After the connection, you’re hooked up with catching samples from the shale shaker, every five or ten feet, depending on the formation you’re drilling into. Then you deliver the sample to the mud logger’s trailer across the location. Your other assignments include: scrubbing and painting the rig, greasing fittings, carrying mud for the derrick-man, fetching drill bits, pipe dope, and tools. A drilling day is easy money for an experienced worm-hand.

The true test for a weevil is tripping pipe; a task that can’t be performed fast enough. Crews are judged by their trip times and competition is fierce. You may spend hours or an entire shift stationed in worm’s corner with no breaks.

Tripping in the hole: you set the slips as a stand of pipe is plunged downhole, unlatch the elevators, holding them steady as the driller applies the throttle, sending them up to the derrick-hand, latch your tongs onto the pipe in the rotary table so the chain-hand can drape the spinning chain around the box, tail a stand of pipe as the derrick-hand loads it on the fly, keeping your feet from beneath the pipe—a snag will take off your toes or foot. Then stab the pin into the box, keeping your head down as the chain-hand throws five wraps while lifting your tongs up to the top tool joint, make them bite from the backside as the driller torques the pipe tight, unlatch said tongs, then reach down and jerk the slips with the chain-hand, and start all over as the driller raises the brake handle, sending the stand down towards China.

If you’re lucky enough to catch an 8,000 foot roundhouse, you’ll be repeating this procedure 250 times in six hours or less. If you’re fishing, 400 reps is quite likely. You won’t need to go to the gym after work to get your cardio. And those drill pipe slips are notorious for gaining weight after an hour. You had better be pulling as hard as your new buddy the chain-hand, or you won’t be friends for long.

Tripping pipe is really quite simple, but terror doesn’t let the process enter your memory at first—certain that you’ll lose a finger, a hand, or maybe your head at any moment.

The mental factor is just as important as the physical to make it in the oil patch. Although most roughneck’s resumes would be more likely to contain time in jail or prison than a high school diploma, that is not to say they aren’t inherently smart. You won’t last long without a generous dose of common sense. Attention to detail is a must. When you’re scrubbing a motor, look at the gauges. If it’s running hot, tell the chain-hand. Spot a leaking pipe? Tell the derrick-hand. If you get low on dope, grease, or tong dies, tell the driller. Know where wrenches, nuts, and bolts, are stored because you’ll be chasing them sooner than later.

The language is foreign, words and terms that only make sense to men with experience. The word sub, as an example can refer to half a dozen objects, not including sandwiches and Navy vessels. You need to learn the context. Scrub the sub on a drilling day means cleaning the substructure under the rig floor. Scrub the subs, after tripping pipe means cleansing the collar subs of pipe dope. Then you have change over subs in a variety of sizes, bent subs used for directional drilling, a saver sub on the kelly, etcetera, etcetera.

On top of it all, you are surrounded by mind numbing noise. The draw works diesels, the light plant—louder than a ZZ Top concert—and the massive drum brakes, erupting squeals heard for miles.

As the low man on location, the dirtiest, foulest jobs have your name on them. You’ve got to prove yourself the same way every oilman has. There is no room for a weak link in the chain.

I Can’t Drive Thirty-Five

The worm was riding shotgun and held the magnetic yellow flasher in place on the vinyl roof of my rig beater.

My hand’s getting cold, he whined.

I tossed him a pair of new safety gloves. Here you pansy ass. You make it a month without getting hurt, you’ll get a dozen pairs.

Really?

We looked like a legal operation, cruising east on the four lane stretch of I-94. The unit had a Wide Load banner draped across the back, with four ancient orange, dope smeared flags propped into their corner pockets of the oversized portable rig. Our tool-pusher, Denny Mills led the way in a company truck with a yellow flasher rotating on the cab. Steve Pierce, my driller was at the helm of the rig, cruising along at thirty-five miles an hour. I followed behind, riding drag in my rusted 1977 Olds Toronado.

I plugged a Johnny Cash cassette in and jacked the volume as Folsom Prison Blues began. I reached into the back seat and fished an oak branch from beneath a heap of empty beer cans. I had whittled it to fit between the driver’s seat and gas pedal—poor man’s cruise control. I propped it into place, lit a cigarette, and stretched my legs. Ah, life is good…

There were five counties and seventy-five miles separating us from our new well north of Richmond. We had just plugged a dry hole in Jonesville, and rigged the operation down. We figured that a weekend off was in order. All twenty loads had been moved by our fleet of trucks and the unit, a permit load was all that was left. The draw works and derrick are deemed a unit once the derrick is scoped down and laid over top of the tiny cab.

Since it was a Friday and permits were normally only issued for week days, we would have to wait until Monday to move it, once the office had arranged for the permits required for each county that we had to maneuver through.

Yes, we would have time off to head to the house, cash a paycheck, pay some bills, hit the laundromat, sight in deer rifles for the upcoming season, get drunk, and chase down a bar maid or two. Not necessarily in that order.

Our weekend plans went to hell when big Tony’s voice crackled over the radio. Make it happen, was all that was said. When Tony spoke, it was the gospel. We all knew what it meant, except for our worm, still shiny and new. It meant we’d be staying here in a motel for another night, and moving the unit at dawn. Without any permits…

Tony Howarth was our Drilling Superintendent and our idol. A legendary oil man from west Texas, with four decades in the industry. He was the lone survivor of a blowout north of Odessa. His back was scarred from the severe burns inflicted when the well torched while he was taking the Geronimo cart down.

And Tony was a real cowboy before he went to work in the patch. He was the Texas saddle bronc champion at the age of eighteen. He wore custom fit cowboy boots: Lee Miller, JB Hill, Frommer, and Beck. Full quill ostrich, alligator, crocodile, elephant, eel, python, and shark, to name a few.

Tony commanded respect. Not by shouting or screaming—he didn’t need that. His mere presence could make a worm wet himself. A towering frame, and the Texan drawl, he was a speak when spoken to sort of man. And nothing baffled him. Nothing. If Tony was summoned to the rig, he’d figure the problem out in twenty minutes or less, and God help the bastard who didn’t. We weren’t sure how he ended up here in Michigan, but we were glad that he was ours.

Tony was an outlaw at heart. Hell we all were, but this wasn’t just bending the rules. This was a flat out, blatant: In-Your-Face-Johnny-Law-! Screw-You-! Drive-Down-Fifty-Miles-of-Interstate-Highway-And Twenty-Five-Miles-Of-County-Roads-! I’ve-Got-Your-Permits-Right-Here-Pal-! Up-Yours-! bootleg rig move.

I had been involved with at least two dozen bootleg moves before. Most were under twenty miles, through the back woods of northern Michigan, keeping to side roads, avoiding the major highways. Bootlegs were a gamble that the dreaded MPSC wouldn’t be on the prowl, and avoiding the costs that each county charges for a permit. And the compliancy to Big Government that it entails. But any branch of law enforcement could pull us over, and if they did, they’d hit the jackpot.

Even with a permit, Rig 2, or The Deuce as it was known, was trouble. It was the oldest rig in our fleet and violations would cover every inch of the rusted relic—the list would be longer than a Baptist sermon. She was devoid of headlights and taillights, with rotted tires, straight pipe exhausts, and brakes, or more like what brakes? It would be hauled off to an impound lot and to rescue it back into service, either every infraction would need to be repaired, or a compliant, corrupt judge would have an offshore bank account, a new hunting cabin, or both.

It would be serious jail time for everyone involved if we were captured, but Tony’s hands would be clean. Plausible deniability is the government term, used to absolve the brass of covert CIA operators, caught in black op, off the book missions. Any one of us would take the fall for Tony if we had to. Not even Pierce would point the finger at our boss if we were nabbed.

So it was an Act like everything is normal. Nothing to worry about here sir, permitless move.

Things were going smooth so far. Traffic blew past us, cruising at a steady thirty-five miles an hour: the top speed allowed for a permit load. I kept my beater four hundred yards behind the rig. I had learned a long time ago to keep my distance—following too close has its hazards. I was directly behind Rig 3 when a right angle drive gearbox exploded on US-27 north of St. Johns. Parts suddenly unloaded from the back end of the old Ideco 800: drive shafts, universal joints, bearings, and screw drives. I hit the brakes and veered into the ditch, narrowly missing a two foot chunk of cast iron housing. Hunks of shrapnel were spread out across the two lane freeway—it looked like a rummage sale laid out there on the blacktop. Me and the worm were gathering up the biggest pieces when he nearly got hit by a station wagon, diving into the ditch when the big car swerved.

I knew this job was dangerous, he shouted, gasping for breath. But hell… I didn’t know I’d be dodging traffic too.

We had a permit for that move, but still got wrote up for twenty-one infractions.

We had put twenty miles of interstate behind us, with no hassles from the law and so far, no mechanical issues with the dinosaur. Then Pierce started picking up the pace. I plucked the oak branch from my gas pedal and accelerated up to forty, then forty-five… What the hell, I muttered. Then a burst of black smoke and sparks erupted from the stacks, and the lunatic pulled into the passing lane. Steve blew past Denny and a string of semis. The bastard’s snapped!

Pierce had told me she’d go seventy, but I didn’t believe him. Top end was forty on most of our portables but the Deuce was a lightweight, by far the smallest rig in our fleet. She was a National double with a substructure too short for a mouse hole, so the kelly had to be rat holed on connections. It was powered by a single V-12 Detroit with a six speed Allison tranny.

Steve appeared to going seventy-five as I backed away. The derrick was bucking hard against the half inch chain holding it in place. The chest high aircraft tires in the front don’t absorb bumps in the road, they magnify them. Scrub brushes and dope pails flew off the back, landing in the highway, ditch, and median. Then the flags parted company, followed by a chain boomer that I steered hard to avoid. A hundred feet of cat line was dragging behind the rig as Pierce was off to the races. Cars swerved and tires screeched, trying to dodge the debris. Then the Wide Load sign ripped free and planted onto my windshield, blocking my view. I veered blindly onto the shoulder and down into the ditch before it flew off. The worm’s side of the windshield was spider webbed from an I-94 road sign that I took out.

Holy hell. I threw the car into park, unplugged the flasher, and killed the tunes. Pull that thing inside, I shouted at the worm.

Is something wrong? he asked.

No. This is pretty much how it always goes…

Pierce was a loose cannon—a real head case—but I never thought he’d pull something like this. I had only been his derrick-hand for two months. Holes were scarce when the price of crude plummeted and most of our rigs got stacked. Then a handful of day rate wells came up for bids by Sun Oil and big Tony made the low offer.

I need a derrick-man, Steve explained when I first spoke with him on the phone. After an hour of working with him, it was obvious that he needed a psychiatrist, along with some Brake Handle 101.

We got into it good on my first day. Daylights had just plucked the string out of the hole after the bit cratered. I climbed up the stairs on the tiny rig and exchanged greetings with derrick-man on tour. He was the evening tour driller when I broke out during the boom of 1981. I was somewhat surprised to see him working derricks, but you take what you can get during a bust.

How the hell did you end up working for Pierce? he asked.

Called me off the list. Anything I should know?

Just count your fingers before you sign the kill book at the end of your tour.

I nodded as he handed off the climbing belt. Thanks for the warning.

Steve and the two floor-hands lugged the freshly dressed bit from the top doghouse as I made my way up the derrick to my office in the sky.

I loaded the eight-inch bottom hole collar and the boys on the floor were making up the bit by hand. I held it fast with a wrap and a half, so it wouldn’t slam into the back of the derrick when Steve torqued it up tight. Then I loaded the second stand, slammed the side door elevators shut, hooked the safety chain and pointed to the sky. I watched as the floor-hands stabbed it and passed the chain up. Then Pierce hit the cat head lever, with the elevators still tight against the collar sub. With the spring open! The drill collar was turning to the right while the sub sat stationary. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Whoa! I roared down. Lower the blocks you dip shit!

I reached out and tightened the collar sub by hand. It was nearly unscrewed. Then I loaded the third stand and ditto: he did the same thing. Lower the blocks you moron, I howled. You’re gonna kill somebody!

Then Pierce leaned back and shouted, What are you? A cry baby derrick-hand up there?

Cry baby my ass… Time for some face time with my new boss. I took off the belt after he torqued the stand tight, and stepped off the diving board onto the elevators and rode the stand down, hanging onto the bails.

I jumped off just as the floor-hands set the slips. I looked at the chain-hand and worm. Here’s the story boys. I don’t know how long this idiot’s been on the crow bar. I really don’t care. But these subs ain’t torqued and bright boy over here isn’t lowering the elevators when you’re making up the collars with the spinning chain. With the spring open no less. So the sub won’t just come unscrewed. It’s gonna shoot up in the air and land on somebody. I pointed at Pierce. I could give a hoot if it hits that worthless bag of guts. We’ll bury the sorry bastard off in the woods with the D-6. But I don’t want to see you guys getting killed.

I threw off my gloves and