We had a line part earlier this week. For those of you who do not know a line part occurs when, for various reasons (worn iron, too high pressure, human error, etc), a steel line that we are pumping through bursts under pressure. There are a lot of safety controls to limit this (regular iron inspections, check valves, pressure relief valves, etc), but they still do happen infrequently and they are always dangerous. We were fortunate that nobody was seriously hurt (one guy was shaken up and a little bruised, but that's it). This particular asshole, immediately after the line part, asks simply: "When can we start pumping again?". Yup, this guy's a real class act. Honestly, it's people like that that cause the oil patch to have such a shitty reputation.
In completely unrelated news, when I came to work this morning, I saw that somebody had actually plugged in the block heater on their truck.
Also, for your amusement, I present the following picture. It was the response from one of the guys in our lab when asked by our Calgary for some pictures of the pumps running some of our testing equipment (a really stupid request, for reasons that I won't go in to here). I hope you get as much enjoyment out of it as I did, since it's the funniest thing that I've seen in a long time.
4 comments:
I love that picture. I'm tempted to add it as an attachment to an equipment database I'm testing right now (I do actually have to make sure image attachments work properly!)
Guys like you describe are found in all professions, but are especially dangerous in the oilfield. I worked with one as a summer student (he was also a summer student) and I found through the grapevine that his end review said simply "This is the kind of guy that gets people killed out here."
And thanks for posting; I was just coming by to comment on your last post because hinting that you're being shot at by rednecks and then not posting for weeks makes some of us WORRY!
Do I win a prize if I tell you which UCA they are having a problem with in Calgary???
I, too, am also glad to hear that you haven't been shot or injured from ruptured lines.
Yeah. I've been alternating between really busy, really tired, and really lazy since the last post so it took me a while to get around to updating the blog. The shooting did happen, though - it just wasn't at me. The guy was shooting at the drivers who were hauling excess water off of the well after we had left. I don't know a lot of the details but I do know that nobody was injured.
And Mark, you might indeed win a prize if you can tell which UCA that Calgary is having a problem with, unfortunately this diagram came about as a result of us asking Calgary to help us diagnose a problem with one of our UCAs.
Does UCA stand for Unqualified Clown-Ass?
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