After about a week of freezing, we’ll have an ice pad that measures a solid four feet deep. Then, we’ll set the whole drilling rig right on top, steady as concrete. Next springtime, we’ll be long gone and the pad’ll melt away and there won’t be any trace we were ever here. Pretty slick, eh? You tell those environmentalists about that for me, okay? (LAUGHTER)
Okay. Here’s the roster. We got me and Willy Ray running the drill. Our medic, Jean Felix, is also in charge of camp operations. He’ll make sure everybody gets watered and fed and keeps their little fingys attached to their hands. Me and Willy each got five guys on our drill crews: three roughnecks and a couple Filipino roustabouts. Our crew is rounded out with five specialists: an electric man, a drill motor man, a pipe casing man, and a couple welders. Finally, we got a cook and a janitor wandering around here somewheres.
We brought a bare-bones crew of eighteen, company man’s orders. I’m comfortable with it, though. I guess. We’ve all made money together before and we’ll all make money together again.
Next week, when the drill is online, we’ll keep going nonstop in two five-man crews for twelve-hour shifts until the hole is drilled. Should be four or five days of drilling. The weather is a little bit foggy and a whole heck of a lot of windy, but, hey, any weather is good drilling weather.
That’s it, Lucy. Hope all is well in Texas and that you’re staying out of trouble. Good night.
It’s Dwight. November eighth. Company man still isn’t here. Says he won’t be coming, either. Says we’ve got it under control. He just told me to make sure the communications antenna was steady and out of the wind and to bolt it down extra tight. Said if comms get knocked out between us he’s gonna be real unhappy. I gave him the regular roughneck response: “Whatever you say, boss. Just make sure your checks keep cashing.”
Other than that, uneventful day. Ice pad is coming along faster than expected, what with the wind blasting through here hard enough to push a grown man down. All our buildings are huddled up next to the well site, close enough to eyeball. Still, I told the men not to go wandering off. Through this nonstop howler you couldn’t hear an atom bomb detonate from a hundred yards away. (LAUGHTER)
Uh, one more thing. I had a chance to check out that groundwater monitoring package this morning. The thing we’re supposed to install? It’s out back, on pallets and wrapped tight in a black tarp. Honest to god, Lucy, I never seen anything like it before. It’s this big pile of curved wires, yellow and blue and green. Then, there’s these spiral pieces of polished mirror. Each one is light as carbon fiber, but razor sharp around the edges. Cut my sleeve on one. The thing is like one of your grandmam’s crazy jigsaw puzzles.
Weirdest thing though… the monitoring equipment is already partially hooked up. A line is runnin’ from a black box that looks like a computer all the way back to the communications antenna. Can’t tell for the life of me who could have set it up. Heck, I don’t know how I’m gonna put it together. It’s gotta be experimental. But then how come no scientists got sent with us on this project?
It’s not ordinary and I don’t like it. In my experience, weird is dangerous. And this place isn’t very forgiving. Anyways, I’ll let you know how it turns out, darlin’.
Lucy, baby, this is guess who? Dwight. It’s November twelfth. Ice pad is complete and my boys have assembled the dozen or so pieces of the drilling rig. You wouldn’t believe it, Lucy, how far the industry has come. Those hunks of metal are futuristic. (LAUGHTER) Small enough to chopper in, and then you just get ’em close and in the right configuration. The pipes and wires reach out to each other and the pieces self-assemble, just like that. Before you know it, you got yourself a fully functional frontier drilling rig. Not like the old days.
We should be drilling by tomorrow noon, first shift. We’re ahead of schedule, but that hasn’t stopped the boss man from chewing me out over the phone. Mr. Black thinks we have to be finished and out by Thanksgiving, no matter what. That’s what he said, “No matter what happens.”
I told Mr. Black, “Safety, my friend, is number one.”
And then I told him about the hole already being here. I still haven’t figured out why that is. And not knowing poses a serious risk to my crew. Mr. Black says he can’t find anything on it, just that the Department of Energy put out a call for proposals to get it monitored and that Novus won the contract. Typical. There’s about a half dozen partners on this project, from the cooks to the chopper pilots. The right hand is ignorant of the left.
I checked Black’s state drilling permits again, and the story adds up. Even so, the question still teases me: Why is there already a hole here?
We’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.
Dwight here. November sixteenth. Uh, oh boy, this is hard to say. Real hard. I can’t hardly believe it’s true.
We lost a man last night.
I noticed something was the matter when that steady hum of the drill started kinking up. It woke me from a sound sleep. That drill sounds like money falling into my bank account to me, and if it stops, I take notice. While I sat there blinking in the dark, the sound went from a deep grumble you could feel in the pit of your belly to a squeal like fingernails across a chalkboard.
I threw on my PPE gear and got upstairs to the rig floor, pronto.
Geez. What happened was, the drill string plowed into a layer of solid glass and pieces of old casing. I don’t know what the casing was doing down there, but it bucked the drill string. The drill came unjammed okay, but the boys had to change it out quick. And my senior roughneck, Ricky Booth, went after it with a lot of speed but not a lot of brains.
You gotta grab them horns and push, see? The guy missed his grab at the drill shaft and it went swinging, spraying mud and shards of glass all over the rig floor. So he tried to toss a chain around it to get hold. Shoulda used a Kelly bar to ease the drill shaft into the bore instead of slapping it with a chain like a hillbilly. But you can’t tell a roughneck his job. He was an expert and he took a chance. I wish he wouldn’t have.
Problem was, the shaft still had some spin to it. When the chain went round, the shaft took hold quick. And Booth had the chains crossed over his gosh-darned wrists. Willy couldn’t stop the spin in time and, well, Booth got both his hands tore off him. The poor kid staggered back a few steps, trying to holler. Before anybody could grab him, Booth fainted and ate it right off the platform. Banged his head on the way down and landed limp on the ice pad.
It’s terrible, Lucy, really terrible. It breaks my heart. But, even so, this kind of situation happens. I had to deal with it before, you remember, out in the Alberta oil sands. Thing is to jump on it fast and get it under control. You can’t be left prying bits of your man out of the permafrost with a crowbar the next morning.
I’m sorry, that’s just awful. My mind isn’t right just now, Lucy. Hope you’ll forgive me.
Anyways, I just had to keep moving. So, I roused the second shift. Me and Jean Felix dragged Booth’s body to the storage shed and wrapped him in plastic. Had to, uh, had to put his hands in there, too. On his chest.
In a situation like this, out of sight, out of mind is crucial. Otherwise my boys’ll get spooked and the job will suffer. Plan for the worst and recover fast is my motto. I promoted a roustabout named Juan to roughneck, relieved the shift with four hours left on the clock, and stopped the drill.
Mr. Black musta been watching the log file, because he called right away. Told me to get that drill going again when the day shift started in a few hours. I said hell no, but the kid sounded panicked. Threatened to pull the whole project out from under us. It’s not just myself I’m thinking of, Lucy. I got a lot of people depending on me.