Tales from the Oil Field of Bygone Days: Part 3 - Accomodations

Tales from the Oil Field of Bygone Days: Part 3: Accommodations

When I first started as a mud logger our trailers did not have sleeping quarters. You could take a nap on the short bench but that was not very comfortable. We usually slept in our vehicles, either leaning back in the seat somehow or with all the back seats down or across the truck seat if you had a full-size pick-up. I didn’t. On cold days or nights one would have to idle the vehicle to run the heater until it got too hot then shut it off until it got too cold in a continuous cycle. This was not so fun when you were sleeping in the back and had to keep getting up. I worked nights a lot at first and trying to sleep on hot summer days was the worst. Finding a shady spot was key. This is not easy at all on a cleared off well location. Sometimes I just put a sun shield over my face and woke up covered with sweat. Not fun at all. 

Many times after the job was done came the long drive home – up to 9 or 10 hours. That often meant pulling over at a rest stop and sleeping for an hour or two. Sometimes, coming dangerously close to being asleep at the wheel it was necessary to find any place, a gas station parking lot, especially a big one like a truck stop worked. In those days it cost too much for us to get a hotel room and we rarely did. Besides, after the job you wanted to get home asap for some off days.

One time on one of those hot days after working the night shift I found a quiet and very shady woodsy gravel road with a nice pull off and no houses anywhere nearby. It was a great place to sleep or so I thought. I lived in West Virginia at the time but this job was in Amish country in northeast Ohio. I heard a few Amish horse-drawn buggies go by and just went back to sleep. Next thing I hear is a megaphone voice saying, “Step out of the vehicle with your hands up.” Now that is NOT a fun way to wake up. The police officer scolded me and said he could have arrested me for vagrancy although it wasn’t private property and there were no signs posted. There was a creek down the road with cars parked where people were fishing. Apparently, someone was suspicious about the West Virginia plates.

By the time I moved up to staff geologist for a big company I could stay at hotels on long trips to catch up on sleep or on long jobs where I worked on site early in the Marcellus play when horizontal wells took longer to drill and we were going through several different learning curves. Hotel prices were pretty cheap until the boom came and some actually doubled in price. I got to stay in good ones and bad ones depending on where the wells were. You get what you pay for was an apt rule of thumb. One had on their website the song “Hotel California” playing in elevator music format in the background! Actually it turned out to be an OK place with nice people running it and I stayed there many times. Once on a well in northern Indiana my wife came along. We checked into a hotel where the foreign owner boldly asserted that he would give us one of his special deluxe rooms. It was in winter and we found that the bathroom had no heat and the place was infested with cockroaches. After that we moved to another place.

One time I was staying onsite mud logging a long well targeting the Rome Sands in the Cambrian Rome Trough in Eastern Kentucky. We hit some gas in the Ordovician St. Peter Sandstone. The gas was high in H2S. We were still drilling on air and flaring the gas, which would occasionally get a blue-green color possibly due to SO2 or some other sulfur compound. We had a stationary H2S detector in the trailer and were reading about 12-15 ppm H2S but it came up to about 40 ppm on the connections with the connection gas. The gas was pumped into the trailer. We did have a small exhaust on the back of the gas detection equipment that pumped the excess back outside. In any case, after about 36 to 48 hours of being in this H2S environment I think I was getting low-level H2S poisoning. I had an odd pain in my neck and felt strange. It was planned to switch the well to fluid when we hit water as expected but that was delayed. Thus I had to go offsite for a while and get away from the H2S and to a hotel and a real bathroom!

   

Once early in the Marcellus play our mud logging company was not available for a few days so I drove from the location in PA about 3.5 hours away to New York where the mud logger was working to get some equipment so I could mud log the first part of the well as we were about to kick-off. It was late at night as we were set to start early the next morning. It was also a very cold night, near zero. I was driving a company vehicle at the time (quite rare). On the way back the SUV broke down. It was about 1 AM on a lonely 4-lane in the mountains of PA. Luckily, a guy stopped and gave me a ride into the nearest town where I had to get a hotel room, the only one being available was a Jacuzzi suite but they did lower the price. It was 2:30 AM and I just wanted to sleep. I had also paid for another hotel room near the well site hours away where my stuff was so the company would have to pay for two that night. Next morning was a tow to the repair shop where it turned out to be some electrical problem with a required part replacement. I made it back to the well late that afternoon and set up the mud log and logged for about a day and a half when the logging company arrived – so I guess I saved the operator a bit on mud logging to offset the extra hotel cost. 

When my wife used to travel with me sometimes we would camp out in the summer. Those were fun times. If I was working nights I would get some sleep and then have a driver for the rest of the day and we would explore the local scenery.