This tale is based on my dad’s accounting of a fairly significant event in his life - an accident which contributed to the demise of using the old steel derricks left over from the pre-portable drilling rig era that were still standing around in older oil fields for workovers. Ironically, perhaps, my dad’s occasional work in the oil fields began even before those steel derricks were built, when he worked as a wooden rig builder in the east Texas oil fields.
Dad went to work for the Texas Company, later renamed Texaco
Inc., in 1944 after having worked as a derrick man on drilling rigs in west
Texas for a while. With the Texas Company, he worked as a derrick man for a
workover pulling gang based out of Hamlin TX.
The gang pusher's name was Newt Cotton (Cotten? We called
him Uncle Newt.) The other guys on the crew were Virgil Dockins and Beady
Mason. The gang became an extended family, going on fishing trips together down
on the Concho and Colorado Rivers, attending sporting events together, and
getting together at each other's homes. In the summer of 1952, they also had a
work-study student (or apprentice, I'm not sure of his formal status) named
Johnny Moran who was a Cajun studying petroleum engineering at LSU. My older sister,
Pat, 13 at the time, was totally crushing on Jonny Moran.
My oldest sister, Gwen, had gotten married earlier that year
to Ed Baker, a South Carolinian who was an Air Force cook stationed at Shepherd
Air Force Base in Wichita Falls. He had subsequently been transferred to
Ellington Air Force Base in Houston. On the day before we were to leave on
vacation to visit them, the gang was assigned to do a pump replacement on a
well out of Rotan, Texas.
In that day, there were many of the old steel derricks still
standing in the oil fields. It was common to use them for workover jobs, as it
saved considerable time, since you had to unscrew fewer joints of pipe,
compared to when using the shorter derrick of the workover rig. On this particular well, my dad had previously observed that
the derrick seemed to be getting very weak. In the morning meeting, he
recommended that they not use the existing derrick for that job, but that they
use the workover pulling unit’s derrick, instead. Alternatively, could they put off the job until the next day after he was on vacation. My dad was the Safety
Coordinator for the Department, and he felt his recommendation should carry a
lot of weight. However, the boss, either Mr. Richie or Mr. Rose, overrode his
recommendation. My dad reacted angrily, telling everyone in the meeting, “If I
get killed today, you are all my witnesses, and I want my wife to own a big
part of this company as a result of this decision.”
So they went out and strung up their pulling unit on the old
derrick. The pulling unit is a big truck with a big old Waukesha engine that
drives a huge windlass with enough cable to reach down to the bottom of the hole.
If you’ve ever driven around in oil fields, you’ve seen pump
jacks – teeter totters atop elevated fulcrums with one end connected to a motor and counterweights and the other with a “horsehead” bobbing up and down with a rod going down into
the ground connected to it. The pump sits at the bottom of the hole and is
connected to the horsehead by a string of rods. To bring the pump to the
surface for replacement, you do a “rod job”.
With the pulling unit in position, the derrick man carries a light line up and
runs it through the pulley at the top of the derrick, so that it can be used to
haul the main cable up and around the pulley and back to the ground. The string
of rods is secured to the pulling unit and then the rods are disconnected from
the horsehead. The derrick man is then positioned in the crow's nest midway
up the derrick. The cable is then connected to the rods, and then the string of
rods is pulled up the hole. After the top of the string of rods arrives at the
crow's nest, the rods are clamped down at a point below a convenient joint and
the floor gang unscrews that section of rods. They are then swung to a side platform
and stacked by the floor man and the derrick man. The cable is then attached
back to the top of the string of rods still in the hole. The process is
repeated until the pump arrives at the surface. The pump is then replaced, and
the process is reversed to put it back down into the hole.
In this case, this pump was firmly stuck. When Uncle
Newt applied pressure to get it unstuck, my dad observed the derrick start
deforming really badly. He described it as going from a square to a flattened
diamond. He waved for Uncle Newt to stop, grabbed some rags, and bailed out of
the derrick on the dead man. After he was on the ground, Uncle Newt, still
thinking the derrick was safe, applied pressure to the pump one more time. The
derrick began falling and laid down directly across the top of the gang truck,
as everyone scrambled for their lives!
After the dust settled, and everyone started reassembling,
Johnny Moran was unaccounted for. They finally located him where he had dived –
under the gang truck. They helped him to extricate himself. When they asked if
he was hurt, he said, "If blood is yellow, I’m bleeding to death!”
Amazingly, no one was hurt. But Uncle Newt was totally
abashed, and he cried for a long time about almost killing his best friend.
The next day we were off for Houston.
I’m not sure if an old derrick was ever again used on a
workover job in the oil field, but the practice didn’t persist for very much
longer, for sure.
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