Surviving Deathtraps & Blow Out Preventers

A Roughneck’s Story

When I was eighteen I decided to go to Hobbs, New Mexico to live with my uncle and work with him in the oilfields. I worked on his crew on a drilling rig near Odessa, Texas.

The Deathtrap

The ride to and from the rig was around 2 hours each way. My uncle had taken a small diesel Toyota pickup truck and converted the back into a raised bed with a mattress over it and a shell over top of that. Under the bed was a tank he welded together for extra diesel fuel, so we could go for miles without a fill-up. He got all his diesel and oil from the rig for free. He figured out the most economical way to get to and from the rig with his crew.

However, thinking back about that truck, it was an OSHA disaster waiting to happen. Three guys sleeping in the back, with no restraints, and 2 in the front. Diesel isn’t really explosive, but if the driver fell asleep at the wheel after the long, exhausting shifts, it wouldn’t have been pretty. It was a 2-hour drive to the rig, a long 8-hour shift, and then a 2-hour drive home every day. I’m sure that my uncle, today, as a Certified Safety Engineer, would probably never approve of such a vehicle. But this was at the heart of an oil boom in the 80s, and long before OSHA started clamping down on oilfield safety regulations.

Roughnecking

Working on the rig was physically demanding. I’ve roughnecked a couple of different times in my life, and every time it takes an adjustment period until I feel strong enough to do the work without extreme muscle aches and pain after every shift. From making connections with 500 lb counter-levered tongs (as seen below) that you have to throw around quickly, to throwing a pick or a sledgehammer for hours, to picking up large sacks of chemicals and running up a flight of stairs, your body is tested to the limit every day. But when your body does finally catch up to the physical activity, you feel as strong as an ox. That’s when the work starts to be fun.

This video shows some live-action work from the platform on a drilling rig. A good example of the kind of work we did on a daily basis.

Blow Out Preventers

One of the things you do when you first start drilling a hole is set up a wellhead casing, which is essentially a large pipe that goes 20 feet deep with a flange on top of it. That top pipe helps to get the hole started right without a bunch of dirt caving in on it and it’s also where you set up the Blow-out Preventer.

A Blow Out Preventer, or BOP, is a huge piece of hydraulically controlled machinery that you fasten on top of the flange, using large bolts and nuts. You also insert a metal O-Ring between the BOP’s flange and the wellhead casing flange, to keep the connection water-tight.

The BOP can weigh 50,000 lbs for a smaller drilling rig and up to 300,000 lbs for a deep-sea rig. Its main purpose is to control a blowout of gas or oil that could come up from the bottom of the hole at any time while you are drilling.

One day we arrived on the rig site and we were just getting the hole started. The wellhead casing and flange were already in place and it was our task to load up the BOP and tighten all of the bolts down. All of this takes place down in an area they call the cellar.

A cellar is a hole around the casing that’s lined with boards, to keep the dirt from caving in. It provides space for us to get in and tighten the bolts connecting the BOP to the flange using a couple of large wrenches and a sledgehammer.

The BOP itself has to be lifted up using a large set of cables and pulleys and then lowered into the cellar from the rig. This is all controlled from the drilling platform which is about 25 feet above our heads. The driller (in this case, my uncle) controls this process while someone else watches out since the driller can’t actually see what’s going on in the cellar. This lookout (the assistant driller) gives the driller instructions on raising or lowering the BOP while the workers try to man-handle this 50,000 lb hunk of metal onto the flange as it is lowered slowly by the driller. It needs to be lined up on the flange so that it seals the o-ring and lines up the holes for the 12 bolts to be inserted and tightened.

My uncle was upstairs controlling the cables that were lowering the BOP into the cellar and his assistant was standing above us at the top of the cellar. A co-worker and I were down in the cellar trying to push this metal monster around. That’s when something went wrong.

50,000 Pounds Pressing On Your Chest

Through some sort of malfunction in the controls, the BOP started lowering and swinging slowly towards me. Being new to this environment, I didn’t move out of the way until it was too late. It kept coming towards me until it pinned me against one of the walls of the cellar.

As it started pushing against my chest, the assistant driller started jumping up and down and yelling at the top of his lungs for my uncle to stop and reverse the direction of the lift. I basically thought I was done for.

The BOP continued to press against me until it cracked my back like a chiropractor. And then just as quickly as it descended, it lifted off of me. I thought the assistant driller was going to lose his mind and he may have let go of a cuss word or two. My uncle, however, because he couldn’t really see what was going on, had no idea how close death had been for his greenie nephew in the cellar.

We took another swing at it, got it lined up properly the next time, and got the BOP bolted down properly without another incident. When we told my uncle about what transpired he was shocked, but there really wasn’t anything more he could have done since he couldn’t see what was going on. He was just glad his nephew was still around to tell about it.

I’ve often said that it must not have been my time to go that day. Maybe life had something else in store for me. After being around for 57 years, I’d say that was pretty accurate. Since that day, I’ve spent two years in a foreign land and learned a new language and a new culture. I got married and had 3 beautiful kids. I’ve traveled to over 50 countries and sailed completely around the world. And I’ve lived a fulfilling life.

I’ll be forever grateful that by some lucky accident, in that split second, my uncle’s lever changed gears, that BOP was lifted off of me and didn’t crush me to death and I was able to continue on with this crazy existence. It’s been a good life. You never know when things might change. So appreciate each day as a blessing.

Want to connect? You can find me somewhere on our beautiful planet, on a sailboat, or with my hands in the soil and my eyes gazing up at the clouds. Or here on Linktree.

For more of my work, here are a few examples.