Life in the Oil Fields

I can't answer what it's like but as far as experience goes if your on here asking what they mean by experience and how big are the oil fields and such I'd say you have zero experience. I'm not trying to offend but i know enough to know oil field work can be dangerous and no one should claim experience and possibly jeopardize the safety of other's. Good Luck though.

 

Where at? I've worked here in PA,OH,WV. I've ran tri-axle water truck, hotshot, and t/t step deck doing work hauling stuff related to the gas wells marcellus and shallow.

It's mostly common sense, don't do anything you think is unsafe I don't care who is telling you to do it.

 

I have a problem with your last statement. While I believe safety is of the utmost importance if I am training you to do a job out here and what I am having you do is perfectly safe but looks to be unsafe to the untrained eye and you shut my job down more than once your not going to have a job real long with me. Most newbies out here in the patch think that they know way more than they do and what we do scares them so it must be unsafe when in reality is the way we do the job so until you learn the ins and outs you've got to kind of cool it on the shutting a job down crap. A perfect example of this, I was up on a 12 foot ramp one day pulling a tool off the floor and I was just getting to the critical part where it was about to break over and lay down on my
bed when this fresh green roughneck went and got the safety man because he thought I wouldn't have control of the load once it broke over. I had perfect control of I had my #2 winch line holding it back plus a truck on the other side holding it. The safety man comes out and wants to shut me down at that critical moment because their policy was that anybody could shut the job down. It was almost a wreck because they pulled my concentration off of the perfectly safe task at hand because they were scared. My point is, common sense isn't real common anymore so if a guy wants to learn and will keep his mouth shut long enough to learn and pays attention he will do way better than a guy that knows everything about everything.

 

I'm about to start hualing frac sand again next week and I can tell you some of the site are so tight you almost have to have the sand coordinator back you in. At first it was very nerve racking but after just a couple of days I got settled in. As far as the frac sand goes sometimes I had to crawl in between the sand kings (the large bins you load the sand into) to connect the hoses. If you get there on stage 1 you may run back to back loads for days. This is possible due to the oil field HOS. When you get a couple of hours to sleep you better do just that. If you get tired and tell them "hey I need to stop and sleep" well you can forget about getting any loads for a couple of days after that. The pads are out in the middle of now where so bring plenty of food. The sand will shift just after its loaded so pull up or backup and hit the brakes to get it to settle in. Do not complain while under dispatch or again you will not get loaded and many many times just flat out be told do not come back. I witnessed this happen to many a driver. The guys that work the rigs are a tough breed no doubt so I always just let them work and stayed out of their way. After all they live there I'm just shooting through. The main reason I never complained is because the money is so good. The check my second week was well over $8000 and this was with on 1 1/2 tanks. I got involved with the wrong company or I would have never left. And there are some bad ones out there just like any field I'm sure.
To sum it up:
I ran very hard and then sat ($65 hour to sit) when the rig had a problem
The working conditions are dirty, wet, and at times without a respirator hard to breath
I hardly ever had to go more than 100 to drop the sand
The drivers I worked with were helpful and cool.
During the summer down here wearing the frc clothing is almost unbearable.
It will beat the #### out of your truck...better off to buy a cheap one to do this.
The work does slow down or did this year in the last two months.

I start hauling again next week so its good enough for me but hell I live within an hour of ten frac shipping companies.

Hope that helps.

 

I understand what your saying Haulhand, but you know as well as I do that some people DON'T have a #### clue what they're doing and that's how people get hurt. We Have had guys cause spills only because they were too proud to ask for help, and im talking call in the clean up crew spills...I always give people I meet too much credit on the whole common sense thing, such as climbing the stairs on a frac tank in the icy winter and not using the hand rail, then wanting to suck up comp when they fall and break their ###.

 

I would love to have coffee with you haul hand, I like to hear more about rig moving, wish my boss would buy some winch tractors. I want to get into moving some of the shacks and larger stuff but it looks like hes buying some trucks to haul pipe.

 

What I'm talking about and I'm sure you understand is the guys that want to shut a job down just for the sake of shutting it down. The guys that don't know I would rather them quit and ask me but don't shut my job down.

Where are you in PA? Around the end of January I might have to fill in for one of my guys that's having a baby and make a few trips back there with shacks. If I get close it would be great to buy you a cup of coffee and talk.

 

what would have been the consequence to disobey the safetyman?
or did he realize you had situation under control?

 

The consequence was that the safety man was run off for getting involved in a critical situation and causing a near miss also the worms ( new hands) were given very menial tasks to stay out of my crews way. Fortunatly I had enough wits to keep the situation under control and get the draw tool on the ground before I shut down and had a powwow with the safety man and the company representative that had hired me. The reason that the safety man was gone was because either he was going to leave or I was going to pack up my toys and go find somebody else to play with if he was on location. I suppose you could say that I did disobey the safety hand but his boss was on my side.