Daily Archives: October 6, 2014

Big Bits and Pieces . . .

412 DayTimeWe’ll today turned out to be our busiest day in almost a month, with about 170 vehicles coming in. A large part of this was the big trucks cycling through, hauling the bits and pieces of the rig located in the back that’s being moved a few miles down the road.


And by ‘bits and pieces’, I mean really BIG bits and really ENORMOUS pieces. Many of them substantially bigger than our 40 foot RV, and almost as wide as our cattle gate. In some cases they had less than a foot of clearance on either side as they went through. At least they didn’t break our new cattle guard this time like they broke the old one the last time they moved a rig through.

Broken Cattle Guard 1

The weather turned out to be really nice again today, with only a mid-morning rain to dampen things down, literally and figuratively. And of course, with the rain watering down the dust on the road, the road-watering guy showed up TWICE to ‘muddy up’ the situation even more. Where was he yesterday?

Although our temporary tarp canopy roof weathered the rain with no problems, I’m probably going to look for a bigger one when I get groceries this week. Our original canopy cover was 13’ x 13’, but the replacement tarp is 10’ x 20’ so we lost our 3’ overhang, and it turns out we miss it. So I’ll see if I can’t find a bigger one.

As far as we know, they’re supposed to skid the rig in front of us over to a new well site tomorrow. At least that’s what they said last week, but it’s already been rescheduled twice, so who knows. We’ll just have to wait and see.

We’ve been told that this 3rd well will involve a lot of ‘sampling’, which slows down the whole process, since they usually have pull the drill pipe string back out every time they take one. At least that’s the way they’ve done it on other rigs we’ve worked. And it takes a while to pull 10,000+ feet of drill pipe out of the hole, and then put it back and start drilling again.

It seems like the only big piece(s) of the rig left to take out tomorrow is the derrick itself. Then, after that our vehicle count should really slack off for a while

At least until the fracking starts.

___________________________________

Remember Nick Russell has a special this week on the first book in his great Big Lake murder mystery series. It’s so special that it’s FREE on Amazon Monday through Friday of this week.

Big Lake Cover

 Big Lake has sold over 170,000 copies and put Nick on the New York Times Best Seller list. And even better, there are four more Big Lake books to read after this one.

And if you don’t have a Kindle, get one. Otherwise you can download the free Kindle app for your PC, Mac, Smartphone, or Tablet.

__________________________________________________________________

Thought for the Day:

“When you’re going through hell, keep going.” – Sir Winston Churchill

adfadf