Happy Birthday, Piper!
Today is our Granddaughter Piper’s 21st birthday. It sure doesn’t seem like it’s been 21 years since she was born.
And she’s grown up to be such a beautiful young woman. And smart too.
See ya soon.
Today was a little busier than yesterday. We had 145 vehicles compared to 144 yesterday. So just a little.
So far this gate has pretty much been an 18 hour gate, but of course we man (woman) it 24 hours a day. It’s not unusual for me to have no vehicles come through between 11pm and 6 am. Or maybe just one, like tonight so far.
If I do get one during the night, it’s usually just a tanker coming in to haul out a load of crude from one of the production sites. Since there’s no pipeline connection here, all of the oil has to be hauled out by tanker. It’s takes them about 45 minutes to pick up the 8 to 9000 gallons of crude and be back on their way.
They brought a lot more of the new rig in today, including the 4 big pieces that make up the derrick itself. Sitting here and looking out, there’s just a wall of metal moving by. It’s amazing how big some of these pieces are that they move around.
The cattle guard that they cross over coming through our gate really sags under some of these big loads. I hope it survives this, because if it collapses it will bring all 6 sites here to a grinding halt.
One thing that’s interesting about this rig is the somewhat lackadaisical way they’re putting it up. When we followed a Marathon/H&P rig 2 years ago, it was a 36 hour turnaround.
It took them 18 hours to tear everything down, load it all onto a steady stream of trailers and haul it away. Then at the next site, they’d go from a empty pad to ready to drill in another 18 hours. It was just amazing to watch the choreography of the whole operation. As soon as they started the tear-down, we would moved to the next site and get set up. Then we would be off until they were ready to start drilling again. So we would get a couple of days off, but we still got paid. Nice!
But here, stuff has kind of come in over the last several days, with today being the first day they actually started putting things together. And then they quit at dark. Here’s yesterday.
And here’s today.
One thing that was funny today was a big lowboy hauler that came through the gate carrying a big bulldozer and an enormous crane. I think the cattle guard almost cried when it crossed over.
But the funny part was about an hour later when the lowboy left he had a Tonka toy truck strapped down in place of the bulldozer and the crane, kind of like this one from the Internet. I wasn’t able to get a picture of mine as it went by.
Tomorrow, probably more of the same.
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Thought for the Day:
The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments. ~Mad Magazine
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