Years
ago, when I started in the drilling business, training of new hands was almost
non-existent. Drillers expected new hands to know what to do and how to do it
without any instruction – almost as if they were supposed to be born with the
knowledge of how to make the tongs bite or slip the drill line. This generally
led to a lot of yelling and cussing by the driller until the new hand figured
it out. It also led to a poor safety record. Drillers actually have told me,
“If he hurts his back or mashes his hand, he won’t do it again.”
Fortunately, times have changed. Some of these changes have been forced on the
industry, such as those by EPA and OSHA, and some have been forced upon us by
insurance companies that are scared that some shyster lawyer is going to sue
them over every injury – imagined or real. But some changes have been
voluntary. Since most drillers are pretty stubborn, it has taken a while for
them to realize that doing things the right – and safe – way actually is faster
and more productive than taking dangerous shortcuts. You might save 10 percent
in time on a well, but if you spend 150-percent more time fixing a train wreck
or re-drilling a well, you really haven’t saved much, if any. I think BP is
starting to realize this about now. On the other side of the coin, safety
regulations can get a little ridiculous.
I was drilling a big well in a nuclear plant some years ago. I think we all can
agree that safety needs to be a pretty big issue in nuclear plants, but
sometimes they get a might carried away. One day, I was welding up something at
the rig when I felt a tap on my shoulder. Now, my crew knew way better than to
stop me in the middle of a rod unless it is a real emergency, so I was about to
come out from under the hood and cuss at somebody. There stood a young lady
safety engineer. She had a degree, and large book of things to look at on the
rig to see if we were safe. I laid down the rod-holder, and stood up to speak
to her – first mistake. She immediately wrote me up for leaving a rod in the
holder. She didn’t realize that if she had waited 2 more minutes, I would have
finished the rod, and dropped the stub in the stub-bucket.
Nowadays, crew training and safety go hand in hand. The JSA (job safety
analysis) is a part of every crew change. Before the term was invented, I
always took time with my crew to go over all the aspects of the job we were
going to do next; I would tell them what to watch out for and how I expected
them to do it. It was as much about training as it was safety. I didn’t
necessarily do it every day, but I did do it when we started the next phase of
a project. Running casing, coring, rigging up or down, all have different
hazards and duties, and I found out that more work got done and fewer people or
parts got torn up if everybody knew what to expect. Sometimes the older, more
experienced hands had heard it all before and rolled their eyes, so I directed
most of my comments to the new guys – but the others got to hear it again
anyway. Now we all sign a form that says we have done what we always did.
Safety and training should be equal parts of the same program.
As our industry has matured, some very good programs, such as continuing
education for drillers, have appeared. Unfortunately, these usually were
mandated by the state instead of organized by the drillers. Once again, we had
to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the modern era. These programs
usually are aimed toward the licensed drillers and the managers of the
companies.
There is a real shortage of structured, organized training for entry-level
people. There are a couple colleges and a few vocational schools available, but
the programs don’t seem to have taken off like they should. This leaves
training to the drillers; so whether or not we like it, or are any good at it,
we still have the responsibility to train the young hands that eventually will
take over the industry.
An update on my brother, Willard: As you have heard, my Willard is quite the
outdoorsman, so when he heard about the oil spill in the Gulf, he got himself a
job cleaning pelicans. He came home the other day, and told me he’d been fired
after cleaning – and gutting – only 56 pelicans. I gotta talk to that boy
….
ND