Some years ago I had a job as a drilling foreman for a large contractor. Sometimes when we would bid a job, they would ask me to go look at the location to see what we needed. They were bidding a job for a pulp mill in the Southeast that needed and used a lot of water. The wells they had were spaced out as widely as possible on their plant site to avoid interference. When they needed a new one, the only place left to drill was inside a paper warehouse. It was a 36-inch well 900 feet deep, so we needed a pretty large rig to do it. I went down there and met with the man in charge, who took me to the warehouse. He said they would take the roof off an area about 80-by-120 feet for my location. Plenty of room for a 3000 class rig, above-ground mud system, pipe racks, etc. Too bad I don’t have a sarcasm font …
When we went into the warehouse, we rode in his pickup through a very narrow, twisted labyrinth of tanks, pipes, buildings and other obstacles. I realized that there was absolutely no way the rig was going to fit, but my company said, “We have confidence that you’ll figure it out.” As I walked around the warehouse, I noticed that there was a railroad siding that dead-ended into the warehouse. I went out in the train yard, and found another siding I could build a ramp on, put the rig on a flat car and bring it in. The only problem was the rig had to make a very short U-turn off the flat car to get into the location. I measured and found that I could make the turn with the trailer, but not the derrick.