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.
Readers, you will have to forgive me, for I am going to take a short detour from my series of columns about clamp-on pitlesses. I recently had occasion to pull a pump that I had installed years ago and, not having a pump hoist available, did it the way we used to do it.
The failure of a critical pump in a mining operation means unplanned and extremely expensive downtime, which can escalate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue in just a few hours’ time.
It’s a beautiful day for drilling! That’s the message from thousands of drilling crews each time they head to a new jobsite. Fighting back against a turbulent economy with a shiny new contract in your pocket is a big part of our industry’s new reality.
When pumpable, one-step, high-solids grouts hit the market in the late 1980s, solids content ranged from 20 percent to 30 percent. There were two-step pumpable grouts already in the market at that time and these were less than 20 percent solids.
I bet a lot of readers think they’re pretty careful — and environmentally considerate — when handling drilling fluids and solids byproducts.
But, I was thinking of this recently as I attended the Underground Construction Technology (UCT) event in Atlanta last month.
