ex Halliburton employee's commentary on the Gulf Oil Spill

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Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans:
In 1984 I myself worked as a cementer for the Wooster, Ohio field office of Halliburton. It was backbreaking work, but the pay was very good. I remember struggling to drag pipe through hip deep mud in some of Ohio’s oil well locations. I also remember working thirty or more straight hours on the job…. It would be several straight days “on call” and then maybe several straight days off duty and off work.

When you were on call, you could work a lot of hours in a row, and that included driving tear drop cement trucks at questionable speeds on rural roads when you’d been at work for twenty or thirty hours. I remember having worked about twenty-five or so straight hours and coming back into the yard at three thirty in the morning and getting sent out again on another job. These working conditions are the norm at Halliburton’s facilities, at least they were in the mid 1980s. The reason for it is pretty obvious: Halliburton pays relatively high wages, and the fewer workers they have to hire to make up their local work force, the higher the profits, since the work is not so regular and the oil field service industry goes through spurts of activity and inactivity.

There were only four Halliburton employees stationed on the Gulf of Mexico rig when it suffered the blow-out…. In my experience, four employees is barely enough to crew a basic 3,000 or 6,000 foot well in some farm field in Ohio, and it seems to me, nowhere near enough for a huge oil rig in the middle of the Gulf. However, apparently a crew handling casing on a rig in the Gulf is often no larger than two men. “Need pr” comments on this article at Daily Kos: “There will be a weight log on the cement to show how consistent the cement job was. They should have taken samples to test the strength of the cement. I hate Halliburton but I seriously doubt this (is their) fault. There is a audio from a worker that was on the rig available and it sounds like they failed to notice the pressure on the well head when they opened the BOP.”

Need pr continues: “they had salt water in the production tubing when they opened the Blow Our Preventer (BOP). The well had a gas kick and blew the salt water out of the tubing. The pressure was so great that that it blew the water 200 feet in the air, the gas settled around the rig and that’s what caused the initial explosion. The link is on Hurricane Trackers website and I believe the audio was from a right wing radio show who was trying to claim terrorism. The caller was listening to the show and gives a detail account of the initial problem.”
http://evans-politics.com/gulf-oil-spill-the-halliburton-connection.html