Sorry, this is what happens when you get stuck in small town North Carolina (Jacksonville, NC to be precise). Observations so far:
1. The most often seen billboard is a breast enlargement add with a well endowed woman in a bikini.
2. This area must set a record for density of tattoo parlors.
3. I've been told (and have accepted the advice) that bars around here aren't advisable as marines like to fight. If I really want to go to the bar, the advice is to avoid the day of and several days after payday.
4. Point #3 is reinforced by the broken windows in the hotel room on Sunday morning and the 4 marines trying to sneak a free continental breakfast and the front desk staff calling the MPs.
5. Amazing number of for sale signs - even in the nicer beach areas there are apartments and condos and houses for sale everywhere. Not sure if this is a regional thing or part of the mortgage crisis...
6. Amazing number of trailers. They seem everywhere, not just in trailer parks. Given that North Carolina does get hit by hurricanes every now and again, this seems less than wise...
7. There were 6 people in my CPR class including 4 women (including the instructor) and 2 guys (including myself). If there was a scale present, I'm sure I would have weighed the least out of everyone. Damn are people fat here!! Day before, three of us went to Applebees and couldn't find one waitress to admire without getting into the bussers who are under 21... how sad!!
Sunday, November 04, 2007
strange week at work...
I've been here since Monday supposedly installing 600 foot monitoring wells. But there's two geos onsite and only one rig has shown up so far. So I've taken the weekend off (well, yesterday I did my CPR course which had expired and was causing me mucho grief from our H&S people). To sum up the week so far:
Day 1: Monday is a travel day from Montreal w/ a 2PM departure, so a nice slow day departing from Montreal; unfortunately my black jacket gets left in the black trunk of the cab and I have my glasses and maybe my watch in my jacket (not my expensive glasses, but my superstore glasses); travel includes an extra 6 hour layover in Washington Dulles (as in DC) waiting for plane to be fixed; get to hotel at 2:30 AM (I guess that actually makes for a Tuesday arrival).
Day 2: There are two drill rigs, the first one gets set up (see photo), but I'm on the other rig which is dragging it's but and the driller isn't scheduled to show up for ??? My first impressions are that things are a bit antiquated? old? slow? These drillers are used to doing things on their own and not used to having supervision. But since the 2nd rig is no where near ready to drill, I get to watch them set up the drill site - i.e., someone dump and spread a truck full of grave. This is highly exciting, even more when the operator manages to slice his finger open while operating the front end loader (i.e., he's in the cab and cuts his finger on one of the levers!). This sucks as I've just ordered the first aid kit and it's being delivered to my hotel tomorrow morning. Fortunately, I've got my camping first aid kit on me to apply some antibiotic ointment and bandaids. I get to spend an hour filling out a H&S Incident Report in the evening (which makes two for the site as another driller on an unrelated project is knocked into a mud pit when a drill rod falls from the rig - something that never happens and could easily kill someone).
Day 3: I'm going to watch someone excavate a mud pit (a 20' x 10' x 8' deep pit which is then lined and filled with water & drilling mud) except that on the very first scoop of the excavator we dig up a ~50 strand telephone bundle. Sweet! Pretty sure it's not fibre optic, which incurs fines of say ~$300,000/day, but still big problem. I scramble and hours later we find out it is dead / abandoned and not a big deal. Lucky.
Day 4: We stretch the liner on the mud pit and fill with water. I hang out mostly on the other well, which is drilling slow because driller is from 1963, has no mud kit, is trying to drill with water instead of mud, the mud pump on the rig isn't working, etc. etc. Let's just say the pace is underwhelming and I'm looking for things to do.
Day 5: The 2nd driller arrives onsite, so I should be able to get working, but the first driller's sister just went into the hospital, so we are still at 1 driller. Doesn't really matter as the mud pit at the 2nd site has collapsed (if had been filled with drilling mud instead of sitting for 2 days, probably would have been fine...). But the new driller has his act together, has a mud test kit (confirms my observation that mud is way to thin), orders a new mud pump for rig #1 and orders an external mud tank & shaker system for the 2nd drill rig (so now mud pit can be abandoned), etc. etc. Things looking up, but won't have a 2nd driller till Monday.
Day 6 & 7: Well, that takes me to this weekend, which should be Day 6 & 7 of a ten day shift, but which I've taken off except for my CPR course. Which means that I don't get paid, but... I could have sat around and billed 8 hours a day, but I don't mind a couple days off as I got almost no time off before this job and I have some chores and fun stuff I've been wanting to do (backing up laptop, programming my GPS unit I got for my birthday in 2006, making a couple CDs, new music on the MP3 player, watching TV, etc.). A 2nd driller will be onsite tomorrow, so I'll be working soon enough.
So how was your week?
Day 1: Monday is a travel day from Montreal w/ a 2PM departure, so a nice slow day departing from Montreal; unfortunately my black jacket gets left in the black trunk of the cab and I have my glasses and maybe my watch in my jacket (not my expensive glasses, but my superstore glasses); travel includes an extra 6 hour layover in Washington Dulles (as in DC) waiting for plane to be fixed; get to hotel at 2:30 AM (I guess that actually makes for a Tuesday arrival).
Day 2: There are two drill rigs, the first one gets set up (see photo), but I'm on the other rig which is dragging it's but and the driller isn't scheduled to show up for ??? My first impressions are that things are a bit antiquated? old? slow? These drillers are used to doing things on their own and not used to having supervision. But since the 2nd rig is no where near ready to drill, I get to watch them set up the drill site - i.e., someone dump and spread a truck full of grave. This is highly exciting, even more when the operator manages to slice his finger open while operating the front end loader (i.e., he's in the cab and cuts his finger on one of the levers!). This sucks as I've just ordered the first aid kit and it's being delivered to my hotel tomorrow morning. Fortunately, I've got my camping first aid kit on me to apply some antibiotic ointment and bandaids. I get to spend an hour filling out a H&S Incident Report in the evening (which makes two for the site as another driller on an unrelated project is knocked into a mud pit when a drill rod falls from the rig - something that never happens and could easily kill someone).
Day 3: I'm going to watch someone excavate a mud pit (a 20' x 10' x 8' deep pit which is then lined and filled with water & drilling mud) except that on the very first scoop of the excavator we dig up a ~50 strand telephone bundle. Sweet! Pretty sure it's not fibre optic, which incurs fines of say ~$300,000/day, but still big problem. I scramble and hours later we find out it is dead / abandoned and not a big deal. Lucky.
Day 4: We stretch the liner on the mud pit and fill with water. I hang out mostly on the other well, which is drilling slow because driller is from 1963, has no mud kit, is trying to drill with water instead of mud, the mud pump on the rig isn't working, etc. etc. Let's just say the pace is underwhelming and I'm looking for things to do.
Day 5: The 2nd driller arrives onsite, so I should be able to get working, but the first driller's sister just went into the hospital, so we are still at 1 driller. Doesn't really matter as the mud pit at the 2nd site has collapsed (if had been filled with drilling mud instead of sitting for 2 days, probably would have been fine...). But the new driller has his act together, has a mud test kit (confirms my observation that mud is way to thin), orders a new mud pump for rig #1 and orders an external mud tank & shaker system for the 2nd drill rig (so now mud pit can be abandoned), etc. etc. Things looking up, but won't have a 2nd driller till Monday.
Day 6 & 7: Well, that takes me to this weekend, which should be Day 6 & 7 of a ten day shift, but which I've taken off except for my CPR course. Which means that I don't get paid, but... I could have sat around and billed 8 hours a day, but I don't mind a couple days off as I got almost no time off before this job and I have some chores and fun stuff I've been wanting to do (backing up laptop, programming my GPS unit I got for my birthday in 2006, making a couple CDs, new music on the MP3 player, watching TV, etc.). A 2nd driller will be onsite tomorrow, so I'll be working soon enough.
So how was your week?
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Alaska - Pt. 2
I haven't been in Alaska in a nearly a couple months, but I did finally get my photos and stuff together. Though I lost a memory card (sure it fell between the seats in the rental car) so I got a bit discouraged. Such is life...
The highlight of the Alaska work was not the work :) I think the last post summed up the drive there (near Mt Denali aka McKinley) and a couple small weekend roadtrips and such. And the last week of work I worked with Paul, an electrician who I did utility locates with (me on a GPS unit, him with essentially a fancy inductive metal detector). And it turns out Paul has a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, but this nowhere is exactly half way between Fairbanks and Anchorage via the southern route (via Delta Junction, nearly into the Yukon and Whitehorse), which is exactly the route I was planning.
Turns out Paul's cabin is a very nice 2000 sq. ft. log cabin above the tree line on Summit Lake. And most importantly, it has nice wood burning stoves and a solar system to make life easy.
When I first arrived, it was a dark, foggy, gloomy almost surreal afternoon / evening. The place was totally deserted with not a car or person to be seen anywhere. And because above the treeline, you could see everywhere (no such thing as privacy here)...
The next morning, everything had come to life! I don't know if you can tell just how scattered the cabins are on this treeless plateau. There's a little townish type clustering of houses around the lake (though definitely no shops and no people whatsoever when I was there) and then a scattering of cabins on the upper ridge. Just felt very strange with no trees...
After leaving the cabin, I took about a hundred photos, all on the card I lost. So here's what stuff looked like... (note, use your imagination).
Here's a couple river scenery photos for Carole (the 2nd being a river that starts at the distant glacier - the glacier used to be at the highway)...
And some random pipeline photos, since I was along two major pipelines at various times - I think both started at Prudhoe Bay (aka the North Slope) and one went into Canada (Alcan)and eventually Fort St. John and the other (Alyeska) to the port at Valdez (the infamous namesake of the Exxon Valdez).
The road trip took a rather random detour to Valdez just because (and where the fish are big, almost as big as in Kenora!)...
The road to Valdez was very impressive with glaciers and waterfalls around every corner in the road. Of course, most of these photos are goners, but here's a few...
And I was lucky, because they had just had torrential down pores the previous day and the road was nearly flooded out in a few places (it look more impressive in a few other places where the backhoes were doing there job, but I was trying not to get killed stopping in random places on the highway - this little stream going through the culverts is the runoff from the glacier I had just hiked up to in the previous photos). Apparently this happens every year and people just accept being stranded for a few days now and again. If I had been there a few weeks later you can take a ferry to Anchorage, which would have been sweet!
And lastly, just some more miscellaneous photos...
Since Alaska, I've been to Seattle for a couple days to visit Justin, then to Montreal for a week with Mel, then to Calgary for a day, Edmonton for a week of work, Winnipeg for a weekend wedding, back to Edmonton for a couple weeks, then a Jasper roadtrip with Carole, back to Edmonton for a couple more weeks of work, then to Calgary for a day and now I'm in Montreal for 3 days (in a cafe right now) and heading to North Carolina tomorrow for a month or so? Working 10 days on, 4 off and not sure how many shifts, so everything is very week to week shall we say. Anyway, with one paragraph I've covered the last month or two and now I'm up to date - sorry, don't feel like being wordy anymore :)
The highlight of the Alaska work was not the work :) I think the last post summed up the drive there (near Mt Denali aka McKinley) and a couple small weekend roadtrips and such. And the last week of work I worked with Paul, an electrician who I did utility locates with (me on a GPS unit, him with essentially a fancy inductive metal detector). And it turns out Paul has a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, but this nowhere is exactly half way between Fairbanks and Anchorage via the southern route (via Delta Junction, nearly into the Yukon and Whitehorse), which is exactly the route I was planning.
Turns out Paul's cabin is a very nice 2000 sq. ft. log cabin above the tree line on Summit Lake. And most importantly, it has nice wood burning stoves and a solar system to make life easy.
When I first arrived, it was a dark, foggy, gloomy almost surreal afternoon / evening. The place was totally deserted with not a car or person to be seen anywhere. And because above the treeline, you could see everywhere (no such thing as privacy here)...
The next morning, everything had come to life! I don't know if you can tell just how scattered the cabins are on this treeless plateau. There's a little townish type clustering of houses around the lake (though definitely no shops and no people whatsoever when I was there) and then a scattering of cabins on the upper ridge. Just felt very strange with no trees...
After leaving the cabin, I took about a hundred photos, all on the card I lost. So here's what stuff looked like... (note, use your imagination).
Here's a couple river scenery photos for Carole (the 2nd being a river that starts at the distant glacier - the glacier used to be at the highway)...
And some random pipeline photos, since I was along two major pipelines at various times - I think both started at Prudhoe Bay (aka the North Slope) and one went into Canada (Alcan)and eventually Fort St. John and the other (Alyeska) to the port at Valdez (the infamous namesake of the Exxon Valdez).
The road trip took a rather random detour to Valdez just because (and where the fish are big, almost as big as in Kenora!)...
The road to Valdez was very impressive with glaciers and waterfalls around every corner in the road. Of course, most of these photos are goners, but here's a few...
And I was lucky, because they had just had torrential down pores the previous day and the road was nearly flooded out in a few places (it look more impressive in a few other places where the backhoes were doing there job, but I was trying not to get killed stopping in random places on the highway - this little stream going through the culverts is the runoff from the glacier I had just hiked up to in the previous photos). Apparently this happens every year and people just accept being stranded for a few days now and again. If I had been there a few weeks later you can take a ferry to Anchorage, which would have been sweet!
And lastly, just some more miscellaneous photos...
Since Alaska, I've been to Seattle for a couple days to visit Justin, then to Montreal for a week with Mel, then to Calgary for a day, Edmonton for a week of work, Winnipeg for a weekend wedding, back to Edmonton for a couple weeks, then a Jasper roadtrip with Carole, back to Edmonton for a couple more weeks of work, then to Calgary for a day and now I'm in Montreal for 3 days (in a cafe right now) and heading to North Carolina tomorrow for a month or so? Working 10 days on, 4 off and not sure how many shifts, so everything is very week to week shall we say. Anyway, with one paragraph I've covered the last month or two and now I'm up to date - sorry, don't feel like being wordy anymore :)
Friday, September 14, 2007
Alaska - Pt. 1
Hey folks. Nice to know a few of you complain when I am lazy and don’t blog. I’m in Alaska finishing up my 3rd of 4 weeks of work. Currently sitting in a coffee shop on Saturday morning - I do have internet at the apartment, but my roommates girlfriend just flew in so I’m being scarce.
And yes, apartment... usually I stay in hotels for fieldwork, but the company has rented 4 apartments for the project. Which is very nice since we have a per diem and are able to eat at home. Might be the first bit of field work where I loose weight! And a good crew out that all gets along and takes turn grilling fresh salmon on the hibachi and such. Life is tough...
The work started off a little funny. Was supposed to be installing wells and doing soil gas sampling in basements, etc. But delays in approvals and such meant the first week or so ended up being mostly hand auguring soil piles. Though I’ve been doing a lot of GIS and GPS work too - mostly tracking down as-built AutoCAD drawings, compiling in GIS (ArcInfo), uploading to a GPS (Trimble unit that does real-time corrections to ~2ft accuracy) and then field locating pipelines, drill locations, etc. etc.
So Alaska and you think cold, but temperatures have been high 20s (Celcius that is), even pushing 30 a few days (mid 80s F, which if I’m doing my conversions correctly, is about 30 C?). Apparently this is quite nice weather for this time of year. If fact, I nearly got heat stroke one day while auguring a tad too fast, but I digress…
So what's up besides work? (before you fall asleep)... last Sunday morning a handful of us drove to Chena Hotsprings about an hour east of Fairbanks. Was a nice hotsprings, definitely developed, but done somewhat tastefully. Though I only took photos of somewhat interesting things in the front...
In the afternoon after the hotsprings we did a hike up Angels Peak, where we got rained and hailed on just as we reached the peak. I really wasn’t expecting much of a hike so I was wearing sandals, jeans and a cotton t-shirt (the hiking shoes, gortex jacket, etc. were in the car). Oh well, since the weather here has been warm, the hike down was muddy, but not too cold despite looking like drowned rats. Side note, And we saw a moose and a bear in the same day too.
A less exciting day was a trip to the north pole. Funnily enough, one must go south to get to the North Pole. The North Pole is actually a town with a ridiculous amount of Christmas theme stuff for everything. We had also thought about driving to the Arctic Circle (ummm… is it the 15th or 30th parallel)? It's a bit of a drive though, and not necessarily nice rounds along the Alaskan Pipeline (which I saw last week as well - not very exciting, but...). Isn't the 2nd photo of Santa strange... almost like if one were to rearrange the letters in Santa one would get Satan!! HMMMM???
Well, that’s a quick update. I’ll be finished here on Sept 9 and then taking a few days to get to Anchorage - get to drive past / through Denali Natl Park, Mt. McKinley (tallest mountain in North America), etc. etc. – Then looks like I’ll be heading to Seattle for a day or two, then Montreal for a week or so and then off to Edmonton for a repeat of some work I did last fall. I had no other plans after Edmonton (even Edmonton still hasn’t 100% confirmed) until 2 days ago and then things went crazy. I got 2 emails in the morning trying to get me on a project in Nevada and then that would conveniently start near San Francisco the following week. I was contemplating how to make these fit in with Edmonton when my OL (operations lead – sort of my boss) called asking if I wanted a 2-4 month placement in Honolulu and he needed to know ASAP. What was I to say? But just as quickly, things aren't looking as good. So looks like my surfing skills may remain poorly developed :(
And yes, apartment... usually I stay in hotels for fieldwork, but the company has rented 4 apartments for the project. Which is very nice since we have a per diem and are able to eat at home. Might be the first bit of field work where I loose weight! And a good crew out that all gets along and takes turn grilling fresh salmon on the hibachi and such. Life is tough...
The work started off a little funny. Was supposed to be installing wells and doing soil gas sampling in basements, etc. But delays in approvals and such meant the first week or so ended up being mostly hand auguring soil piles. Though I’ve been doing a lot of GIS and GPS work too - mostly tracking down as-built AutoCAD drawings, compiling in GIS (ArcInfo), uploading to a GPS (Trimble unit that does real-time corrections to ~2ft accuracy) and then field locating pipelines, drill locations, etc. etc.
So Alaska and you think cold, but temperatures have been high 20s (Celcius that is), even pushing 30 a few days (mid 80s F, which if I’m doing my conversions correctly, is about 30 C?). Apparently this is quite nice weather for this time of year. If fact, I nearly got heat stroke one day while auguring a tad too fast, but I digress…
So what's up besides work? (before you fall asleep)... last Sunday morning a handful of us drove to Chena Hotsprings about an hour east of Fairbanks. Was a nice hotsprings, definitely developed, but done somewhat tastefully. Though I only took photos of somewhat interesting things in the front...
In the afternoon after the hotsprings we did a hike up Angels Peak, where we got rained and hailed on just as we reached the peak. I really wasn’t expecting much of a hike so I was wearing sandals, jeans and a cotton t-shirt (the hiking shoes, gortex jacket, etc. were in the car). Oh well, since the weather here has been warm, the hike down was muddy, but not too cold despite looking like drowned rats. Side note, And we saw a moose and a bear in the same day too.
A less exciting day was a trip to the north pole. Funnily enough, one must go south to get to the North Pole. The North Pole is actually a town with a ridiculous amount of Christmas theme stuff for everything. We had also thought about driving to the Arctic Circle (ummm… is it the 15th or 30th parallel)? It's a bit of a drive though, and not necessarily nice rounds along the Alaskan Pipeline (which I saw last week as well - not very exciting, but...). Isn't the 2nd photo of Santa strange... almost like if one were to rearrange the letters in Santa one would get Satan!! HMMMM???
Well, that’s a quick update. I’ll be finished here on Sept 9 and then taking a few days to get to Anchorage - get to drive past / through Denali Natl Park, Mt. McKinley (tallest mountain in North America), etc. etc. – Then looks like I’ll be heading to Seattle for a day or two, then Montreal for a week or so and then off to Edmonton for a repeat of some work I did last fall. I had no other plans after Edmonton (even Edmonton still hasn’t 100% confirmed) until 2 days ago and then things went crazy. I got 2 emails in the morning trying to get me on a project in Nevada and then that would conveniently start near San Francisco the following week. I was contemplating how to make these fit in with Edmonton when my OL (operations lead – sort of my boss) called asking if I wanted a 2-4 month placement in Honolulu and he needed to know ASAP. What was I to say? But just as quickly, things aren't looking as good. So looks like my surfing skills may remain poorly developed :(
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