WILD-WELL EXPERIENCE PUTS HEROISM IN PERSPECTIVE
The first thing I see when I walk into my office is a jumbo photograph of a natural gas well blowout in Mississippi. The photo captures the massive column of fire jetting from the wellhead but not the shriek of high-pressure gas or the overwhelming radiant heat that toasted whatever part of you faced the well. That’s OK, I was there, and I will never forget the sensations.
Oh, to make this even more interesting, the gas from the well was 17% hydrogen sulfide, which can be fatal at less than 1%.
It took a team of real experts 21 days and $17 million to bring that well under control. I was responsible for my company’s investment in the well, and, when it “blew out” I spent most of those three weeks at the well site. It was the experience of a lifetime to watch the experts at “wild-well control” tame that well. It is interesting to compare their approach to the risks they face with that of our Carnegie heroes. It tells us something good about both.
We’re all fascinated by the men (mostly) who handle these oil-well disasters. Friends would ask me if we brought in Red Adair to get the well back under control. Everybody seems to know his name, and his exploits certainly captured the popular imagination. John Wayne’s character in the 1968 movie The Hellfighters was based on Red Adair, a movie the shaped most people’s understanding of oilfield fires.
Movies portray the wild-well workers as courageous risk-takers, risking life and limb to save the well for its owner. But after watching real wild-well experts, I realized this is wrong. When crews attack a wild well, they plan to do it at virtually ZERO risk to themselves. This makes perfect sense and it’s the pivot-point of the difference between what they do and what Carnegie heroes do. Consider three things:
What are the stakes? An economic loss or a human life lost?
What tools and techniques are available?
How much time is there to solve the problem?
A wild-well crew is trying to solve an economic problem for the well owner.
Remember, these are professionals who will take on many of these challenges throughout their career. Suppose there is a 1% risk of death on a wild-well job. Not so bad, you say? But would you be willing to take that 1% risk a hundred times throughout the course of a career? I would not. Nor would the wild-well crews. They rely on detailed planning to drive their risk as close to zero as possible. Carnegie heroes, on the other hand, have died in about 20% of their rescues. Why would they do that? Clearly because the stakes are so much higher, i.e., the life of another human being. This galvanizes us to act in the face of appalling risk. If any do calculate risk (I’ve never met one), the fact that they will only try this once may help.
When these crews take on a wild well, they draw on more than a hundred years of expertise developed since Myron Kinley, the father of the industry, snuffed his first well fire with dynamite in 1913. His disciples developed a host of clever tools and devices to make their work safer. Our Carnegie heroes have no such base of experience to draw on. They must improvise a rescue in the moment. For tools they have only what might be within reach. Yet they do what they can with what they have, just because the stakes are so high.
Finally, wild-well crews can take their time to pick the methods and assemble the equipment they need to tame a particular fire. They can have specialized equipment flown from anywhere in the world. They can use time in their favor. Now, you might ask, what about all of that deadly hydrogen sulfide spewing from the well? Here is a fun fact: when that Mississippi well broke out of control and started to blow out gas, the crew themselves set the well on fire with a flare gun, which they had for just that purpose. The toxic gas burned off safely with the rest. That meant, though, that the wild-well crew had to keep the well burning until the very second they controlled and diverted the gas flow. Tricky!
Our Carnegie heroes have little or no time. The fire, the rip tide, the mad dog, or the runaway train will not wait until they think through a plan and assemble equipment. Their universe is squeezed down to a few minutes, maybe just seconds, all while a human life teeters in the balance. And none of them have been to Hero Academy or wherever you go to learn how to do the impossible with nothing. How do they do it? Why do they do it? I don’t know. That is why we call them Carnegie heroes.