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Greta Field, other blowouts talked about at folklore meeting |
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Advocate, Sunday, March 31st, 2002 By HenryWolff, Jr. - Henry's Journal |
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Even the crawdad holes were blowing out. That is how Lew Schnitz of Boerne recalls conditions around the site of the great Greta Field blowout near Refugio when he arrived to drill an oil well during the mid-1950s. Schnitz, who had 40 years with Exxon in the Texas oil patch, talked about this and other blowouts in a paper, "Five Stands Off Botton," that he presented Friday during the 86th annual meeting of the Texas Folklore Society at Holiday Inn. C.L. "Smokey" Starnes was a tool pusher who had been sent to Greta with a company rig to drill several wells. "He knew the history of the field through information he got from other rig hands and drillers and from company knowledge of the blowout history," Schnitz noted. Sometime around the early 1940s, a well had blown out in the field, caught fire and the rig had "cratered." "That is, it fell into the hole created by the blowout," Schnitz says. "Several important events occurred because of that blowout that still impact drilling and producing operations today." Many longtime area residents will remember the blowout and how U.S. Highway 77 had to be re-routed around it for years with the crater being visible to motorists. "Since the well was blowing out underground and was charging all the shallow sands in the area, even water wells were blowing out and it made all drilling operations very dicey," he recalls. A drilling engineer, Schnitz arrived to work at the Greta location with Starnes, stepped out of his company car with his hard hat and boots ready to help "Smokey" drill a well. "He met me halfway to the tool house," Schnitz recalls, "and said, 'Boy, don't you dare pull up a weed out here. It'll blowout on you. Why, look - all the crawdad holes are blowing out.'" "And, they were," Schnitz says. "The sands were charged so shallow that the crawdad holes were bubbling and blowing natural gas." There was at least one incident where someone stepped out of a car, lit a cigarette and threw a match to the ground, causing a flash fire that ignited the natural gas at ground level. Schnitz says his years with Exxon, or Humble Oil & Refining as the company was formerly known, gave him an opportunity to meet and work with several old-time drillers and tool pushers whose work ethic, wisdom, wit and humor is legend. He remembers "Smokey" Starnes as being "very dedicated, hard-working, and handled the company rigs and equipment like they were his own." Once when Starnes had been on a rig all night, perhaps several days, and was having trouble with the well "kicking" - that is, trying to blow the drilling mud out of the hole -- he called warehouseman Chester Burrage. "Chester," he said, "this old well has been kicking on me all night and I need you to send me some Baroid out here right now." "How much Baroid do you need, Smokey?" Chester asked. "Hell, Chester, that ain't nearly enough," Smokey replied. He was used to warehousemen trying to cut back on supplying equipment and materials to keep the cost down. Schnitz tells another story on South Texas wildcatter H.H. "Clearwater" Howell, so-named because he didn't believe in spending money needlessly on weighting material for his drilling mud. Seems one of Howell's drillers called in on the radio and said, "Mr. Howell, this well has been kicking on us and right now it is flowing up to the first girt on the derrick. We need some weight material to kill it." Clearwater replied, "Hank, I'm going to send you two sacks of Baroid and I want you to kill that well if it takes every bit of it." About the nicknames, everybody in the oil patch seemed to have one, Schnitz being known himself as "Coyote," pronounced "ky-o-te." Seems some of his fellow workers thought he had eyes like a coyote and had lived in the brush country so long that he thought more like a coyote than a human being. There was always some reason for each nickname, like tool pusher Chris Dowden talked with a slight lisp and had "a kind of sing-song voice" that earned him the name "Crying Chris." In charge of a diesel-electric rig with a short sub-structure, Dowden had his own ideas about efficiency in moving rigs from one location to another. Driller R.L. "Junior" Westbrook tried his best to make rig moves go smoothly with little lost motion. "But he didn't please Chris," Schnitz says. After observing several of Westbrook's rig moves, in his unmistakable voice, Dowden informed him that the first two things to move were the coffee pot and the outhouse, not necessarily in those exact words. Using the language of the oil patch, Schnitz related a number of stories about well blowouts and the people he worked with. When he first went to work fresh out of college there was a training session with Superintendent A.B. Van Heuser that he well remembers. "Boy, pay attention to those old heads out there so you don't get yourself hurt or killed," Van Heuser advised, "and watch out for those rattlesnakes." Wells blowing out weren't the only problem in the South Texas oil patch. |
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