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Rig Handling

The Sky is Falling

May. 14 2024 - Grant Pettit

A long, long time ago … wait, I’ve already done that bit. Lemme try again.

Once upon a time … nope, done that one, too.

How about this? Come with me back to a simpler time, a time when you talked on phones instead of stared at them, a time when the Cubs had still not won a World Series since 1908, a time when your intrepid writer was a little less of a crotchety old man. (A little. I’ve been somewhat of a crotchety old man since high school.)

Young-engineer Grant was called by an offshore operator to an elevator & handling-tool service facility to witness the teardown of a hydraulic elevator from a drill ship. (I know, I could probably just use their names and most of you would say “oh, yeah, how is ol’ …,” but I couldn’t be bothered to get permission for all that.)

“Yeah, no problem,” greenhorn Grant said. “What happened to it?”

“We were tripping in and we latched on a joint of pipe, picked the string up out of the slips, and the elevator doors popped open about halfway up.”

Wide-eyed silence.

“Oh man, is everybody … ok?” (I find it very difficult to ask the question about whether anybody got hurt. I want to be delicate, and I know sometimes the answer is “yeah, it’s bad,” considering the fact that hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel that was being suspended by large machinery now suddenly falls from the sky. Basically, I don’t really want to know the answer, so I tend to be overly delicate.)

“Yeah, we were lucky. The pipe caught back in the slips. So after everybody unpuckered, we rigged it down and sent it to town.” Whew, thank goodness.

“You swapped out the slips and pipe, too, right?”

“Yeah, but that’s clearly collateral damage, so we’ll deal with that separately.”

“Ok. I’ll see you there.”

So that’s exciting. I mean, I know our customer has lots (and lots, and lots) of money that they’re out because of the equipment failure and the associated non-productive downtime. Just march through the steps needed in your mind: rig down a big hydraulic elevator on an offshore rig, rig up a new elevator, finally successfully pick the drill string out of the slips, swap out the slips around the hanging drill pipe string, trip that string out and rack it back, then pull and inspect everything that might have been shock-loaded during the event. All while paying half a million dollars a day. The mind boggles.

Me? I just get to figure out why. (Much more fun.) So I watched as the shop set up a quick functional test of the elevators … and hydraulic fluid started spilling out all over the place. Well, you know, maybe that came from the final break; let’s cast our eyes over the thing and see what we can see.

This paint’s in pretty bad shape; how long has it been since it was torn down and inspected? Here’s the ID plate … it says the last full rebuild was 6 years ago … surely it hasn’t been that long, let me write down the numbers and see if we can pull better records.

Well, it looks like something’s been off for a while. Look at all those hammer marks on the latch! Having issues getting the thing closed, were we?