And How Was Your Day?

10 Replies to “And How Was Your Day?”

1. Just curious. I imagine every average family house and farm on the Prairies have lightening rods installed at high points on house and barn. What about something as vital as oilfield installations?

   1. Lightning rods are hardly ever seen any more, only on older buildings pre 1970’s.
      The oilfield structures like the ones at this site are very well built and have a very good safety record. Not much will save you if you have a lightning strike and any flammable vapour in a tank. There most be thousands of strikes on oilfield structures in a season on the prairies.

2. IIRC, Oklahoma may be one of the worst for lightning strikes on oil rigs. I grew up there. My Uncle Bud was a pumper and leaseholder.

3. I was a volunteer firefighter in my home town for 7 years. Once responded to a call at an oil well battery SW of town. It had been hit by lightning during a recent rainstorm, ignited some crude spilled on the ground & the fire worked its way under a large propane tank. It BLEVE’d, the neighbours heard it & called it in.

   We arrived onsite, along with another local fire department. There was second propane tank right beside the blown one & the fire was still burning underneath. Nobody wanted to get close to this thing w/ a pumper, so we put on the longest reach nozzle we carried & a newbie & I started crawling on our bellies towards the fire, through a freshly seeded field. They kept on feeding us line & we’d test the range every so often. Once we got close enough, we just poured the water on.

   At one point the tank relief valve released, shooting propane into the air which immediately ignited. Helluva sight! I think I wet myself as my partner hunkered down behind me. You wanna talk adrenaline rush! At the same time we knew we were going to be OK, as the relief valve was working. Kept on spraying water, changing pumpers out as the tanks MT’d.

   Some of the water drained downhill in the drill furrows towards us, which wouldn’t have been bad, but it also carried some oil, which was on fire, too. Every so often we had to roll one way or another to avoid getting burned.

   Fire eventually put out, sprayed more to cool everything off, went & had a looksee. That BLEVE’d tank looked like a sardine can, opened up along the seam at the top. Impressive.

   Ah, the good ol’ days.

4. Far more accurate than Russian artillery.

   1. unDORK
      Did the Russian artillery hit the CIA for 6.2 billion? I would call that damn good accuracy!

   2. And Putin remains in power.

      So much for the overthrow.

5. Are we sure this isn’t just another WEF-sponsored attack on energy infrastructure?

   1. That was my first thought too, the other kind of lightning.

6. By “lightning”, doesn’t the author really mean “Bic lighter”? On a related note, this morning’s news reported that the majority of wild fires this season disproportionately affected Canada’s native population. I guess mother nature is a racist patriarchal white man in drag.