Lindsay, Oklahoma 1954
Lindsay was a small farming community about sixty miles south of Oklahoma City. Until it became an oil driven community it was known as the broom corn capital of the world and each year held what Lindsayites called the Broom Corn Festival. If you owned a broom the bristles were probably grown around Lindsay. After the broom corn was harvested and all the broom corn Johnnies (illegal immigrants from Mexico) had left town the committee that was in charge of the celebration brought in a carnival and country and western bands for two days to celebrate the end of the broom corn season. Lindsay was a true boom town in every sense of the word. Raising broom corn was a prospers business and with royalties from oil and gas production staying in Lindsay it was a prosperous community
Cities Service Oil Company was the most active operator in the area. With a District office located in Lindsay and with all the activity in the district, Cities had moved in a complement of ten engineers to handle the work load. It was twenty four hours a day seven days a week.
I was assigned the task of determining if each of the zones in a dual completion were producing separately. It was required by the state to produce one zone, the Springer Sand, through the tubing and the other zone, the Hart sand, through the annulus, the area between the tubing and casing. It appeared the seals in the packer between the two zones were not holding. Each zone would make its allowable of one hundred fifty barrels a day of oil plus the associated gas. Every day the well was not producing this amounted to a reduction of one thousand dollars day in revenue. In a well today that amount of production would be over twenty thousand dollars a day.
Since the Hart zone was sensitive to the use of water, because of swelling clays in the sand, oil had to be used as a completion fluid. It would be extremely difficult to balance the amount of oil used to keep one zone from blowing out while at the same time using too much oil would cause the other zone to break down and start taking fluid.
We thought we had the perfect balance as we pulled the tubing out of the hole. We were down to the last three joints and dressing the packer out with new seals when the first burp hit.
We always kept a valve open on the floor to stab into the top joint of tubing. The driller had shut down every motor that was running on location and closed the pipe rams manually on the blow out preventers. The roughnecks on the floor were having trouble stabbing the valve into the joint and getting it to make up. By this time the tubing was unloading oil that was going half way up the derrick. With oil and gas almost covering the location it would take only one spark to turn the place into and inferno. The valve we we’re trying to stab into the tubing had a different thread than the one looking up. With the well getting stronger by the minute there was no time to consult with anyone except the people on the location. After discussing the problem with the driller for about two minutes the only option we had was to drop the three joints of tubing in the hole and fish them out later.
The driller told two of the roughnecks to pull the slips supporting the tubing and he would back the pipe rams off in the blow out preventer and drop the three joints in the hole. Then we could close the blind rams and have the well under control.
Once again things did not go as planned. After the slips had been pulled and the pipe rams backed off, instead of dropping the tubing in the hole, the well was blowing so hard it started to lift the tubing out of the hole. As each joints cleared the floor it would starts falling over and break off at the collar. As each joint broke off it fell in an area that was void of other pieces of iron andit would hit creating a spark that could cause an explosion. By this time we were all standing about one hundred yards away from the well and up wind. With the tubing out of the hole there was no restriction on the flowing oil and gas.
It was turning into a first class blowout. After the last joint was blown out of the hole the driller and I headed back to the well to close the blind rams on the blowout preventers. The drillers only comment while closing the rams was “I hope I can get the blind rams closed before the flow of oil and gas cuts them to pieces.” As the rams closed the noise decreased from a defining roar to deathly quiet and I heaved a big sigh of relief.
It was time to take stock of the damage and head for the office to report in. After I got past the damage to my pride it looked like about forty acres of broom corn was covered with oil.
As I walked in the office the receptionist wondered out loud, how in the world I could get so much oil on me. My only response was where I have been it wasn’t hard. The Superintendent walked out of his office just as a reporter from the local paper walked in the office to get the details on Cities’ blowout.
“After I know what happened you will find out” he replied to the reporter. How the reporter heard about the problem so quick I never knew. We walked in his office and he closed the door. I fully expected to loose part of my rear end. He wanted to know all the details and offered a little sympathy. We discussed the possibility of one producing formation taking oil and allowing the other producing formation toget away from us during the planning stage of the workover.
I expected to be severely criticized but that did not happen. As I left the Superintendent’s office he offered the thought, it could have been much worse. He told me to shut the job down and have it written up by report time in the morning and then we would start planning how to finish the job.
-L.D. Todd
