Tag:drilling
It didn’t take a lot of horsepower to make the holes in which we set the explosives and hydrophones – just a water pump and a couple of guys with pipe wrenches. Water was relatively easy to come by. In most cases the crew only had the dig a sump one or two feet deep and place the filtered end of the inlet hose into the sump.
Actually, the shot below is of a pretty shoddy job. If we’d done it properly, as we did most of the time, there wouldn’t have been any blow-out. Here, a large part of the energy of the charge is moving upwards as the shot hole blows out and the noise generated when the dirt falls back to the ground also degrades the signal. But when a shot goes well, there’s nothing to photograph.
The relatively short dusk duration is captured in this image with the yellows of the setting sun to the west and the darkening skies of night to the east.
Of course, I was in Brunei to look for (more) oil. This is a shot I took of a jackup drilling rig and supply boat at sunset one evening. I’m standing on the beach and my best guess is I used a 500mm for this shot.
I’d only been in Brunei a few days when the Rasau 17 well blew out. The escaping gas caught fire on April 25, 1989 which puts a date on this image.
