The Drilling of Atlantic No. 3 (Page 5)

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Hugh Leiper, then derrick man, on graveyard tour March 8 picks up his version of the story from 4 a.m.:

We were down in the cellar thawing out a line and all of a sudden there was a blurp of mud, and lost circulation material spewed over the drilling nipple and that's when I said to Cliff (Covey, cat-head man), "Let's get the hell out of here", so we... got out of the cellar. We ran out to the west from under the rig and just about 20 ft. in front of us, one of the rotary table master bushings landed in front of us. This had come from the "Oilwell" 26½ in. steam rotary table...Two men could not pick up one of these...lt was still dark and of course, later on, we never did find the other half.. I yelled at Cliff to run down to the boiler house to tell the firemen to shut the boilers off.. .and I ran up the steps and through the dog house out onto the rig floor...and I stayed with Bill (Murray, the driller) who had already dispatched Frank McKelvie and Bob Curle. We brought that string off bottom and hoisted it as high as we could...Bill and I, after chaining it down (locking the brake tight with a chain fastened to the floor) ran down through or past the engine on the draw works into the pump house and went out the side door...There were coming out of the well itself, showers of shale and gravel. The rig had been winterized using tin and the shale would penetrate that tin just like you turned a machine gun on it. So we hid alongside the stacks of mud and shale...and when it let up a bit, Bill and I took off for the boiler house and it was a frightening sight, By this time, it was starting to get daylight and although you couldn't talk to one another because of the noise, it was hitting the top of the crown and spraying as far as the eye could see...Bill sent Frank McKelvie down to the camp to wake up Lloyd Stafford, The night before, I had been a witness in the cookhouse to quite an argument about what to do with this well...A decision had been made to drill dry and I can remember Lloyd certainly opposed to this whole exercise and he did make the comment that from there on in, he didn't want to be involved so we didn't know if he had quit or...if he was joking or just what...Lloyd came up and there nothing anybody could do. We had shut all the boilers off... We got in there with 2x4's and 2x6's, knocking off as much of the tin sheets as we could so we could get air into around where it was blowing. They eventually got word to Cody Spencer and he arrived...¹⁴

Later in the morning, it was discovered that the blow-out had knocked off a nipple on the stand-pipe leaving a "Dutchman" (threaded portion left inside the fitting)...Jack Moore, then welder, now resident of Anchorage, recalls the task of removing the broken-off piece:

Cody, Clarence Matthews and, I think, Gene Denton arrived at the lease in mid-morning, and Clarence asked me if I had a brass diamond point chisel and hammer with my tools. There was a Dutchman broken off in the standpipe and they wanted to compound several Halliburton and Dowell cement trucks to regain circulation...With a derrickman's harness buckled on me, I crawled across the floor to the stand-pipe with a rope held by Matthews and Murray at the dog house door, to pull me out of trouble if required, I had almost finished the task when several jerks of the rope caused me to turn my head - in question. There was Cody motioning me to get back to the dog house. I indicated 'almost finished' . With that, he pulled me across the floor to the dog house. To offset the roar of gas he cupped his hands and yelled in my ear, "Do you want to get your uncle in trouble?" Whereupon, he took the tools from me, put on the harness and finished the job himself. That was indicative of Cody.¹⁵

In a recent interview, Cal Bohme was asked, in view of the experience he had gained since 1948, what the main causes of the Atlantic No. 3 blow-out were and how it might have been avoided. His reply was that the decision to drill ahead "blind" was a very seriously flawed decision, especially with such a shod section of surface casing".

The most pressure that one could expect the surface pipe to hold would be about 300 psi, equivalent to the overburden pressure. But the bottom hole pressure at total depth was over 2,000 psi so this meant that as soon as they drilled into the D-3 with little mud in the hole that this pressure could be exerted against the shallow formations just below the surface casing shoe.

Even with the Hosmer button, it might have been possible to keep the pressure bled off through the 7 in. line by pumping mud down the drill pipe and attempting to fill the annulus with fluid, But even so there was the dilemma: killing the well, then losing circulation, then the well starting to blow out again on you. Cal described it as a cyclic situation: "...build up enough pressure to kill the well, then lose it into the lost circulation zone."¹⁶ There was no error on the crews' pad; they drilled ahead in good faith, believing that the people who gave the orders knew what they were doing. Bohme recalls his being on tour when they finally succeeded in landing the Hosmer button:

...I can remember when we spent the entire shift pumping a slug of mud down the drill pipe and the flow would slow down enough that we could get up to the well with the Hosmer button and try to latch it and I think we made five or six attempts and every time we would try, the flow would be so great, you couldn't even hold on to the button, It would blow it out of our hands and as I say, it would blow it up in the air and we would get out of the road quick...¹⁷

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