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Stafford recalls he had just pushed the Hosmer
into place and the pressure on the surface casing
was building up.
...We were standing there - all the
valves closed - all of a sudden a sizzling
underneath...the weld had begun to open up where the
7 in. flow line was welded into the 10¾ in.
casing. The hissing was getting louder and all of a
sudden it just went bang. A bunch of shale had blown
up around the bottom of the head and just plugged
the annulus off solid. Cody had one of these big
hats on and he looked at us and started saying,
"God damn, God damned, jumping up and down. He
threw the hat off and he jumped on that a couple of
times, I pulled my old clothes off and I was going
to throw them in the boiler but the boys said, "No
don't. We will clean them." They had one of those
old steam boxes there, I was soaked with oil - if
anything had caught fire it would have been goodbye
for all three of us that were there."18
The morning
of March 8 saw curious local residents and oil
workers coming over to the wild well for a better
look. Paul Fandrick recalls the oil spraying over
his farm three mites to the south, blackening the
snow which was still 2 ft. deep. This oil spray was
to continue through the summer, and when the wind
blew from the southeast, it would settle on Devon
clothes lines, one of them being Elsie Kerr's. The
frost was still in the ground, except for the mud
pit, which had thawed, The violent force of the oil
and gas flow, along with shale, made it nearly
impossible to deploy the Hosmer, let alone get near
the rotary table.
Jack Pettinger and Paul Bedard19
were just finishing a cementing job that morning
when they saw the black plume. They had already run
a number of plugs at Atlantic No. 3 and knew how
serious the lost circulation was, They immediately
drove over to see how they could help, They left
their trucks spotted out on the road, Little did
they realize that nearly all of their waking (and
sleeping!) hours would be spent from then until
November helping win the fight.
In retrospect, the
fact that Viking gas had started to charge the
overlying sands (Belly River and surface) from
February 17, (the date when the D-3 was contacted
and circulation partially lost) suggests that the
well may have already passed the point of no return
by the time the D-3 lifted off the remaining mud
column on March 8.
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