Flowback

The coil tubing crew finished up and left yesterday and the flowback crew came in and started setting up.
This crew will hook up the well to the pipeline and monitor all flows and seperate out the oil from the /sand/water/gas/other things.
About 7:30 this morning they got the flare off flame going which burns off the excess gas.
We still do not know how long we will be here. We are guessing until they put up a physical gate to close the property off.
have a great day
love to all of ya
Jim and Linda

2nd update on damage

Hi all
I think this is the final survey, unless something shows up later down the road
refrigerator- two new circuit boards
furnace- new circuit board
air conditioner- new control box and new thermostat
Directv- replace both hi-def and regular receivers (will have to talk(or is that fight) to Directv today to try and order receivers)
bed room tv- replace (why it took out the bedroom tv and not the living room tv???)
satellite dish- replace contril box and power supply....if this does not fix the problem than there is something wrong on the roof (Weingard says ship the dish back to them....how the hell do we do that)
Other than that things are going good.
We still have no idea when we will leave this site and move on. They should be done today with the coil tubing job and start moving their equipment out. Since there is not a physical "gate" here we may have to stay here until they build a gate. No one knows whats going on, especially us.
have a great weekend
love to all of ya
Jim and Linda

Update on storm damage

The repairman got here around noon today........we could not thank him enough for getting here as quickly as he did.  Status so far is as follows:

-a/c has been fixed......fried circuit board.  He had this part with him and was able to repair it today.  Along with the a/c unit, the circuit board for the furnace was also fried.  Will have part on Monday.
-refrigerator......fried circuit boards(2).  Part has to be ordered and will not be here until Monday.  Fortunately, I called the office at Gate Guard Services and asked it they by chance had a refrigerator at the office.....they do and we were able to take some of our food and put in their refrigerator.....so, we will not loose everything!!!!!!
-satellite....we called this morning and ordered a new power source and hopefully that will fix the satellite.  Part should be here on Monday.  Unfortunately, that means NO TV ......which is going to make my nights even longer!!!!!!

Total costs should be around $1000.00-$1300.00 depending on if the parts we ordered for the dish fix the problem.  Probably will not file a claim with the insurance company as we have a $500.00 deductible.

The strange thing about this is that is was actually a DC problem, not 120V.  That is why everything else, TV, computer, convection oven, was not damaged.  It only hit the items that were DC connected, but did not affect 12 volt lighting.

Take care.....

Linda and Jim

Storm

We have whethered many storms through our 12 years on the road...and have never sustained any damage.....until tonight.  We had a storm front come through this evening that produced a lot of rain (prediction for some parts of Karnes County was up to 6 inches) and A LOT of lightning....well, one of those bolts of lightning hit very close to us and, as of right now, our refrigerator, air conditioning and satellite are not working (and we just installed a new air conditioner two weeks ago).  We are going to call the RVcompany that installed our air conditioner and see if they can come out tomorrow and access the damage.  Hopefully, it won't be as bad as we are thinking......perhaps just circuit boards!!!!!

Good thing we are working..........although this is not how we had planned on spending our money....

Take care........

Linda and Jim

They left us behind

The crew finished fracking Friday and started moving all of their equipment out. We had thought that we would be going with them, but the next site they are going to already has a gate guard. We talked to the Marathon safety man and he kept telling us he would let us or our office know what was going on.
Yesterday we called the office and they had not heard anything from Marathon and told us to just sit here and wait until we hear something. We are still getting paid. And, there are still some people coming in to do clean up work and remove their equipment.  One guy showed up at midnight last nite!!!! how dumb.
The oil companys lease  or rent a lot of equipment and the people to run them. It apparently is cheaper for them to do business this way than to try and buy their own equipment and hire and train people.
So here we sit and wait.

Love to ya
Jim and Linda

Found the gun

After moving in a very large crane and a bunch of related equipment, including two smaller cranes, they started the job of getting the gun and wire back out of the well. Estimates were from 12 hours to two or three days......if they had problems.
By the time all of the equipment was set up, which includes a series of pipe and other equipment on top of the well head towering up about 50-60 feet or so (thats why they needed the larger crane) it was 10pm and bedtime.
When I got up and ready to work about 5:45 they were still at it. Found out that they were lucky and found the gun/wire on the first try and were very slowly pulling everything out. It will be late today before they are done and remove all of the equipment. Than our regular crew can come and and finish the last 1-3 fracks. We may be out of here by tomorrow afternoon, moving to the next site which is about 6-8 miles from here. It is located on hwy 181 about a mile north of Karnes City.
Sorry I can not show you any pictures, but photos are not allowed on site.
Have a great day
love to ya
Jim and Linda

Broke down

We were scheduled to leave sometime today, according to the rumor mill. But yesterday evening they dropped the wire down the well. Which is a bad thing. When I came on duty at 6am the entire site had been down all night. They are (according to the rumor mill) waiting for a bigger crane to come in.....or ......they may just move out and have the cold coil crew fix the problem..   but, there is still one frack to go before they are done.
I did find out an interesting fact. It takes approximately 320,000 pound of sand to do one frack That is about eight enclosed semi trailers full!!! And they do about 15-18 fracks per well on average.

Will let you know whats going on when we find out.
Looks like we will be moving with this crew to the next two sites. The next one is a one well site and the one after that is a three well site. It takes about a week to do one well if it is average depth of about 15-18000 foot. Hope that we stay in range of this cell tower as we have great internet here.
take care, and love to all of ya
Jim and Linda

Fracking

Wow, two updates in a day!!!
I found a website that kind of explains fracking. Look at the video that is on the site. All of the equipment that it shows in the diagram is here at our site. We are still not sure what it all does....
there are several water trailers where I think they mix the chemicals with water and several trailers where they load various grades of sand into. There are also a a large number of very large pumps that have huge diesel motors on them and are built on special trailers. I would guess that there are at least 7 of these trailers. When they all get rev'ed up they make a lot of noise and smoke.
http://www.hydraulicfracturing.com/Pages/information.aspx
Basically they run a "gun" with explosives down the well as far as it will go and set off charges, which fractures the rock or shale. Than they send down the sand/water/chemical slurry to fill up all of the fractures and than block off that area. Than they repeat the process a number of times until they have the whole well hole fractured.

After this the whole crew moves all of the equipment to another site and another crew comes in and does what I think is called coil piping. We do not know what this is, but think they remove the sand/water/chemical mixture and allow the oil to start flowing into the well.

Than another crew comes along and hard pipes the well head into the pipeline, or in some cases, they build storage tanks and separate the oil from the water and pump both into water and crude oil tankers for removal.

It looks like we will be following the fracking crew to the next site and hopefully will stay with them until we leave.

Hope that makes it about as clear as mud for you.
Speaking of mud, we have been covered in it here....every time a truck or crew come in we have to sign them in, and than out. On the site before this one we had almost 900 sign ins in about a week.!!
take care all of you dear friend
remember we love ya, and miss you
Jim and Linda

OMG - Internet service!!!!!!

We don't know why,,,,,but today we have had internet service....so I'm going to take advantage of it and try and get everyone updated on on Gate Guarding experience.,

I think when we left you last our assignment had come to an end and we were heading back to the yard at Whitsett.  Well, we enjoyed two (2) days of peace and quiet, did some shopping and got the laundry done.  Saturday morning, we got another asignment and headed out to the Day Lyssy site. It was a very busy site as they were at the fracking stage so there were a lot of sand trucks in and out along with the crew.  This procedure takes appox. 5-7 days and we did not know where we would be going after they were finished fracking.  As it turned out, we are going to be following this fracking crew from site to site and on Friday morning we packed up and moved to the Ted Butler site about 7 miles down the road.

As you can see from the pictures, it has been raining here since Friday.  The weather here is as unpredictable as our weather in Michigan.......Thursday we had the air conditioning on and Friday we had the electric heater running!!!!! 

The mud is terrible and according to the weather channel, it is suppose to be rainy for the next few days.We need to invest in some good "mud boots"!!!!!!

This site is quite different from the other two we have been at as we are only about 100 yards from the site and can watch all the activity!!  One of the guys from the crew has been kind enough to explain the procedure to me and, although I don't undertand everything, it is nice to have some knowledge about it.  Unfortunately, there are signs posted stating no photographs so we are unable to let you see what it looks like,.

Take care

Jim and Linda