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Off roading
Friday evening and it had been a long, long and very hard week. I was locking up the office ahead of a torturous drive across the city followed by another hundred or so miles of congested motorway to get home. Home to my ‘nearest and dearest’ and my two darling little girls. The phone rang. On the other end was a man clearly in panic.
“He no work. He go bang. My boss he no happy. We no pump oil. My boss he very, very not happy!”
Unpicking the poor man’s broken English I managed to glean that he was the Operations Manager for an on-shore drilling platform in Portugal. It had never occurred to me before that such installations existed in Portugal. Least of all that the power generation equipment would have been built by my company.
“OK, I’ll look into it on Monday.” I explained. Optimistically.
“No, no. Not Monday. You come now. You sort problem. Big problem. We no pumping oil!”
The man, I shall call him Miguel, It was after all his name, had never met my wife, otherwise he would not have dared make such an outrageously preposterous suggestion. However, he could not be blamed for not knowing the privations I was about to suffer by acceding to his request so I agreed that I would try and get a ticket to Lisbon straight away. I first telephoned ‘She That Had To Be Obeyed’, took the flak fully on the jaw as it were, or at least in my right ear, then set about getting to Lisbon.
Miguel had sent me a fax with directions to his rig’s location north of Lisbon. I landed late that evening and rented a Ford Taunus. A virtually brand new car showing just 200 kilometres or so on the clock. Astonishing to think that only half a dozen hours earlier I had expected to be met by my loving wife and children at my front door yet here I now was thrashing up a strange autoroute in an even stranger car in what could best be described as a tropical storm, heading goodness knows where.
Miguel’s directions named a town around 200 kilometres north of Lisbon at which I was to turn right. Simple. There was only one road marked. However according to my map it didn’t reach very far. Miguel had alluded to this fact when in his description he described the road as ‘getting very bad after whatever village’. He named it of course but I can no longer recall. Even if I could I think shock would have quickly erased it from my memory anyway.
“It’s only another sixty kilometres after the village.” Miguel had carefully explained.
He continued “You no worry about the road. It go all the way. We only make it last
month.” His drilling company had indeed ‘only made it last month’. Made it with a fleet of
Caterpillar scrapers and dozers, through what actually surprised me existed in Europe
and that was best described as virgin jungle.
The surface had been hastily covered in some fairly hefty aggregate. Obviously a few heavy trucks had made it through though because I was now bumping along the rocky surface with one side of the car in the wheel furrow they had left behind. A problem was the mound in the centre between the two ‘wheelings’ was slightly higher than the ground clearance of my car.
The first thing to go was the silencer. Quickly followed by the rest of the exhaust system. Then, one by one each of the hub caps decided to follow suit. Negotiating a tricky descent and a couple of bends put paid to the front air dam. Progress was slow. I hadn’t seen any sign of habitation for the past hour or so and I was getting tired at this point. I had only covered half the distance indicated in Miguel’s directions and the map showed nothing ahead of me except a dotted line some sixty kilometres further ahead the other side of which was printed Espagne, and then more nothing.
At 3:00am I arrived in a clearing and which was floodlit. In the
middle there was what looked like an oil production platform. Around the perimeter
were various 30’ transport containers. Miguel had been expecting me and had waited
up. No time for ceremony he took me directly to one of three containers that housed
large Caterpillar diesel powered electricity generators. One of these had the end
completely destroyed in what looked almost like a bomb explosion. Miguel
explained that the 72” eight blade fan between the engine and the radiator had
decided to part company with the shaft upon which it rotated and ‘gone walk-about’
first through the side of the container then fortunately for personnel in the vicinity had
twisted back on itself and destroyed the one and a half tonne radiator that was there
to cool the giant 12 cylinder diesel.
“He not meant to do that!” exclaimed Miguel. Somewhat obviously I thought.
“OK, what about the Stand-by units?” I asked, optimistically. At the same time anticipating then fearing what the answer was going to be.
“He no work either. Bad fan bearings. Make lot noise. Not safe. We shut down.”
Just as I guessed. Clearly something had gone wrong with the design specification. One catastrophic failure was rare. Three side by side was unprecedented.
“Where's your telephone?” I asked.
“Over here in office next to huts.” replied Miguel and we walked across to the ‘fire safe’ zone some distance from the platform with its supporting plant and machinery. I phoned my boss in the States. Despite the time difference he had already left his office for home for the week-end and was less than happy when I asked him to charter a Braniff 747 Freighter for me to fly three replacement radiators from our factory in Milwaukee into Lisbon as soon as possible. He understood though. Although not liable for down time, the losses of our customer, Caledonian Mining Corporation, ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. We didn’t want to even begin to think of the consequences of letting this important customer down.
Next morning I retrieved my calculator from my briefcase and started to work out what had gone wrong. I won’t bore you with the technical details but an engineer had made a genuinely easy to make mistake and ‘converted’ a radiator and fan combination designed for an entirely different but similar duty power plant. He or she had undoubtedly done so in the interests of expediency, probably to secure an order or to complete a schedule to win a contract but had taken the radiator fan speed into a forbidden critical speed zone in the process. The result was that one had broken up and the other two were about to. Fortunately without injury let alone loss of life to nearby personnel.
I vowed to Miguel that the mistake wouldn’t be repeated. We probably would never know who the culprit was anyway but that wasn’t important right now. What was important was to get the platform operating again as fast as possible. There was nothing that could be done till morning so the next most important things was for both Miguel and me, plus most of the rest of the stood down crew to get smashed out of our brains on Aguardiente, wine, beer, Porto and anything else we could lay our hands on. Rules about not drinking on the job no longer applied when the rig is shut down. Miguel did though have the common sense to first order a chopper from Lisbon airport to fly us both back first thing in the morning where we could better handle procedures for the arrival of the replacement radiators. We both anticipated, quite correctly, that there would be an army of Customs officials and bureaucrats whose sole object in life is to frustrate the work efforts of people like us that ultimately pay their salaries.
First light and a battered old Huey is heard clattering overhead. A repainted relic of
the Vietnam war where you will recall the USA came second. I told Miguel I needed
to get my overnight bag from the rental car in case we didn’t get back the same day.
Unfortunately when I opened the front passenger door to grab the bag that I’d placed
on the passenger seat I completely underestimated the power of the backwash from
the chopper’s rotor. It folded the door back against its hinges, breaking the check
strap mechanism in the process. The front wing didn’t fare much better than the door skin
which smashed into it and I guessed that both were now a write off. Miguel said he’d get
one of his men to take a look at the door whilst we were away to see if he could make it
safe for my return journey sometime the following week.
Miguel and I sorted the import paperwork for the replacement radiators and decided to await the arrival of the Braniff jet, just to make sure everything went to plan. Miguel hired an off-highway truck to get them up to the rig at the earliest opportunity and having seen to it that it was safely en-route we hailed the chopper again to take us back. I had feared Miguel’s budget might mean we would have to hitch a ride in the old ex-army four wheel drive truck but fortunately he drew the line at any further torturous journeying for us both.
We arrived well ahead of the truck of course and there being nothing better to do decided to open another case of beer. Or three. Next day the truck arrived and I supervised installation and setting up the new radiators along with their massive fans. Two engines were successfully run up and tested much to Miguel’s delight so I bade him farewell.
I was less than impressed with Miguel’s ‘he an expert’ mechanic friend who had decided in my absence that there was no way the bent door would fit back in the hole it had originally been designed to fill. He had thus cut the hinges off altogether and then lobbed the twisted door in the boot.
“It OK, it no cold. It no raining. You no get wet. A little windy yes but no wet. Adeus and thank you for coming.”
In my enthusiasm to get back onto the sixty kilometre dirt track I was obliged to open the driver’s door to see where I was reversing. Such was the mud that had coated the car on my outbound journey a couple of days before that I couldn’t see out. Water was too precious on site to waste on such frivolities as washing nice new rental cars. Unfortunately I didn’t see the tree stump in the undergrowth right at the limit of the door’s outer extremity and thus just like its sister on the other side, tore that one off its hinges too. I recollect thinking at the time that at least now both sides matched.
I was even more tired by the time I’d covered the three hundred kilometres or so back to Lisbon. I was late too and after parking the car in a space reserved for car rental returns I dashed up to the Hertz desk. Only to find it unattended. My flight left in thirty minutes so there was no way I was going to hang around for what was undoubtedly going to be a torrid explanation. An account of how their brand new Taunus had been returned after just three and a half days with half an inch of mud sticking to what few remaining body panels there were still left attached or undented. So I left a little note which started with the word ‘Sorry’.
It must have done the trick because to this day I have never heard a thing. Bless you Hertz.
You are definitely No 1 in my book. 
I’ve finished ‘off-roading’ now.
For the day anyway.
