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When Moe Holman climbed to the top of the mountain 20 years ago, he saw hazy, dirty yellow clouds spreading on his downhill road. He quickly braked the car and tapped the switch to close the vent. Holman knew this piece of land in Northern Alberta better than most local farmers, and he couldn’t believe his eyes. The acid gas cloud can only come from one place, which is a well, nearly eight kilometers away.
Realizing that he was avoiding the clouds, Holman got out of the car and walked to the trunk to retrieve his binoculars. A breeze blew the gas to the east, and when the experienced oil repairer trained his binoculars in a downwind, he had enough time to see it drifting towards a flock of geese, which were scattered across a group of farmers¡¯ fields Green grass. When it overtakes them, every bird falls, and most birds don’t have time to lift their beaks from the ground, let alone try to fly.
On February 5, 2001, a young man in Fort St. John, named Ryan Strand, was 175 pounds and six feet tall, and fell like one of the unfortunate birds. At the age of 25, he only worked for 11 months at the last call in his short working career. The call came from Todd Thompson, the control room operator of Natural Resources Canada Ltd., based in Calgary. The call took him to a well site. Only five months ago, an uncontrolled acid gas leak occurred. A head operator scrambled into the well. The darkness gathered in the evening of late September.
The well is located near Buick Creek, a pile of abandoned houses anchored by ordinary shops and muddy old car yards. It is also close to the Blueberry Reserve, which is an aboriginal community at the bottom of a steep valley. When the acid gas leaks out of control, this is really the wrong place: the gas is heavier than air and will sink.
While visiting the reserve, I learned with my own eyes why its residents live in fear. In several places, electronic monitors sit on top of high towers, blocking the air. When acid gas is detected, an alarm will sound and people will rush into vehicles, including trucks donated by CNRL. On the land above the reserve, sometimes because energy companies blow in the direction of burning acid gas to reduce pipeline pressure, burning flames are sometimes emitted from the chimney. Those chimneys and nearby compressors sounded like jets screaming on the runway, making some locals feel as if they were living in a war zone. This is a place they call Little Beirut.
Thompson recorded in his notes that night that he sent Strand to the well at 21:58. Strand was about to clear the hydrate plug that blocked the pipeline, frozen natural gas and water, and forcibly shut down the pump in the well. The jack extracts oil or natural gas from the well and transports it to a pipeline that transports B.C.¡¯s fossil fuel resources to the south. When hydrate blockages form, they usually shut down. More than an hour later, at 22:58:31, Thompson recorded the first of two sour gas leaks at the well site. Before all the conversation stopped, Strand had time to broadcast “I need help; I need help”.
The only worry for “fanatics” like Alberta farmer and convicted gas well destroyer Viber Ludwig, sour gas leakage has become a growing concern for residents in northeastern British Columbia. Young people like Trand are hurt every day. At least a dozen potentially fatal leaks occur every year. Although there are no reliable statistics on workers “knocked down” by acid gas, interviews with workers who have been engaged in energy work for a long time show that this situation is far more common than the industry and the provincial government are willing to admit.
Fortunately, very few leaks have been reported in remote areas far from the community. One such incident involved Calgary-based Westcoast Gas Services Inc., which is now part of Duke Energy. On Victorian Day 2000, a spectacular three to five million cubic feet of toxic gas was released to Fort St. John. In the atmosphere to the north, if the leak occurred in other places near the extensive network of oil wells and pipelines in northern British Columbia, such as Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Fort Nelson or Fort St. John, hundreds of holiday revellers may have died, China The same goes for the 243 residents of Xiaoyang. In December 2003, a sour gas well ruptured. In the “death zone” that Chinese officials later called 25 square kilometers, another 9,000 people were injured and 40,000 had to flee their homes.
At the same time, these warning stories about the deaths of two young men in a British Columbia oil depot underscore the dangers inherent in the province¡¯s frantic run to double oil and gas production. As stated on the website of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, the exploration and production of oil and natural gas is the largest natural resource producer of direct income in British Columbia, and the Liberal Party is “committed to opening up to every region and community in the province.” Obtain these wealth by providing a “simplified regulatory environment.” It seems that special attention should be paid to which regulations are being considered for this streamlining.
“Turtle” is what Ryan Strand’s high school student called him. It is precisely because he is the opposite of his name that these nicknames are retained. Ryan’s mother, Trudy, said that the son towering over her would never lie down on the sofa in front of the pipe. Always active, he devoted most of his energy to art. He has completed all the graphics processing of his high school yearbook. His paintings are hung in local businesses, and many of them contain some weird elements, marking them as his works. A dark detail appeared on the night of his death, and his artwork confirmed his death.
At 3 o’clock in the morning, Trudy woke up when the phone rang, and his fear grew when the police told her about an accident. Is she the mother of Ryan Strand? Does her son have a tattoo on his calf back? When Trudy heard these questions, she knew Ryan was gone. She never told the faceless police officer that the tattoo depicts a turtle with sharks and other fish wandering on it, and in the treasure house, a quart of 2% milk is engraved in gold. This is Ryan’s design.
Ryan’s death was highlighted in the Workers’ Compensation Committee of the Safety Awareness Movement in British Columbia. However, the investigation by the Georgia Naoman found that some disturbing details about Ryan’s death and working conditions in the energy film of British Columbia, in the WCB investigation of Ryan’s death or the investigation verdict of the British Columbia Coroner Service None included. Both reports took more than two years to be published, but neither mentioned the previous, potentially fatal leak that occurred at the well site five months ago. This fact only appeared when Straight asked for a list of sour gas leaks from the Oil and Gas Commission of British Columbia (the province’s energy industry regulator). From 1999 to the present, the June application has produced 73 separate lists of sour gas leaks, 6 of which occurred in the same area where the destination of Ruian was reached. It is worth mentioning that this list is not complete because it does not include any leaks from the well where Ryan died, including the well that killed him. If these events are included, almost 11% of potentially lethal acid gas leaks reported to OGC occurred near Buick Creek.
When told that his tally did not contain incidents involving Ryan’s death, OGC provided a copy of the “Blowout and Death Report” to the Direct Force, which included a copy of the report to the Minister of Energy and Mining Richard Nou Ifeld¡¯s brief briefing. The note reads: “Uncontrolled natural gas was previously released from this well on September 22, 2000.
The briefing continued: ¡°There does not appear to be any connection between the incident and this accident.¡± ¡°This is one of the types of facilities routinely inspected by the compliance and law enforcement inspectors of the Oil and Gas Commission. This well was in September 2000. Inspections were carried out on the 5th, and immediately after venting on September 22, 2000. No defects were found in these two places. The time of the accident can be predicted.”
Considering how toxic the toxic acid gas is, WCB requires the company to notify it when a leak occurs. However, the Naruto team learned that in the past five years, WCB has only received notifications of such incidents five times. There is a clear difference between the OGC and WCB data, which shows that the regulators did not strictly record the leak. The company also does not regularly report to all relevant agencies. In addition, in the five years before OGC was founded in 1999, no less than five provincial departments were responsible for collecting leakage data for one of the most toxic substances known. Curiously, the provincial emergency plan for coordinating emergency response is not among them. PEP only requires reporting from April this year.
All this is in stark contrast to the proactive measures taken by the provincial government in recent years to deal with the threats faced by residents of Kelowna, Barril, Lillooet and other communities, which are due to the confusing fires coming to the indoor forest. People in those communities were told to pack up and prepare to flee immediately when houses with obvious fires were close to their homes. But in the Northeast, an invisible or almost invisible poisonous gas cloud can overwhelm you within a few milliseconds, and even the people who use it don¡¯t seem to know all the relevant facts.
If Ryan Strand realized that the acid gas leak occurred only five months before Buick Creek¡¯s death, it would not be reflected anywhere on the WCB report page. This is through freedom of information Requested, or judged in the service of the coroner. If he did know, he would doubt whether he would ask for a backup before he was hurt. Or whether he chooses to wear a “self-contained breathing apparatus”-wearing a tight-fitting mask and air supply-instead of leaving it in the cab of a truck, just a few meters away from where he is going to die.
Not all natural gas in British Columbia is acidic, but most are acidic. The most interesting component of the gas is hydrogen sulfide or H2S. H2S concentrations of only 500 parts per million can cause respiratory paralysis and confusion. Unless you recover quickly, those who are knocked down by sour gas will suffocate and die within a few minutes.
68-year-old Moe Holman has worked in the energy industry in northern British Columbia and Alberta for 45 years. He was knocked down by poison gas twice, once 10 meters above the ladder of a natural gas plant in Alberta. He also saw many colleagues attacked. When he arrived in Calgary, Holman recounted for a while. He was working near Chetwynd and saw a man driving a pickup truck passing by, preparing to go downhill.
Holman recalled: “I heard the horn of the truck.” “I knew exactly what it was. The other guy and I were covered up. We carried a sniffer (H2S monitor) with us, and we were It was detected. It entered the guy¡¯s truck through the heating system and knocked him down. Out, he fell forward onto the steering wheel and his body hit the horn. We came to the truck, I pushed him up and drove him Up the mountain. I was wearing a mask and he came over.”
The most terrifying aspect of the rescue operation is what happened when the downed workers were resurrected. Holman said: “These people are often very violent when they come. You think the person you come out is the one who caused you to suffer.” “And if it’s inside the plant, it’s really a bug. It’s really bad. …Because they often start to climb and the time for them to fall is very short.”
Kirby Purnell is a long-term worker at the McMahon natural gas plant near Taylor in northeastern British Columbia. In 1974, a compressor on a natural gas pipeline was capped high. It exploded under high pressure and was exposed to poisonous gas. The H2S content is as high as 40,000 ppm. Purnell remembered turning around before the power outage. He said in a telephone interview: “You breathe into the lungs for a little bit, and the blood will be absorbed and carried into the brain, paralyzing the respiratory center, and you will lose consciousness all of a sudden.” Fortunately, Purnell’s head hit one. Unlocked door. He fell and was found by another worker and dragged him away. This is a dangerous task in itself, because it is often instinctive rescuers who act instinctively and succumb to the poison.
Natural gas workers and owners of land near wells have long believed that even low levels of H2S pose health risks. In late June of this year, researchers at the University of Calgary released a study showing long-term exposure to low levels of hydrogen sulfide Levels weaken or destroy the memory of animals.
Holman said that long-term processing plant workers may lose their sense of smell or see rainbows around incandescent lamps. Soon after that, their eyes may begin to feel that they are being polished by sandpaper. To get rid of this scrub, Holman said that he and others used condensed milk to rinse their eyes. He smiled and said: “Ordinary milk does not work well. Carnation is better than Alpha.” Holman also said that the severe back of the skull headache he suffered was also caused by exposure to acid gas.
Holman said that if someone works, lives or travels in an energy film, one thing must be remembered, and that is the direction of the wind. “And I’m real.” After seeing those geese falling down, he never forgot this lesson.
Trudy Strand’s biggest worry is that Ryan will have an accident while commuting, not on the job site itself. She felt that he was relatively safe. She said that her current view was formed after years of working in Petro-Canada¡¯s Fort St. John¡¯s office, where she and her girlfriend shared secretarial work and gave Ryan a secret. Lens worked at the Canadian energy giant in the summer.
At the age of 21, Ryan found himself working for one of the biggest companies in the film, located in the Jedney area two hours north of Fort St. John. He developed from maintenance work to work on pumping units and compressors, and took safety courses along the way. It is worth mentioning that two years later, the Jedney field workers of Petro-Canada successfully joined the union, joining a select group of only 300 workers covered by the collective agreement of BC. But because Ryan signed the contract, he was let go. His next job is a contract worker for CNRL.
Ryan had only worked for the company for 11 months when he was sent to the Buick Creek Wellhead from two minutes to 10 pm on February 5, 2001.
WCB’s investigation revealed that the pump at the site was shut down due to blockage of hydrate in the pipeline. This blockage includes gas molecules trapped in ice at low temperatures and high pressures. They are very common, in fact, only 12 hours before Ryan visited there, it blocked the production line at the exact same well site. In order for the gas to flow again at a temperature of -20¡ãC, Ryan must dissolve the plug. Doing so involves a rather rough procedure, in which a hose is drawn from the exhaust port of his pickup and wrapped with a rag around the shaft where the suspect plug is located. Then, Ryan returned to the truck and, with the engine idling, clamped the pipe clamp against the throttle to accelerate the engine and heat the hoses and pipes.
When returning to the CNRL control room, Todd Thompson broadcasted to Ryan: “You know she is very clear on my side, how is your ending?”
Then, Ryan resets the so-called Presco-Dyne switch, which is a safety device that automatically turns off the pump jack in the event of a sudden pressure change. Then he restarted the pump. Two minutes later, the pump fell again. There is still something blocking the phone. The WCB report summarized what happened next.
“There is evidence that Strand then closed the isolation valve below the Presco-Dyne switch, released the pressure between the isolation valve and the switch, and restarted the pump stand at 22:57.”
What Ruian didn’t know was that in the short section of the pipeline, one or more other hydrate plugs were still on the production line. To make matters worse, the jack was restarted while Presco-Dyne was shut down. The high-power pump only took one and a half minutes to increase the pressure to the burst point. When a cover designed to prevent blowouts is blocked, it uses enough force to dent the sides of the Ryan truck. Later investigations revealed that the blowout preventer cap failed “mainly because the threads on the end cap were not machined to the correct contour”, and because the cap was not inserted correctly, it was not Ryan’s job.
After Giesbrecht received a call from Thompson, Jerry Giesbrecht, the operator of the contract gas plant, took a few minutes to reach Ryan. According to the WCB report, the masked Giesbrecht found Ryan “lying on the ground, almost completely buried in a highly viscous fluid.” The H2S readings in the wellsite far exceeded the lethal level, about 100,000 parts per million. After Gisbrecht dragged him away and tried his best to wipe Ryan’s face, he called Thompson to an ambulance. When Giesbrecht performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Ryan, Thompson rode an ambulance to the scene of the accident. While driving, he broadcasted company personnel and told them to warn local residents. Ryan never regained consciousness. His lifeless body was transferred to an ambulance on the Alaska highway. In the early morning of February 6, he was declared dead at Fort St. John’s Hospital.
A month later, on a lonely winter road outside Fort Nelson, another young man in his 20s died in an oil well in British Columbia. His name is also Ryan. Ryan Goertzen. The situation after his death is very different from that of Strand, but they highlight another dangerous aspect of working in the north: the temptation of money, the incentive is so strong, people will work beyond the normal limits of personal safety, thereby endangering their own and others’ safety . deal with.
Goertzen is a prairie boy who grew up in Hamiota, a small town in Manitoba. Like many people, he graduated from high school and knew nothing. His mother, Penny Goertzen, recalled in a letter to Straits Direct Mail: ¡°He was playing in a rock band at the time, and he didn¡¯t do much other than that.¡± ¡°I was very clear about parties and him. Feel tired of lack of responsibility, and fully emphasize the responsibility of coping with one’s own attempts to raise children.”
Petunia and her husband Rudy have six children together. She told Straight in a telephone interview that almost all the work of raising the children fell to Penny, because 14 years ago, Rudy chose to leave Manitoba to work in an oil well in British Columbia. Last year, Rudy’s box office revenue was about $120,000. This is a huge sum of money for the family, but it costs Rudy’s money. He usually works 400 hours in winter and only stays at home for a few weeks each year. Golzen’s eldest son, Travis, was attracted by the promise of work and followed in his father’s footsteps. Penny thinks this is also Ryan’s right path.
“Ryan didn’t want to go,” Penny recalled. “He didn’t want to leave his girlfriend Andrea.” But Penny continued: “He decided to go because he wanted to make some money, and then went back to Andrea to go to college.”
He left home on January 2, 2001. He is 19 years old. He will die within three months after six months, less than 20 months.
Ryan acted as a “mopper” and rode a truck with his father to the drilling site, where he disassembled the equipment, loaded it on the truck, and tied it up.
In most oil wells, the ground freezes in the middle of the night and in winter, and the company can more easily move the heavy equipment used for exploration, drilling and pipeline engineering, and the work is very busy. Like his father and brother, Ryan’s long physical labor caused him to lose sleep and feel completely tired. But unlike them, his exhaustion involves “spells”: racing times and irregular heart rhythms. The plot continued to circulate. On March 16, Ryan complained of a beating heart and visited the emergency room in Fort Nelson.
What he said to the doctor was clearly interested in Beth Larcombe, the Coroner of British Columbia. She pointed out in the subsequent investigation into Ryan’s death that he told the doctor that he In the past two weeks, 263 hours of work were recorded-nearly 19 hours a day, every day, for 14 consecutive days. But the motivation for work was so strong that Ryan refused to conduct a 24-hour heart monitoring exercise in Fort Nelson, and instead chose to rejoin his father and brother.
Two weeks later, just after he and his father unfastened the chains on the truck tires, Ryan grabbed his chest and fell into the cab.
In Larcombe¡¯s report and the follow-up report of the Canadian Ministry of Human Resources and Development (due to the interprovincial nature of the business, federal agencies, not WCB, have jurisdiction in this case), on the page of Ryan¡¯s employer, Streeper Petroleum and Contracting Ltd. , Was found to have only the most basic emergency employee evacuation plan. When Ryan went bankrupt, the company called Fort Nelson General General Hospital and, after the hospital provided the phone number, called the British Columbia Ambulance Service.
The lack of specific information about the exact location of Goertzens prevented Streeper from providing the necessary information to dispatch the first of the two helicopters to find Ryan. The helicopter flew for more than two hours without finding the scene of the accident. As the minutes turned into hours, a second helicopter was called, Ryan closer to the scene. But by then, it was too late. At that time, Rudy and Travis spent a lot of energy and energy to CPR Ryan within a few hours after the company recovered the equipment failure. The cardiopulmonary resuscitation continued, but was stopped by the doctor in Fort Nelson, who said that Ryan died three hours after suffering the last fatal spell.
An autopsy later revealed that Ryan died of undiagnosed cardiomyopathy (actually an enlarged heart). The condition is that he enters the battlefield with the unknown.
According to Victor Huckell, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia and a cardiologist who specializes in cardiomyopathy, in a normal human body, the body responds to physical stress and fatigue by producing adrenaline and other chemicals. They can stimulate fatigue, resist fatigue, and are relatively harmless except for slightly increasing blood pressure. But in people with cardiomyopathy, the same chemicals may worsen odd heart rhythms. In a telephone interview, he told the “Direct News”: “I’m sure this poor child has cardiomyopathy that is not work-related.” “And his death is probably accelerated by excessive work.” In other words , He may have already stepped into the grave.
According to data released by the BC WCB, in the five years ending in 2003, 2,103 people were injured and killed in the energy and mining industries in British Columbia. The statistics for both are grouped, so it is difficult to know only what can be attributed to the energy sector, but quite a lot. During the same period, payments to injured workers and survivors who died in the industry totaled $86.5 million. In 55 cases, toxic substances, including acid gases, caused casualties. In at least one of these cases (acid gas poisoning occurred in 2003), an unfortunate worker was so severely injured that he lost 280 days of work.
In the deaths that are about to die, both Ryans are investigating institutions such as WCB, Coroner Service of British Columbia and HRDC. They only focus on a series of conditions leading to the death. In Ryan Strand’s case, placing the switch in the off position and poor mechanical equipment were considered the main factors leading to his death. In Ryan Goertzen’s case, HRDC and the coroner service clearly lacked an effective emergency evacuation plan. The coroner also pointed out that HRDC will inspect employers every 12 to 36 months, but no inspection records have been found in the past 12 years.
These details are obviously the concern of Penny Goertzen and Trudy Strand. However, the two women are disturbed by the bigger problems behind their son’s death. How do young people work for 19 days with equipment containing substances that will kill them and their co-workers? What is going on? How to send a young man alone at night to solve a potentially deadly problem in a well that had previously been dangerously close to taking the life of another person?
Trudy said from his Calgary home: “I have real concerns about what happened there. This is a strange place, approaching in a zone where Compton Petroleum proposed to close the area where up to 6 sour gas wells were drilled nearby. 250,000 residents. “We have no information to tell us that they are doing anything to make young people safer. However, young people have been flocking here because of their high salaries. I mean, these jobs are not eight dollars an hour. Their hourly salary is 14, 15, 20 dollars per hour, or even higher. However, the temptation of money prevents people from seeing the danger. Ryan shouldn’t be working alone that night, no one should. ”
This is the view of Kirby Purnell, who trained union colleagues on acid gas safety issues. Purnell said that in the contract world, where the vast majority of workers in the energy industry are employed, the pressure to cut costs is relentless. As a result, people fall into a situation of “working alone”, and when things go wrong, they almost certainly result in death or serious injury.
The trip to Strand and Purnell reminded me of another incident 22 years ago, when I was in my second year at the University of Toronto. Elmer Krista-Bob and his friends-is a popular chemical engineering student. We share the same floor in a large residence with 42 other students. In the spring, Bob interviewed and found a job at Petro-Canada in Alberta.
He was excited about the prospect of personally learning about the energy patch life, and moved to work in the company’s Fox Creek business unit for $8.44. In less than six weeks after starting work in May 1982, Bob was one of three young men when he was replacing a filter at a local natural gas plant when there was an “undetected increase in air pressure”. Caused the rupture of the gas pipeline. In the hell that followed, he was burned 90% of his body.
A few days later, Bob died in a Calgary hospital. His mother, father, and brother Rayner surrounded him. They had to cut Bob¡¯s side to relieve the swelling and keep breathing. He is particularly painful.
Like everyone else, I remember Bob¡¯s uncontrollable smile and the sight of him walking in the lobby of our residence, with his broad shoulders often hidden behind a striped rugby shirt. This is a game he loves. A year after his death, his former teammates at the Midland Bulls Rugby Club undoubtedly participated in the game with a bittersweet mood when they participated in the first annual Bob Christa Memorial Cup match, they went to Owen Sound.
Bob entered a dangerous world he had never really understood. Since then, many other lambs have also been slaughtered. This is the price we pay for our unremitting pursuit of dangerous gases, which are deeply locked in places where people like Moe Holman say they should be kept.