After 10 barrels of crude suddenly gushed out of a holding tank, I was one of a few who had to scoop it back in.
In case you are wondering, crude oil does not taste like chicken. In fact, it’s a very salty sludge with an aftertaste that can be described best as fishy. No, I didn’t swallow it. But I had the opportunity to taste it more than once as a child.
The first time, when I was 7, my dad suggested that I take a taste of crude oil. The oil that I tried was on a measuring stick that he had pulled from a tank attached to his oil wells. He wanted me to learn how salty it is. Lesson learned, so a mouthful of oil was anything but wanted, and was certainly not expected, the next time I got a taste. This story is about the second event, which happened when I was 12.
The Allure of Black Gold
Oil had been part of my life since an early age. So, I was confident in what I was doing when I turned a valve at the bottom of a holding tank to drain water. Instead, the handle broke and I couldn’t shut it off. Oil spit like a volcano as it came out. My clothes were covered in oil. My skin was covered in oil, too. Even my hair had chunks of crude oil stuck in it as though it were bubble gum.
Fresh crude also smells like the beach at low tide, but having just taken a bath in it while standing next to a hog pen didn’t warrant the cancellation of dinner plans. In fact, I was still soaked in oil when I sat at a table at Hungry Jose’s Mexican restaurant that evening. My clothes were far more suited for a night out than they were for working on the well.
But wading in the oil hadn’t been part of the plan. There were three of us at the well that day. Dad had a friend who was visiting our place in Pennsylvania from his home in Maryland. Art Caplan, who had once worked with my dad, was interested in seeing the well. Art was a periodic visitor. He even spent time on vacation with us in Maine in the summer of 1988. This was almost year later in May 1989.
Art’s visit was the reason we had plans for dinner. My brother had a soccer game that afternoon. We would catch up with him and my mom at dinner. Later, with just enough time to make a quick stop before meeting them, the rest of us set out for the well in Art’s Saab 900.
A Taste of Texas Tea
“The well,” as it was known, was actually a field of four wells. My dad and a geologist named John Best started Lagonda Oil Co. as partners in the early 1980s. It took its name from a small village nearby the wells in South Franklin Township, Washington County. With only limited equipment, they leased some old farm wells. Then, they started pumping oil. It took nearly 40 years for them to make a profit, and that’s when they sold their leases.
They hired a rig operator named Scott Finch. He became their go-to guy for running pipe and hooking up pumpjacks. In fact, the wells on the Smith Hog Farm were Lagonda Oil’s second lease. Efforts to reopen a well on a neighboring farm had failed during their first attempt a few years earlier. Scott ran the rigging at both sites.
These were not sophisticated wells. Most of them had been drilled in the late 19th century and worked off engines powered by kerosene, and then gasoline, before electrical pumps. The wells had been abandoned for many years, but old farm wells are common throughout Washington County.
And even though these farm wells are inherently dirty, “the well” was a relatively clean site on a very clean farm. Well #1 had a concrete road leading to it, and the pumpjack itself was at the edge of a parking pad near a hog pen and barn. I never expected to break a sweat. Instead, I found myself with oil up to my ankles. Several of us—including the property owners and farm hands who happened to be on scene—attempted to scoop the spilled crude oil and brine out of dirt with 5-gallon feeding buckets.
That is, after we got it to stop gushing.
The Jaw-Dropping Experience
After arriving at the well, I ran to the side of the barn to open a gate. The tanks and access to wells #2-4 were in a cow pasture behind that gate. Dad was showing off Well #1, so I went behind the gate and back to the tanks. It was a typical thing for me to do. When dad and I would go to the well together, he would check on the pump and the tank levels while I would drain the water from the tank.
Lots of water is pumped out of the ground along with the oil. Because oil rises above water, one way to take the water out is to drain it off at the bottom of the tank. It was pretty simple to drain the water. All I had to do was turn the valve to open it and let water run out. When it started to turn to oil, I had to shut it off. Oil comes out much slower than water, and the rate of flow starts to wane as the oil gets closer to the mouth of the spout. That’s the time to shut it off. A bucket under the spout was meant to catch any oil that did come out.
The process takes a couple of minutes, so I was wandering around not far from the tanks and waiting for the water to slow. When it did, I ran back over to the tank, tried to turn the valve, and it broke off in my hand. Oil immediately spit through the top of the valve and into my face. But I think I got it in my mouth because it was hanging open. I was aghast from the broken handle that was still in my hand.
A Pool of Oil and Brine
I screamed for help and got some quickly. Several farm hands ran to get some valve fittings. Eventually, they found a cap that fit the spout. That stopped the oil, but our problems were just starting. About 10 barrels had come out of the 100-barrel tank in a matter of a few minutes. The ground was covered in a pool of crude oil and brine. It was fairly contained in a pool, but not so much that it could be left like that. And, the cap stopped the flow, but it didn’t fix the broken spout.
Art and I ran to the store to find a new spout. We knew what size to get from the farmhands. Dad stayed with them and secured some buckets to clean it up. When I got back, the farmhands helped with their tools to repair the broken faucet. But the bucket scooping job was left to the three of us.
We scooped several buckets, but keeping the dirt out of the oil was nearly impossible and it was getting late. This was before cell phones, and my mom and brother were waiting for us at the restaurant. We were reminded of the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez, which was an oil liner that had spilled part of its load off the Alaskan coast earlier that year. As we were scooping mostly dirt, dad said to me, “Now you know why that cleanup is taking so long.”
Flavor That Lasts
Cleaning crude oil is very time-consuming. But we were lucky because it could have been much worse. Eventually, we got enough of the oil back into the tank that we could call it a night. We left, drove to the restaurant, and I told this story for the first time.
Nothing was damaged because of the spill. But it became a story that was frequently told. And why not? It’s not every day that someone gets a mouthful of oil. The problem is, anytime someone mentions crude oil, I briefly get a taste of it like Pavlov’s dog responding to a bell. It was a bigger problem when I lived in the Permian Basin of West Texas, where oil is king. And it made writing this blog somewhat difficult because I am tasting the oil right now.
That’s how an oil spill on a hog farm left a bad taste in my mouth.
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