Chapter 26 Field Work and uh, Drilling in Nevada

When I started at PPCo I was working in a relatively new high tech area of satellite interpretation. Remote Sensing it was called. It was based on a series of Earth observation satellites put in orbit to originally monitor crops. The geological community found it could map structures equally well and showed them things that could only have been imagined in their wildest dreams. Geologists had had orgasms over early hand held photography taken by the Gemini and Apollo astronauts. The Landsats as they were collectively called turned them into whores. A whole community of geoscientists became Remote Sensing whores. They sold themselves for grant money and prostituted themselves in order to get companies, particularly oil companies, to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for processing systems. At the time, the government subsidized the satellites so digital tapes with imagery of large areas were only $200. Photographic negatives or positives were even less expensive. Phillips was one of the first to lie on her back. A whole group existed and they even had their own research support. Namely me. What ultimately happened is we bunch of whores got syphilis and died. Metaphorically speaking of course. The powers that be in the community over sold what we could actually do. The oil companies, Phillips, Cities Service, Amerada Hess, Oxy, Amoco, Exxon, ARCO, Pennzoil, the list goes on and on. Most no longer exist, all shelled out the bucks to have their own Remote Sensing group. The community held annual meetings in South Dakota at the remote sensing data center in Sioux Falls. Still others were held in Michigan, and in Colorado. What I learned right off was that a lot of the "research" was being done by the same guys and a lot of them were in academia. They just flogged the same data, looking at if from 90 degrees and writing a paper, the stepping a few paces to the right and looking at it at 45 degrees and writing another. It was a business. All the while the oil companies were shelling out the bucks for staff and equipment that never delivered. The oil crunch of the mid-80's changed that, along with President Reagan privatizing the operation of the remote sensing satellites. This led overnight to the cost rising 10 times to $2000 a tape with a copyright hanging off of it. No longer could companies swap tapes to save a buck now it was $2000 each time anyone used it. This had a dampening effect on the party. Then the price of oil dropped and almost all the staffs were cut back. Some drastically. Phillips went from probably 20+ people to 5. A whole new industry sprang up then. It was called the value added industry. All those people who worked for the companies set up small companies with new or used equipment they might have purchased from their former employers. They now would do the value added processing on the raw data for the oil companies for a fee. That is pretty much how things work 20 years later. Now as part of the ongoing effort to get the oil companies to shell out money, independent groups, I guess lobby groups sprang up. One was called the GeoSat Committee. Their stated goal was to demonstrate the need, and lobby for new generations of satellites that the government would fund. Things called group shoots where a consortium of companies would fly at their own expense, new sensors while teams mobilized from the participating companies, swarmed over the target areas taking readings in order to calibrate the data received from the sensors. My first experience was to go to Nevada for several weeks with three co-workers and collect ground truth data. We flew into Reno and then drove a circuit of the state, mainly through the central and north, never venturing to Las Vegas. On our first lunch stop, one of my co-workers disappeared into a book store. When we sat down in a cafe he tossed the book in my lap. It was called "The Brothels of Nevada". Well, being the only bachelor of the group, I was expected to give a report of the night's "discoveries" at breakfast the next day. It was a duty I ably performed for the next couple of weeks. It was tough but someone had to do it. Some of the little mining towns had two or three brothels and I felt duty bound to visit them all in the time allotted to me. We headed toward Hawthorne near Walker Lake and the huge Army ammunition depot. Bunkers dotted the valley hillsides as far as the eye could see. We headed on to Tonopah and I sampled the charms of the gals there. They were a delight. We eventually turned north toward Ely, then cut over to Winnemucca, then Battle Mountain and eventually back to Reno. There were a lot of stops in small towns along the way, Goldfield is one I remember. It was a long time ago, but I can still remember the good times. The reader has to remember that this was pre-AIDS. The girls didn't even require you wear a condom. The etiquette went as follows. You walk in. There is a bar. You sit down and order a drink. The proprietor or madam will try to rush you to pick a girl by trotting them all out for a look see. You take your time, have a drink, chat, then choose one. You talk, possibly buy her a drink then head to her room. The Madam tried to rush me, I turned to her, smile and said "Am I in a hurry?" All of a sudden they stopped treating me like the horny 20 something I appeared to be, and was. I all of sudden appeared to be a veteran, all because of the little book. Each gal, has her own bedroom. About he size of a very small motel room. Money changes hands. The Madam comes by and collects it. The clock starts. She asks you to drop trousers and then checks your equipment for leaks. Really. She would manually inspect you for anything she didn't want any part of. Then she would wash you using a basin of warm water. Then you get naked and talk specifics of what you wanted. French, Half and half, etc. Yeah, the book explained the vernacular. Basically, French was your garden variety blow job. Half and half was she started you off with a blow job and finished you with intercourse. Of course you could just start off with intercourse. I didn't need any assistance getting me up so I just opted to get after it. The first gal that entertained me was a very pretty one of Afro-American descent. She was , as most of them were, from southern California, and was up doing a stint at one of the "Ranches". It must have been a slow week, because she broke a few rules. One, we got into some heavy kissing, and two, we ran overtime and she didn't seem to mind much even though the Madam was hammering on the door. Another gal I remember was named Lola. Even had a playboyesque business card with the stylish Femlin silhouette. This gal had big honking hooters with bright pink aureoles and long pencil eraser thick nipples. She had a shock of blonde hair and pale ivory skin. Another gal was named Terry, a pretty brunette with a nice figure. How time flies all those 20 something hookers would be old enough to be grandmothers now.

Chapter 25 Phillips Hazardous Waste

When I first started at PPCo Research and Development I heard stories about the waste pits back west of the Pilot Plant. They were back in the trees along Sand Creek. These things, and I get this second hand from guys who had to survey their locations, were so noxious it make their eyes water just being down wind of them. No telling what went in them. Knowing a bit about geology. I know a meandering creek such as Sand Creek leaves over time a lot of porous sediments just right for migrating plumes. Unlined pits for hazardous waste and toxins make good sources from which these plumes can form. I also know that they tend to migrate to creeks and other surface bodies of water. So my best guess is these pits were unlined due to the fact it was not required at the time. The image of the area now shows that Conoco/PPCo now has four oxidizing ponds in the southern part of the picture. The round white donuts in the square green ponds are bubbles from the aerators in the ponds helping the bugs degrade oil and other nasties in the water. I can not be certain of the location of the old pits. My best guess is the big brown scar to the north west in the trees. Either that or they are hidden by the trees in the middle left of the picture. this is clearly a land fill. You can see the edge of the material to the south where they are pushing it into the trees. I can't say if this is Phillips property, but more than likely it is. There is a big debris pile in the upper right, the white area. It looks like a truck or dozer parked by the black area. There is a chance that the ponds were located where they have built a retaining wall and run-off containment basin just above and left of the containment ponds. The long rectangular structure that looks to discharge into a Sand Creek tributary. Anyone care to do some sampling down stream of this area in Sand Creek? I certainly hope you don't fish there. Sand Creek and Eliza Creek also catch the run-off from the National Zinc Superfund site. In 1984 the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was passed. This was called the cradle to grave act. This required companies producing listed hazardous materials to provide employees with Material Safety Data Sheets and to also track and inventory all wastes produced until they were destroyed. Cradle to grave. Well one day we start getting all these steel drums out at R&D. Turns out Phillips was none to diligent in disposing of the hazardous materials they produced and the government was shipping them back to them after finding them and tracing them back to PPCo. There are lots of ways to save money. I guess letting Sanford and Son hall your hazardous waste off for you is one way. In the event, they had to destroy it. Problem was nobody knew what was in the drums. A lot of them were rusty and were encased in plastic bags to prevent leakage. There were a lot of them. So Phillips set there engineers to designing an incinerator and a scrubber. Soon they were burning the waste and barrels all in one go. They patented the incinerator. John Mihm was the head of R&D at the time. You might remember him as Mihm the Merciless. Well we were going through layoffs about this time. When weren't we. eh? So he had a great club to find volunteers to man the incinerator. Kind of like the old Royal Navy Press Gangs. If your worth to your current organization was suspect, you were given the choice to be laid off, or work with hazardous and toxic chemicals all day. Nice choice, wot? I guess they had plenty of "volunteers" because the incinerator ran day and night for years. I don't currently see any trace of it on the Google images, nor do I see the Pilot Plant. Looks like they are cleaning up the place. Next up, Benzene spills in Borger and Plastics Plant explosions in Pasadena.

Chapter 24 Bartlesville, Toxic Metals and Superfund Central

In my career I have been an environmental consultant for one of the largest international firms in the country. I have been involved in numerous environmental law suits across the country from California to Dallas to Charleston. When I was in college, I did a special graduate research project on toxic trace metals. There are numerous plants that are called bio-accumulators. That is they preferentially pick up toxic metals and concentrate them in the plant tissue. Now this isn't a problem if the plant isn't a food plant. In the industry, certain plants are used to scavenge metals from affected sites, they are burned and the ash is encapsulated for disposal or the metals recovered. An example of a bio-accumulator is Astragalus mollissimus and Oxytropis lumberti better known collectively as Loco Weed. They are purple and white blossomed plants respectively, and are found in the western 2/3s of Kansas. The plants can poison cattle, horses and sheep. The poisoning occurs through Selenium over dosing. As you may have guessed Selenium is a nutrient too, but in massive doses, like so many other things, it is bad, very bad for you. When I first arrived in B'ville in 1980, I was fascinated by the Zinc smelters. My fascination stemmed from the fact there had been so many, and that Zinc a nutrient metal important to men to keep lead in the pencil as well as proper functioning of the related pump. What I also knew is that Zinc is intimately related to Cadmium. A not so nice metal, as well as Lead. We all know about Lead. Not only will it kill you coming out of the barrel of a gun, but it will make you kids dumb as a post if they choose to eat Lead paint or are exposed to it in other ways. My interest stemmed from the fact that I noticed the prevailing wind usually blew from the southwest. I could see in my minds eye, the town wreathed in open smelter smoke blowing across the town, across the flood plain and on to Dewey. As the smoke cooled particulates would rain out containing Lead and Cadmium. Not too much of a problem if you didn't breath the smoke or eat the soil, unless you had another exposure pathway, like food. I remember raising the question one day with my co-workers as we drove across town from R&D what they thought the Cadmium levels of the pecans from the orchard along the river was. You see pecans LOVE Cadmium. They scavenge it. So if you like those B'ville pecans, you are probably getting a good dose of Cadmium too. The Japanese discovered the culprit disease caused by excess Cadmium, Mercury too. Mercury causes horrible birth defects. The Japs learned you shouldn't shit where you eat. They were dumping Mercury laden industrial waste water into the bay where they did a lot of fishing. So they were poisoning the fish who in turned poisoned them. Not a problem for anyone but pregnant mothers. You just sweat it out in most cases. A little dementia might occur along with it; ever heard the term "mad as a hatter"? That is because hat makers used mercury to block hats and got a lot of mercury fumes in the bargain. Back to Cadmium. It causes Tsai Tsai disease which translates to "Ouch Ouch" disease. Cadmium ions which are nearly the same size as Calcium ions, replace Calcium ions in the bones. The problem is it doesn't make strong bones. So the sufferer gets micro fractures in the bones which are quite painful. I never did test those Pecans, but I never ate any either. Looking at Google Earth it looks like the orchard is still there, between Tuxedo and Phillips Blvds. Now I was in the Houston air port one day on my way out of town when I overheard another consultant talking about Bartlesville. It seems I hadn't been too far off the mark. But the exposure pathway that caused the entire hubbub was different and so was the metal. It seems that all the clinker or slag from the furnaces way back then were cheap fill and gravel to some enterprising eye. So they hauled the stuff off and used it to pave and fill the alleys throughout town. The house I had on Cherokee had a retaining wall and an elevated alley behind it paved with gray gravelly material. It seems the stuff was laden with Lead! The affected area according to the EPA report on the National Priorities List was a 135 acre site along 11th and Virginia Streets. It included schools, day cares, churches, playgrounds, parks, recreational areas and business properties. Further they found that: "NZC operated a zinc smelter on this site from 1907 to 1976, when it was acquired by the Zinc Corporation of America. NZC was also known as National Zinc Co., Horsehead, Inc., and St. Joe Mineral. The NZC smelter had no air emission controls, allowing emissions to be deposited downwind in various areas in Bartlesville. According to 1992 EPA reports, lead and cadmium levels in the top 2 feet of soil are greater than three times natural background levels. Although the extent of the area of contamination has not been completely determined, it includes contaminated soils at two schools and three day care centers. An estimated 1,700 students attend the school and day care centers, and 170 people work at the facilities. "

It doesn't seem that they investigated the other smelter sites around town either. If you haven't heard much about it, go figure, who wants to buy contaminated property? I am sure the city fathers, Phillips, realtors and others have had a hand in it. Some concerned person got on the stick and when National Zinc closed the plant grounds were declared a CERCLA Site. That's' Superfund to most of you. It stands for Comprehensive Emergency Response and Recovery Act, also known as the Lawyers Relief Act since 90% of the billons spent have gone to pay litigation costs and not to actually cleaning up. A Superfund court case amounts to a finger pointing festival. Maybe just maybe they actually find the responsible party and make them clean it up, but in most cases the company is long gone or been dissolved. Coppers Wood Treating, better know as the Creosote King , left contaminated creosote plants all over the country sitting on plumes of black gooey hazardous glop. Toxic to people and fish. The company is long gone morphed into another entity called Beazer. Yep, Beazer Wood Products and Home construction. They just walked away and made the government force them to clean it up. I worked on a suit for Conoco, before the merge. They bought a fertilizer plant in Charleston, next to an old Beazer/Koppers plant and got sued in a cross complaint. Seems once Beazer/Koppers got nailed they wanted to spread the pain around. So they sued Conoco for causing the problem. We won on behalf of Conoco, but they still had to clean up an adjoining marsh because a bit of Lead was found there by the EPA. So in order to save the marshland from a bit of Lead, they had to destroy it. There were numerous civil war cemeteries and battle field on and about the site which could have been the source of the Lead, but no, they probably forced Conoco to dredge the marsh then replant it.

The last word, is if you look at the second photo above you can see that they have cleaned up the plant site. The total area affected as reported above was 135 acres. I do not know how they remediated the affected residential areas. There are also another Superfund sites around town. BARTLESVILLE HWY 123 LANDFILL HWY 123 NORTH OF BARTLESVILLE QUAPAW, ST LAKE Landfill N. FUTURA & E CHICKASAW CITIES SERVICE COMPANY 510 SOUTH KAW STREET EAST BARTLESVILLE DUMP 5.5 MILES EAST OF BARTLESVILLE JOHNSTONE & LUPA DUMP NORTH OF JOHNSTONE STREET NATIONAL ZINC CORP. WEST 11TH STREET OLD DEWEY ROAD DUMP 0.5 MILES N. of Bartlesville SOMEX Limited - injection well 1350 South Virginia Avenue