Editorial Comment

November 1997 Vol. 218 No. 11 Editorial Comment Bob Scott Travel cautions, etc. Autumn is a major travel time for oil field types. So here are a

November 1997 Vol. 218 No. 11
Editorial Comment

Bob Scott

Travel cautions, etc.

Autumn is a major travel time for oil field types. So here are a few items that might be of some small interest to all you gadabouts out there.

• A while back, the International Herald Tribune reported on results of a Boeing/Federal Aviation Administration-initiated worldwide inspection of electrical wiring inside fuel tanks of aged 747s. That wiring is one suspect in the crash of TWA Flight 800. There’s good and not-so-good news about that, as a result.

The not-so-good is that a hell of a lot of damaged protective conduits and chafed wires were found leading to fuel pumps inside wing tanks. The good news is that none of the damaged stuff led to pumps inside the main center fuel tank that blew up on Flight 800. And none of the chafed wires had burned through their aluminium conduit.

Interestingly, the Trib reported that the chaffing had been noted 17 years ago and the problem was thought to have been solved way back then by wrapping wire-bundles with teflon. Obviously it wasn’t.

It’s pretty clear that everybody is going to have to continue to bet on the law of averages, although until TWA 800 went down, we sure didn’t know we often were sitting on top of that brobdingian center fuel tank, which is present on all large-body jets flying today, regardless of make.

That may call for an extra martini.

• London’s Times also carried an interesting travel item recently attributed to the police in Milan, Italy. What it said was that X-ray machines at the airports in Milan were unable to detect knives or weapons in the middle of hand baggage. When a civil aviation official was queried about this unhappy situation, he implied that, shoot, that was probably true in all the airports in Italy, since a total of 90 X-ray machines were out of order that he knew about.

Have fun on your Italian trip.

• The Times also warned recently of a virulent new strain of flu virus that could precipitate a global epidemic on the order of the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak which took somewhere between 20 and 40 million lives, depending on who does the estimating. That 1918 pandemic was “the biggest infectious event known to humans” according to the Royal London Medical College, whose investigators found alarmingly low levels of human immunity to the new virus they’re so worried about.

That sort of takes all of the joy out of a good martini if you’re cooped up for 8 to 10 hours in a sealed container at 40,000 ft with 350 or more other folks—and somebody has a coughing spell.

Like the airline ads say, “Have a nice flight.”

Greenpeace (GP), the epitome of the ultra-radical goofygreen crowd and avowed mortal enemy of the oil and gas industry, has seen its U.S. membership nosedive from some 1.2 million to about 400,000. In view of an expanding economy, it’s pretty clear that those lost members didn’t leave for economic reasons. Maybe they finally woke up to the fact that GP’s prime focus has always been GP and its prime goal has not been altruistic. It’s been to make money.

As this was written, all U.S. GP offices except for the one in Washington were in the process of closing and 335 of 400 staff members have been or will be laid off. No mention was made of any reductions in U.S. GP’s 170-member board of directors, whether they are compensated or if all 170 will continue to oversee activities of the remaining staff of 65.

We always hate to see anyone lose their job, and we wish good luck to the departing 335 folks who were there trying to make a living. Unfortunately, we would a lot rather have seen the 65 remaining go because you can bet they’re what’s left of the wild-eyed bottom-line types.

Now if only those who support outside U.S. GP activities plus other fellow traveling econut organizations would only wake up. . . .

According to the Washington Times, what was called a “valuable” oil portrait of then-governor Billy Jeff Clinton was recently stolen from the State Capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas. The FBI discovered it had been sold by a transient for $2 but didn’t identify the poor exploited purchaser .

The chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates oil and gas activities, has come up with an ingenious plan to train 1,100 prison inmates per year for roughnecking jobs to combat the present industry shortage. Costs for an 1 1-day roughnecking course would be $895 per head.

Now we don’t know if the chairman checked with any drilling contractors about this idea, but we talked to a few. One wondered whether women prisoners would also have to be included to satisfy federal Civil Rights laws. Another speculated that the chairman might want to train some of this group for jobs in his own office or elsewhere in state government. Surely training for a bureaucrat’s desk job would take far less time than to produce an acceptable floorman. A third suggested the chairman might get in touch with Billy Jeff to see if he’d be willing to swap some of his White House bunch, who are still so busy they can’t take the time for an FBI background check, for some already-rehabilitated souls.

If the chairman runs for re-election to his present office or any other, he might want to think twice before putting the touch for campaign money on drilling contractors.

News snippets:

Some 174,000 copies of the new Morristown, New Jersey Yellow Pages were apparently sabotaged by somebody who apparently wasn’t crazy about lawyers. The prankster swapped telephone numbers of lawyers for those of “escort agencies.” The counselors are apparently getting beaucoup calls for “dates.” The escort agencies may be even madder.