Holy Storm Surge!

[robpur]

Sinkholes are a bigger problem in Florida than some may think. From time to time it's in the news that a house or car has fallen into a sinkhole. I asked my brother that lives in Tampa about it and he said that it's hard to get sinkhole insurance without an expensive radar ground survey, which is prohibitively expensive. This is hearsay and I'm not sure of its accuracy. If true, then there's not much you can do to protect yourself from losing your home in a hole.

Beyond houses being sucked under there's commercial catastrophes involving sinkholes. In 2016 the Mosaic phosphate mining and fertilizer plant in Mulberry Florida, which is just north of Lithia where I grew up, had a massive sink hole open up under a retention pond containing 215 million gallons of polluted and slightly radioactive water which was dumped into the local aquifer. It took two years for the company to finally cork the 220 foot deep and 100 foot wide sinkhole. In 1994 a previous sinkhole opened in the same area that was 160 feet wide and 200 feet deep which also dumped contaminated water from a retention pond into the aquifer.

 

[erkme73]

For some reason, Florida is the favorite place to move to for all the New Yorkers when they ready to die.... I mean retire.

Please! Not TN!!

 

[J Sigmo]

I have an amusing "fishing" story. And this has absolutely nothing to do with Florida, hurricanes, snakes, or alligators!

A rig was operating near Gillette, Wyoming many years ago. At one point, a wireline company came in to do an open-hole log of the well. Unfortunately, at least part of their logging tool assembly got stuck in the hole. They tried coaxing it out, but to no avail. Then a fishing company came in with overshot tools, etc., to try to fish the tool out of the hole. But this wasn't going well, and was taking quite a bit of time. So the "company man" made the executive decision to just drill the tool up. In other worlds, just drill right through the tool so they could get on with drilling the hole.

Unfortunately, the company man didn't understand the danger of "drilling up" a tool that used a 17 curie gamma ray source!

Contamination was later found everywhere, including in hotels and restaurants in Gillette. It wasn't very long afterwards that the NRC came out with some additional safety regulations regarding the use and handling of radioactive sources in the well logging industry!

I can only imagine the expenses the company incurred. Of course, that well site was abandoned, and the well "cemented" off. The cleanup had to be incredible. A source that hot can be extremely dangerous. Drilling it up contaminated the circulating drilling mud, which then got the radioactive particles everywhere all over the rig, in the mud pits, pumps, etc. I have no idea if anyone suffered any acute or long-term effects, but the potential was most certainly there.

I guess the lesson is: Make sure you really know what you're doing, and don't get impatient, especially when you don't know what you're doing!

I heard this story second hand from a guy I used to work with when we had a company that did repairs and maintenance on various well-logging tools and surface gear back in the '80s. The event probably happened in the late '70s or early '80s if I had to guess.

 

[samplenhold]

The event probably happened in the late '70s or early '80s if I had to guess.

I began working for Exxon Exploration in Oct 1979. One of the first things I did at that time was to go to well sites. There is no way that happened in the 1980s. Ever since I had worked there, the control and access to radioactive sources has been highly regulated. Now I don't discount that this did not happen, I am just saying it would have been before my time in the oil field.

Strapping over a wireline tool is standard practice. Milling pieces of tools that are left in the hole is also standard practice. But milling on a source is just not done now, and not since I was working. I was on a well where the source tool just could not get fished. The standard procedure was to pump died cement into the hole around the tool, and for several hundreds of feet above the tool. This was to alert any future drill that a radioactive source was about to be drilled up. A plaque was placed at the surface with information as to what was left behind. Documents and permits had to be processed for this well pertaining to the buried source. The rig was skidded, and a new hole was dug.

 

[Flintstone61]

note to self: I guess the lesson is: Make sure you really know what you're doing, and don't get impatient, especially when you don't know what you're doing!
(got impatient now I'm 9-3/4 fingers Joe 5 pack)