Rock Springs, Wyo. – It’s only 9 p.m., but the thump-thump of a driving bass line is already wafting through the tiger-stripe interior of the Astro Lounge, a downtown strip club, before flooding through an open door onto the street.
These days, the wait to get in can last an hour, says Jackie Painovich, a longtime bartender, and customers have been known to drop $800 on a payday binge.
Inside, the room is packed with men who have just spent 12 sweaty hours on the hulking derricks that pull prosperity out of southern Wyoming’s natural-gas fields.
They are of a breed that virtually vanished from the American landscape when oil sold at less than $25 a barrel. Hard-bitten and strong-armed, they revel in their stereotype: a fraternity of the rugged and ready who can do a job few others dare.
Here, and throughout the West, roughnecks are back.
“They’re all from somewhere else, and they’re all here to work. The more money they make, the more money they spend,” Painovich said.
“If there is such a thing as a slow night around here, I haven’t seen it.”
With the West in the midst of a once-in-a-generation energy boom, industry experts say there probably will be more than 10,000 wells drilled in Colorado and Wyoming over the next decade and a half. The machines that do that job are 100 tons of belching, creaking, twirling steel.
For the towns that ring the region’s growing gas fields, the men who work those rigs are a mixed blessing. Crime is rising fast, and drunken brawls are common. But the hotels are full, and grocery stores have a hard time keeping food on the shelves.
Rock Springs Police Chief Mike Lowell sees the roughnecks as men who have to be ridden, and ridden hard.
“These are people who aren’t rooted to the community. They go into a bar and seem to forget everything their mothers ever taught them,” Lowell said.
A young officer when the last boom ended here in the early ’80s, Lowell remembers the days of prostitutes walking K Street and fights that erupted into bar-emptying brawls.
During this boom, drug arrests in Rock Springs have gone up nearly five times and alcohol- related arrests have doubled in three years. Five to 10 pounds of methamphetamine are sold in the region every week. But Lowell is determined not to let his city descend into chaos again.
“We want people to do what we say, and we don’t want any guff about it,” he said. “We want them to feel they’re welcome. At the same time, while it may not be their home, we want them to realize it is our home.”
Drive in just about any direction from the place Lowell calls home and derricks rise out of the rolling prairie like the iron skeletons of a remote city.
For the men who work them, that iron is a metaphor. There is perhaps no other job like it in America, combining the heavy machines of the vanishing Rust Belt and the outdoor ruggedness of the empty range.
“Everything on a drilling rig is big and heavy,” said Casey James, a 29-year-old driller on a rig in the Jonah field north of Rock Springs.
“You ask for a hammer, and you get a 5-pound sledge. You ask for a wrench, and you get a 24-inch pipe wrench.”
And it’s weight that is constantly in motion. A rig typically operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Winches squeal. Pipe lurches. Chains swing. A moment of misplaced attention can maim, even kill.
Rig workers tell a joke among themselves about a roughneck who goes into a bar and holds out the first and last fingers of one hand. What’s that? the joke goes. It’s a roughneck ordering four beers.
It’s gallows humor.
Since October, five people have died on gas rigs in southwestern Wyoming. With an estimated 2,000 rig workers in the state, that makes it one of the most dangerous places in America to earn a living.
But the risk creates a bond some of the men describe as among the strongest in their lives.
“The people that you work with out here, they basically become your family,” said Charles Kelley, 42, who blames long stretches in the energy fields for the breakup of his second marriage.
For a time in the ’90s, Kelley said he left the job to chase a more stable life.
“One phone call and I was right back in,” he said. “It can completely tear apart your family. You can lose everything you’ve got. But it’s what you love to do.”
$84,000 a year
Exxon Mobil made $36.1 billion in net profit in 2005 as both oil and gas prices soared, or the equivalent of about $1,100 every second.
That company, as well as others like it, turns around and pays major drilling contractors as much as $22,000 a day for a rig and its crews to punch holes in the gas-rich fields of Wyoming and Colorado’s Western Slope.
And so it goes.
An experienced roughneck makes $26.50 an hour. Plus overtime. Plus bonuses.
Some rig workers on the Western Slope pulled down $84,000 last year. Most never graduated from college, and some never finished high school.
For a far-flung swath of blue- collar America, the current energy boom is a not-to-be-missed opportunity. In the packed trailer parks and hotel parking lots, the license plates tell of the draw of good pay and plentiful work: Louisiana. California. Texas. Michigan.
“Some guy flagged me down on a county road at 9:30 at night,” said Roy McClung, the mayor of Parachute. “He told me he had driven 16 hours straight and wanted to know where he could get an oil-field job.
“By the time the stories get told back home and get embellished a little, it’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for a lot of these guys.”
And if energy is gold, then places like Colorado’s Parachute and Wyoming’s Pinedale, Wamsutter and Big Piney are the modern global economy’s version of the forty-niner camps – updated with satellite TV and catered meals.
These are towns where the bars open at 6 a.m., traffic jams around shift changes can last an hour or more, and a camping spot, much less an apartment, is nearly impossible to find.
Rig crews are crowded together in housing known as man camps. The best are modular compounds with weight rooms and professionally trained chefs. Most are little more than trailers with bunks stacked in cramped bedrooms. One shift comes in, the next goes out.
And the shifts are long, usually 12 hours. In Wyoming’s high desert, the temperature can sink to 40 below in winter and reach well over 100 degrees in summer.
For most, it’s seven days on, seven days off, but with labor in short supply, it’s possible to work just about as long your body can hold up. Lance Hardy, a 28-year-old from Tyler, Texas, recently finished 28 days straight.
“When you work on your days off, that’s just more money,” he said. “You got to make it while you can.”
Crime follows drilling
Men with minimal connection to a community, lots of money and little to do can be a combustible combination, officials say.
In Pinedale, bar fights between gas-field workers and locals have become an almost nightly affair.
In Parachute, a town tucked amid towering bluffs that once made it a magnet for retirees, police are investigating a brutal murder that appears to have started as a fight between roughnecks. The victim, Paul Graves, was so badly beaten that he was left in a coma and died in April after his family removed him from life support.
In Sublette County, a mostly rural area around Pinedale that’s seen some of the heaviest drilling in the West, a recent government report found that the rig count was a far better predictor of the area’s dramatically rising crime than population. In less than 10 years, DUIs have quadrupled, assaults have nearly tripled, and drug arrests have climbed 450 percent, according to Jeffrey Jaquet, the report’s author.
A male stronghold
From the outside, the roughneck’s life can look rowdy, almost brutal. From the inside, men talk about it with a rugged appreciation, even awe. The rig is tradition-bound, hierarchical, intensely male and intensely proud.
“It’s the last vestige of the male-dominated stronghold,” said Thomas Conley, a native of Pennsylvania who has been here since the 1970s.
“Like we used to say, ‘If it were easy, a girl could do it,”‘ he joked.
In fact, some can.
One is Rachel Miller. Originally from Oklahoma, her grandfather worked on rigs. So did her father. She was going to college in Utah when she decided to roughneck one summer to help pay for tuition. The rig challenged her in ways the classroom didn’t, Miller said, and she never went back.
“I craved it. It got in my blood,” she said.
But Miller concedes that the rig is a place where the niceties of modern human resource specialists have yet to make much of a dent.
Those who don’t fit in are weeded out mercilessly. They’re given tasks they don’t know how to perform, told to fetch tools that don’t exist.
“Because I’m a woman, they didn’t expect me to have the drive. They’ve been used to the thought that it’s a man’s world. The fact that a woman might be able to do that job hurt their pride,” said Miller, who works as an instructor on a Nabor’s Drilling training rig in Casper.
It’s a pride many roughnecks wear on their sleeves. Old hands talk about the oil field as a lifestyle, not just a job, and many defend its traditions fiercely.
On a typical five-man crew, the newest hand is called the “worm.” If there is grease to be wiped off, a load to be carried, an errand to be run, it’s the worm’s job to do it.
For a worm, Lee Grazen is far from typical. He’s 46 and worked in the last boom. He quit after a crew mate with 30 years’ experience had his arm mangled in an accident.
“I left the field and swore I’d never come back,” he said.
When he drove to southwestern Wyoming recently, it was to give his nephew a ride to a job in the booming Jonah field. Exhausted, the nephew quit within a week, so Grazen, not willing to leave the crew shorthanded, signed on.
He has rheumatoid arthritis, and coming off a 12-hour shift, his legs often ache. But he said he also wants to prove to himself that he can do it one more time.
“I’ve never been able to just punch a timecard, to show up and do the same thing over and over again,” Grazen said.
“Out there, if you’ve got an experienced driller, he can pull pipe so fast that you’d swear you can see that pipe stretch.
“When things are clicking, man, I’m telling you, it’s fun.”
Ever-present dangers
Imagine a job that – besides drudgery, backbreaking toil and bitter working conditions – offers, with just a small error or a fleeting lack of focus, myriad ways to die.
Steel chain tongs can suddenly tangle, swing around and crush your skull. Your safety strap can become snarled and drag you into a spinning drill head. A 2-inch iron cable, sliced by a sheave wheel, can whip down, hitting you in the back like a flying sledgehammer.
Those are all ways in which roughnecks working in southwest Wyoming have died in the past eight months.
For most on the rigs, those kinds of catastrophic accidents are an abstraction, something you put out of your mind in order to do the job.
But on a recent Wednesday, that abstraction ended for the crew on Pioneer rig No. 41.
In a death more random than most, a worker on the rig was pulling on the steel blade of a forklift. The blade slid out, struck him in the skull and then landed on his throat.
Casey James and Dan Wilkey were scheduled to work the rig that night, and the accident hit home.
They changed their clothes, called their wives and talked about it over dinner.
They reminded themselves of statistics that show it’s more dangerous to drive a car than work on a rig. They talked about how they’d be miserable going to an office every day.
“It’s something hard to talk to them about. There’s times I’ve hurt myself and just don’t mention it. Sometimes the less they know, the less they are going to worry,” James said of the conversation with his wife that night.
James has four children in Vernal, Utah, and when he’s not on shift, he drives back. The money he makes roughnecking is a devil’s bargain.
It allows his wife to stay home with the kids, a choice many American families don’t have. That makes it all – the time on the road, the grueling work, the risk – worth it.
He still thinks so, even if it’s a little bit harder to step back on the rig after a night like that Wednesday.
“You go out there in a bad frame of mind, and someone is going to get hurt. You go out there and you’ve got problems at home, someone is going to get hurt,” James said.
“You can’t ever relax. You can’t ever let your guard down. There is danger in everything we do.”
Staff writer Michael Riley can be reached at 303-820-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com.
