When a well brings in oil, a new group of men and machines go to work.
They lay a pipeline, through which the oil can be pumped to factories
called refineries. Some pipelines are hundreds of miles long.
After surveyors have decided just where the line should go, bulldozers
clear away brush, push over trees, heave big boulders to one side,
making a wide pathway across country. In many places, the pathway is
good enough for trucks to follow. They bring in lengths of pipe and lay
them down end to end. Where the going is rough, a caterpillar tractor
carries the pipe, one length at a time, hanging from a side-boom.
Now welding crews go to work fastening the ends of the pipe-lengths
together. When they have finished, the “hot-dope gang” comes along. They
are men who cover the pipe with a wrapping and then with a hot asphalt
mixture to protect the metal.
Meantime, a wonderful machine called a trencher has been at work. This
is a cat attached to a rig which
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
looks very much like an old-fashioned water wheel. Each bucket on the
wheel has steel teeth. The cat turns the wheel and pulls it forward. The
buckets scoop up earth, and spill it out onto a belt that dumps it in a
heap at one side. The trencher plugs ahead, uphill and down, digging a
ditch just the right width and depth.
Following behind the trencher, cats with booms hoist up the snaky
pipeline and ease it over into the trench. Finally, bulldozers backfill
the trench. That is, they cover the pipe with the dirt that the trencher
left alongside. On one job, the men had to work at top speed in the
desert and in rocky, mountainous country. They were all so glad they’d
finally succeeded in getting the pipeline built that they put on a
celebration. Whooping and hollering, they tossed their sweat-stained
hats into the trench in front of the bulldozer as it backfilled the last
few feet of earth.
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Even after that there was one more tool that had work to do before oil
could be pumped through their pipeline. It is a peculiar gadget that
looks like a bunch of cowboy spurs hooked up with pieces of tin can and
some old plates. The weird contraption is called the go-devil, and it
has the job of traveling, perhaps hundreds of miles, inside the pipe,
pushing out anything that could clog the line. Water pumped into the
line behind the go-devil forces it through the pipe.
In one line, the go-devil brought out chunks of wood, pieces of
rock--and several rabbits, skunks and rattlesnakes that had decided the
pipe would make good headquarters! Now the powerful pumps could go to
work shoving oil through the line.