Underground Construction - June 2020 - 30

Pioneers of HDD Inducted into Hall of Fame
"Not everyone was interesting in doing this drilling. These pipeline
owners and their engineers weren't going to jeopardize their pensions
for some newfangled idea of putting a pipe under a river," he said.
He also faced a steep learning curve during those early years,
drawing on the expertise of oil industry directional drillers while
pioneering HDD methods "without any blueprints" for how to do
any of it.
Northern California was a constant challenge of varying and
unpredictable drilling conditions.
"We didn't have the fine grain or orchard-type ground material
or formations. We had hard pan that kind of reminded you a
little bit of limestone. You could see these layers, kind of like a
layer of hotcakes out there. And Sacramento was made up of that
because it's a flooded area, and it was coming down the mountains, so some of it was very hard and some was very soft," he
said, describing sparks flying as crews drilled through the layers.
Because of the conditions in the region, bentonite was in early
use for HDD applications. Fortunately, because of oil drilling in
the area, bentonite was readily available.
Although each job benefited from the learning of the last, there
were some rough spots along the way. For instance, Cherrington recounted a story of an early attempt on that first river crossing after
hiring an oilfield driller who brought out a heavy drill motor and bit.
"The bottom hole assembly never did come up. It just went
straight down," he said. "That driller we contracted who had all

the tooling came to me and said, 'Son, I think you're drilling
a dry hole here.'
"I thought that was just the end of the world," Cherrington said.
"But we finished the project with some of the utility equipment
that we had. Then, on the next project, we had some input from
(Smith Tool division) Dynadrill. That job was pretty successful
using these tools."
From that point on, Cherrington realized that much of the
technological know-how that could be learned and applied to
HDD could be adapted from the deep experience of the oil and gas
industry. One of his early major successes was a 2,000-foot crossing
under Louisiana's Atchafalaya River of a 10-inch chemical line for
Union Carbide. It was an arduous process with a single-shot system
that had been in use since 1929, averaging 30 feet a day.
"The problem is, when you go out there 1,000 to 1,500 feet, it
was hard to pump it," he said describing the old Dowell cementing
pumps and Halliburton trucks at work before Sperry Sun came up
with the steering tool in the late 1970s that's still in use today.
"Those pump trucks were really working, and the wire line
was dragging down - and sometimes it wouldn't make it. Just
remembering it now - horrible memories," he said.
He described a gradually improving evolution of equipment
through the 1980s-90s, with cable rigs of up to 750,000 to 1 million
pounds, followed by a series of rack-and-pinion rigs.
"Cable rigs had their place," he said. "I'm glad those days are gone." *

Mears celebrates

50 YEARS!
Growth. Innovation. Commitment.

As one of the leading horizontal directional drilling
(HDD) and Direct PipeĀ® service providers, Mears has
HDD rigs up to 1.3 million lbs. and DP thrusters up
to 750 tons.
River, road, railroad crossings / Shore approaches /
Intersects / Installing steel, HDPE, and FPVC / Design/
Build and EPC Services

mears.net


http://www.mears.net

Underground Construction - June 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Underground Construction - June 2020

Contents
Underground Construction - June 2020 - FC
Underground Construction - June 2020 - IFC
Underground Construction - June 2020 - Contents
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 4
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 5
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 6
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 7
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 8
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 9
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 10
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 11
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 12
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 13
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 14
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 15
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 16
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 17
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 18
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 19
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 20
Underground Construction - June 2020 - 21
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Underground Construction - June 2020 - 58
Underground Construction - June 2020 - IBC
Underground Construction - June 2020 - BC
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