Since we were not at work for the last week we had not visited the job sites so we decided to use Saturday to make the trip west. This is the canola field right across from our offices and there is quite a difference in the ripeness of this field and the ones we saw just south of here on our way home early in the week.
We were heading out into the real oil patch of our country and housing is a big problem. Most of the towns out this way are small and do not have available facilities or infrastructure to handle the influx of workers. These man camps have sprung up to handle the workers.
Each site will be a bit different but they all offer very basic housing for the workers.
There are quite a few of these camps along the main highway.
Another thing that is abundant on the prairie are oil wells.
The oil companies harvest oil from beneath the ground and the farmers grow crops on top.
The first stop was at our Beaver Lodge location. This site is always precarious in wet weather. This road is steep, bumpy and gets muddy and slick when wet. Big rigs have been known to slide backwards on it.
The site itself if not bad as long as it is not wet, then everything turns to slop-known as gumbo.
We dropped off some paperwork and drove around the new tank they are building.
Then we headed back east and stopped at the next site in Stanley, ND.
The roads around all the sites were nice and hard since we had not had rain in a few days. The guys were working on a new tank at this site also.
This is a lab building, used for taking and testing samples.
This is a utility building for the maintenance crew on the pipeline.
This is what the finished tanks will look like.
And that is a day in the life of us when we visit the job sites.
No comments:
Post a Comment