North! To Alaska!
The Northern Lights have seen strange sights, but the strangest they ever will see, was a directional drill on Million Gallon Hill, installing HDPE.
With apologies to Robert Service
DTD has completed the first crucial step in mobilizing for a major environmental drilling project at a remote outpost in Alaska. Gathering equipment and supplies from all three of our continental US offices, a crew of DTD personnel, lead by CEO Jim Doesburg and Field Manager Luke Anderson, have been assembling the load-out for a several-month project that will install 10,000 feet of horizontal remediation wells.
Access to the site from the Lower 48 takes a circuitous route over a period of several weeks. Equipment and supplies were staged at a DTD equipment yard in Bremerton, Washington. From there, inventory and packing was completed into multiple trailers. The trailers of equipment and supplies were transported to the marine terminal in Seattle, where they were placed on barges to Anchorage. Overland transport will take the equipment several hundred miles north of Anchorage, where the equipment will go back on the water for another several hundred miles on a river barge. In this highly weather-dependent journey through Alaska, timing is everything. To maximize available time in the field, the loads must reach the river barge before the ice breaks up.
The mobilization process, started in March, has the first loads of equipment currently arriving in Anchorage, and should culminate with the drill arriving on site in late May. After several weeks of intensive drilling, the process is reversed, with the demobilization rushing for completion before winter once again returns to Alaska.
Over the past several years, DTD has traveled to several locations requiring greater-than-average mobilization efforts. Projects in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, with smaller rigs and scopes of work, provided great practice for this major mobilization.