A little over ten years ago Western had a job just outside of Jackson, Wyoming where I was living at the time. Hunting season was fast approaching and the job was behind schedule because had a complicated radial survey designed to pinpoint a drill site and the crew was green as far as heliportable and Poulter was concerned. I had run into the OB in town and mentioned that I had a lot of experience and he said he’d mention it to the PM, a guy named Bret Schafer. Bret phoned me the next day and asked me to come out and talk to him, saying that he’d talked to his supervisor in Denver, a guy named DeWitt Morris who had said I’d do. Bret hired me as his APM and I hit the ground running the next morning.

 

The first thing I did was stop by the mag and tell the guy there to start sacking shots. Then I jumped in a Lama and dropped in on the powder crew, which was shaded up and smoking pot next to a shot (see last pic on Photos 4). I got them up, started calling for powder, broke out my old CGG 17 axe and started driving stakes. They all started asking me who the hell I was, but they followed me and started setting up shots just the same. The next day DeWitt was on the crew picking up cables and phones (see Photos 4 and 5) and we started whipping those lazy shits until they got the idea and started humping the old fashioned way. Long story short, the crew finished the job four days before the deadline.

 

That winter we had two very long lines to do across the Red Desert, from Ft. Bridger to Baggs then from Rawlins to Kemmerer. Good idea—two 250 mile-long lines across an area known for the worst winters in the lower 48!

 

As a native of Wyoming I knew how dangerous it could be so when we got to Rock Springs I asked the Sweetwater County Search and Rescue guys to give the crew a seminar on winter survival. Bret also gave me money to buy a bunch of survival gear, even a sleeping bag for everyone on the crew, and I stuffed the back of the vans full of it. When the head of the Safety Department in Houston found out about the extra effort he flew up and sat in on the seminar, and was impressed. At dinner that night he asked me if I’d be interested in joining the Safety Department and, because he’d looked at my resumé and seen that I spoke Spanish, go to a crew in southern Mexico. Would I!?

 

A week later I was in Mexico City being interviewed by the Country Manager George Yapunchich and my supervisor Eric Wersich. We visited, had lunch, they briefed me on the ops, being run by a Colombian PM named Nacho Orozco, and put me on a bus for Oaxaca City and then a small town named Tamazulapan. You can see many interesting photos of the ops on my website at www.sunlightpublishing.com. Go to the Photos link and click on Mexico One.

 

The ops were pretty straightforward—helidrill but with flycamps with female cooks and a drill crew of around twenty-five men who busted their asses for four dollars a day. However, the eye opener was the management style. The PM was totally corrupt. He took kickbacks from the service station guy who sold us our fuel (I watched the guy pay him off), the head linesmen, drill supervisors, camp managers, buyers (who also kicked back) and other poobahs got drunk in the office two or three days a week. They set the base camp fuel tanks right next to the road and sold it to locals in the dead of night (I watched them do it). The supply tents were set next to the camp perimeter and by the second week there was a deep path worn in the plowed field that made a bee line from the village to the back of the tent where the supply guys were selling our supplies to the locals.

 

There were other things, many that I probably didn’t even know about and I started reporting them but nothing was ever done. I started sending reports directly to Yapunchich in Mexico City but, still, nothing was done. Also, I was reporting lost-time accidents like guys having both legs broken, and other very serious injuries that the PM and Wersich wanted reported as First Aid or Limited Duty injuries but I wouldn’t. When I found out that they were flying the seriously injured guys directly to the hospital without notifying me of the accidents (so I couldn’t report them) I decided to quit Mexico. I requested a transfer back my crew in Wyoming and went on break.

 

I stopped in Houston after break, thinking I was going back to Bret’s crew and when I went into Wayne’s office he said, “We have a meeting with Gary Jones, the VP for South American Ops, George Yapunchich, our VP of HSE and us.”

What!?

 

It wasn’t pretty. Our VP asked me why I was quitting Mexico and I told him about each incident and, each time he asked Yapunchich if I had reported the incidents and he said, “Yes, but Eric and Nacho said he was lying.”

 

When we left the meeting room Wayne said, “Jon, your problem is that you never learned to say ‘Wonderful’ instead of ‘Bullshit.’ You could have been a lot more diplomatic.” All I could say was, “I’m from Wyoming and we don’t have any diplomats there.”

 

Wayne sat me down and said, “OK, you’re done in South America but I want you to go to Yemen and make yourself invisible. We have an enormous job coming up in Kazakhstan where they speak Russian and because you speak Russian I want you to run our safety program out of the London office. While we are getting everything together you will set up a heliportable safety program with the Yemen crew because they have never used helicopters before. It should be a piece of cake, just keep everyone happy.” Hah.

 

I reported to Rich Degner, now the President of Global Geophysical, he took one look at me and said, “Good, you’ve to that rugged look. The guys on that crew are a bunch of real tough guys who’ve been working the Middle East for years. It was true. One guy’s Great-great grandfather had killed Pat Garrett, they guy who shot Billy the Kid, and had been in the New Mexico State Prison when they had the famous riot. He said he had slogged out of there in ankle-deep clotted blood. Another guy was the Great-great grandson of Porter Rockwell who was the personal assassin for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

 

I had been in Yemen about two weeks when the PM, an Irishman named Michael Ewart, said, “We’re getting a new supervisor whom I believe you know. His name is Eric Wersich.” And he grinned an evil grin. Wersich had been sent by the operations people in Houston to cut my head off—Ops versus Safety, the age-old battle in seismic.

 

About that time we got our first chopper, a Lama flown by the Chief Pilot of Heli Union, a very good French company I would fly with many times more in South America. He came up to me and said, “I want you to look at this fuel pump they’ve given me to use. It’s exactly like one that blew up on us in Burma and killed my swamper, burned up an Alouette III and our tool shed. I’ve told the Party Manager and the Country Manager but they just keep telling me that Western doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes! It’s crazy! This is a major safety hazard.”

 

I inspected the pump but told him I was no expert, that I couldn’t condemn the pump on his say-so, though I would take his opinion to heart. I talked to the PM and he just waved his hand, dismissing the pilot’s complaint. I said that he was, after all, the chief pilot of one of the best helicopter companies in the world so maybe he should take the guy’s concerns with more than a grain of salt, but he just looked bored.

 

I kept a low profile and made nice with Eric every chance I got. He was even impressed with some cliff rigging I did for a kilometer-long cable that was used to jump from the desert to the top of an enormous scarp where we transitioned from vibes to drills. And, as a reminder, Wayne Trout even flew to Yemen from Houston especially to visit with me and remind me of the importance of being diplomatic and staying alive for another three or four months, no more. Everything in Kazakhstan and London was going apace and I had been approved for the management position.

 

And then the fuel pump failed. I checked with the mechanic and he took me to the supply pile and we dug out the backup pump, hoisted it clear and broke open the crate. And there on top of the pump was a red STOP sign about three inches in diameter, connected to the pump with a small metal cable, and on the back of the sign it read: “DO NOT use this sparkless pump to move combustible materials. It is designed primarily to pump water in gaseous atmospheres.” Someone at Western had, indeed, bought a killer pump.

 

What was I to do? I could let it go, play the Western game and hide the danger, or do the right thing and report it to all parties concerned. After a moment I realized that chances were I was going to come up the loser no matter what. If I reported it I was done, but if the pump failed I would be fired for putting it into service. I decided to do the right thing, even though I knew it meant the end of my job in London and future with the company. It made me sick. However, there was something else I was ignorant of—just how evil were the people I was dealing with.

 

I wrote a notice that said the pump could be put into service but had to be replaced immediately. Heli Union agreed and said they could have a replacement pump flown in within 48 hours and I recommended that. Of course, it meant a big loss of face for the Country Manager, Joe Vagt  plus the crew management, and that Kraut had a reputation for being an absolutely ruthless prick with not one scintilla of conscience.

 

Wersich took the notice I’d written, accompanied by Xerox of both sides of the STOP sign, and shouted, “You didn’t give a copy of this to the Heli Union guy, did you?” When I admitted I did he screamed, “Get out of here!” and turned to open the PM’s door, but Ewart was already standing there.

 

That evening Ian Curry, the Drill Supervisor and my buddy, and I parked outside of camp and listened in on the traffic between the base camp and the office in Sana’a. They admitted they had been stonewalling, that replacement pumps were still weeks away because of serial customs problems and now I’d put them in the position of having to take Heli Union’s pump, that I was a meddling cocksucker and I was through with the company. They also said they would need a replacement safety man because I was being transferred to our sister crew way out on the jebel, working for Crescent Petroleum (owned by the PLO).

 

I was out on the other crew, with almost nothing to do, for five weeks. The day before I was set to go back a driver arrived to take me back to my original crew the next day, then on to Sana’a. He gave the PM a copy of a fax and I could tell from the PM’s face that he knew what it said. It was no wonder that he had been so good to me for the whole time I’d been on his crew. It was from my sister and it read: “Please send my brother home. Our father has been diagnosed with acute leukemia and has been given only four to six weeks to live.” It was dated five weeks earlier, the day after I had been dispatched to the Crescent crew.

 

When I went into Vagt’s office he had a Yemeni wearing a pistol standing next to his desk. He was a cocky son-of-a-bitch, even smirking as he handed me my one-way plane ticket. I wanted to turn the desk over on him but I was too depressed, too defeated, to work up the energy.

 

Vagt retired with full honors, owns several apartment buildings in Germany and the U.S. and is rich. Eric Wersich is President of PGS Land Operations and Nacho Orozco is one of his favorite PMs.

 

Oh yes, when I got to London I phoned my brother. He said, “Dad died at ten o’clock this morning. The nurse came to me and asked, ‘Is your father waiting for someone?’ and when I said that he was waiting for you she told me to tell him that you couldn’t make it. ‘We have given him two pints of platelets but the leukemia just eats them up as fast as we put them in. He’s in agony.’ “So I bent down and said, ‘Dad, Jon can’t make it.’ He died forty-five minutes later. I’m sorry.”

 

So, Safety can be a very dangerous business, stay away from it if you have a conscience. If you don’t you have a real future. Otherwise, stick with management because you don’t need one. Or morals either.