Old Pick

Understanding a region for new water wells and the amount and quality of water that they would supply is like fishing. A fisherman knows how many fish are in a pond, a lake or a river by fishing it regularly. He knows when the water is clear, and when, where and why the fish are biting. That river changes with time. Fish come and go as they move after their aquatic food or are displaced for a time by floods. The alarm is sounded among fisherman when a river becomes sullied by pollution or altered physically by roadway structures, dams or other man-made features.

The same thing happens with a group of water wells across a landscape.  The landscape could be a small town in a valley or a large valley of hundreds of miles in length.  Some new wells find no water, others find abundant water and draw the attention of farmers, city planners and drillers. A good well is a guarantee of a good life in the country to enjoy sunshine, to plant lush lawns and to grow gardens.

A geologist or a driller is like a fisherman, because he knows where the remarkable wells are; the ones that yield abundant clear and cool water. At first, the geologist and the apprentice driller’s helper knows little and every new well is a greater discovery. Later, after each worker has covered a region for about a decade, he knows the potential for good wells in local areas. The geologist knows where the geological structures are that serve up water the best. The apprentice driller has moved up to a driller’s position and his background is in having had performed some of the work in finding the same good places for getting water.

In the Columbia River valley, an older geologist, Rueben Newcomb, discovered that downwarped folds, synclines, guide water as if acting as great troughs. When these troughs were dammed at the lower end with faults, the water would build up and flow at great volumes at the land surface. Sometimes, a well pump would not be needed. His work, for the U.S. Geological Survey, aided farmers who developed an orchard industry in the Columbia River Gorge. By the mid 1970’s, the orchard business was fully developed and became renowned as its produce was shipped around the country. A mural of the beginning of this business is displayed at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem.

Old drillers, now retired, were the “go-to” people for land owners and irrigators to find their water throughout the State of Oregon. Haarkon Bottner was one such driller in the Portland area. Harold Borchers drilled many good deep wells in the Chehalem Mountain, a wide section of dipping rock near Newberg, and Harry Robinson drilled many high-capacity irrigation wells in the Willamette Valley around Salem.

The stories of these drillers and stories of the drillers who are working today can be gleaned from computerized well log records by searching for “OWRD” on the internet. In each section around the cities that I have mentioned are many water well records. The records can be sorted by completion date so that a reader can see drillers come and go. These records are the beginning of understanding of an area for a geologist. When the geologist carefully locates some of the wells, a local picture develops as ideas, then as maps and cross-sections.

Geologists find faults from mapping the mis-aligning of layers under the surface. Often, there is a fold to tip of the presence of a fault. These faults not only trap water, but their force breaks the nearby rock layers, thus improving the rate of flow from the wells. A higher capacity well is cheaper to operation. The water level does not drop as far and water does not have to be lifted from such great depths. More water is produced for the same amount of electric power.

Like in a river or a pond, something natural or man-made can go wrong among wells. Pollution may occur and has to be cleaned up. Pollution enters the water-bearing layers as a plume. The plume has to be hunted by geologists and chemists with laboratory analyses. The source of the pollution has to be dug up and properly disposed. The plume water has to be pumped out, pumped backward or treated with nuetralizing chemicals. Since underground water moves so slowly, large plumes require a long time to clean up.

In an area of many wells, sometimes, too much water begins to be pumped out of the ground. Then, the total annual pumping has to be reduced and, usually, the newest well users have to give up or suspend their pumping. This is painful. Most states have legal statutes and scientific solutions to prevent this matter from becoming too dire.

This came to me quite by accident, but concentrating your rock samples behind the door to your study or office is a great idea! Arrange your rock samples from smallest to largest, starting behind the door and near it. Place a folded strip of large bubble bubble-wrap in front of the rocks, so the door does not brush the rocks. Add a six or seven inch diameter fire extinguisher back from the door to serve as the largest rock and as the main backstop. Try it. You will LIKE IT!

In 1997 and 1997, there was a dry ford and a concrete ford across a creek between the Detroit Ranger Station and the Shops. Normally, this was fine because the creek was dry in the summer and flowed a little during the winter. Up the creek, however, was evidence of something much more dangerous. Boulders were distributed in lobes, suggesting that the creek could flood very strongly. My son, Jonathan, was looking for a Boy Scout Eagle Project site where he could do something to “make a difference”. I showed him the site.

The U.S. Forest Service does not do construction work “by halves”, so there was paperwork and time involved to approach the problem. Jonathan went through the steps and the Willamette National Forest Bridge Design Engineer and the Detroit District Hydrologist signed off on the design after visiting the intended crossing. USFS Fire Department people aided the design work and assisted with technical expertise. Vince Grace felled the tree for the log bridge and another fireman, tugged the log into position on the levees with the district fire truck and a very thick rope.

The bridge was to have a single handrail and man-made abutments, like a bridge that was later built by the USFS on Fall Creek.

Perhaps, Jonathan’s bridge was further inspiration for the bridge at Fall Creek. The sketch follows:
The bridge spanned the two “natural” levees of the stream. The levees were overgrown with large trees. The selected tree laid a few tens of feet east of the final bridge site. Vince felled it into a small nest of criss-crossed smaller trees to lighten the fall, so that the log didn’t crack. Then, the fire engine tugged it into position. This bridge was a little more complicated than the USFS field crew bridge of 2006 at Fall Creek, because the abutments for this bridge were sand and rock-filled wooden cribs. Each end was leveled separately. The next steps were cutting the flat top and setting the supports. The log had a slight bow, due to its weight. The west support (left) would help prolong the life of the bridge. Before the handrail was installed, the log was peeled of its bark.
The last act was a corrugated steel deck as a foot tread. This was added later. The bridge lasted until between 2010 and 2011, when the handrail became too rotten for continued use. By that time, the bridge had served the Ranger District for 12 years. It remains in position, today, the log crossing ready for a new handrail. It could be replaced by a nice steel bridge, such is the need for reliable access to the Shops from the Offices.

A last note: The bridge was in use during storms when it may have been the only access to the Shops from the Office without driving on Route 22. It provided a nice walk along the footpath toward the dorms for summer interns and visitors. I like to think that the bridge was a good contribution by Jonathan to the Ranger District scene.

You are at the Beach.  The sun is out and the air is cool, but the wind is annoying.  It whips sand in your face and there is a chill.  Where do you go, to get comfortable without heading back off the beach.  You go to the dunes.  You find a spot that is in the sun, warm and out of the wind.  Dune grass waves in the wind and makes a comforting rustling sound.

You know that you are in a dune.  It is a big pile of sugary sand that is held in one place (”stabilized”) by the special shoreline grass.  You can see its round edges be buried by nearby dunes or flatten to the beach.  You are standing on the real thing.  You are at the starting point of what geologists call The Principle of Uniformitarianism.  Sounds like a religion or a profound political movement, something English out of Animal Farm or the Socialist experiment of the 1970s.  Uniformitarianism is that “The Present is The Key to The Past”, because there are buried sand dunes that cities explore for water, geologists search for oil and gas.

Take one step down and now we are underground and near the surface.  The Dunes are buried, but have been cut by a roadway, a railroad cut or by a utility trench.  Maybe they have been exposed along a river bank.  Recognizing the dune is not so easy now, but there are tell-tale signs.  The sand may be filled in with water, mud or natural lime cement, but it is still sugary.  The sand grains are round, the layers slope as if, just yesterday, you were lying on them.  The tops of the dunes are usually lopped off by deposits of dunes upon them.  Maybe not. The grass is almost gone, the few blades pressed as if in a pressed flower book and turned brown or even black by decay or by being turned to carbon (carbonization).

Take another step down.  This time, the dune sand is more competent (it hold together in pieces and its particles are no longer loose).  A vertical core has been taken and has been laid out in five foot long boxes, fifteen to twenty feet to a box.  You don’t know that you are looking at a dune, but there is that familiar sand and bedding again.  You may even be able to blow your breath through it, in tribute to the loose sand that it once was.  A give-away that this could be a dune sand is the coring Rate Of Penetration (R.O.P.). I call it “Drill Time”.  Dune sand drills fast, especially if it is porous (the original air spaces of the dune has not been cemented closed).

Take one more step down.  You don’t have enough money or time to drill an expensive core, so the drill rig is advancing the hole with a bit.  Thin slivers of rock are separated out of the drilling mud by a set of screens.  The mud goes down and away to be treated, remixed and used in the hole, again.  You catch the rock pieces in a hand-held screen.  You have bits of rock.  You cannot see the bedding, anymore.  You might see a thin band across a piece.  You see the sugary sand again and the “Drill Time” is fast.  The spaces are there, but now you have a problem.  You cannot see the height and extent of the dune the way that you could by standing on the dune at the shore.  You will not be able to define one dune like you could then.  You can define a group of dunes by drilling expensive boreholes, a quarter mile apart and taking a few cores.

Take another step down.

Hard work is so rare in American suburban society today, that the simple word for it, “Toil”, has fallen out of use…, yet this common and ancient practice is what has made great nations.

I saw toil in practice, recently, at Texas and Louisiana oil rigs.  These great machines are modern wonders, staffed by experienced teams of workers, but everyone has to work hard.  As each well is drilled deeper, safety and oil or gas finding conditions change with every new formation that is penetrated. Every twenty minutes, each crew member has to react or record a piece of drilling information, because events on an oil rig can changed in a twinkling. If the drill bit does not move, it can get stuck, or it can punch through a high pressure gas zone and the rig can literally “kick” with a small jump and a loud bang.  One well may be very deep and the drilling mud may be boiling when it reaches the surface. Natural gas entering from an upper zone may imperil producing oil or gas from a deeper target zone. Toil is constant and it builds character. Success comes from completing a difficult, often perilous job. Confidence comes from finishing another job that is unique in its challenges.

I just pasted my Continental Airlines passenger stub into a blank page in August on my Day Timer.  The one way ticket cost me a bundle tto go back to Oregon from Houston.  The nice thing about it was that the trip was non-stop, such is the flying of a major airline.

Geologists usually know where they are at all times, if they have been over or think they have been over an air route once.  Such was my belief.  After forty five minutes in the air out of Houston International, the plane was high over flat land, the Great Plains.  I was tracking the direction, using my upturned palm as a sun dial in the sun’s rays coming through the window.  We saw the Rocky Mountains and then familiar mountains came into view.  I told the girl in the window seat that we were now over Klamath Falls, Oregon.  I had recognized the large Klamath Lake.  Then, I waited for the requisite passage of an hour and a half for the Oregon Cascades to come into view.  That didn’t happen.  Two and a half hours passed and the plane made its west turn to fly over and alongside the Columbia River.  Soon, Mount Hood came into view at the window.  By this time, I realized that the Klamath Lake that I saw was something else.  Could it be Great Salt Lake.  We descended into PDX and landed.  I asked the Captain if we had flown north, a considerable distance to Great Salt Lake.  He said yes and said that it was clearly visible. This part of my running commentary to the girl in the window seat had been really wrong.  I caught up to her in the departing group and said, “Well I was wrong about the Lake, but you can see how enthusiastic geologists can be about their science.  She laughed and said that was okay.  Her sister was a geologist.

Uh, that last swallow of coffee was grainy.  Shouldn’t ha’ done that!

A couple of factors concerning the Eagle Ford and a comparision to that last swallow of coffee.

1.  There is a cross-over technology at play, the study by highway foundation engineers of the fine-grained end of natural “soil”.  To engineers, anything that is unconsolidated is “Soil” and foundation drill holes into bridge foundations or along a planned roadway or dam crossing are called “soil borings”.

The “Blah” coffee event deals with the fine-grained end; clay-sized (CL), organic clay (OL), Silt (ML) and Organic Silt (OH).

2.  Let’s add the Field Geologist’s and Field Engineer’s recognition of silt.  Put a small clod between your teeth.  If it chews like bread, it is silt.  If gritty, it is fine sand.

Now to the Coffee and the Eagle Ford.  The Coffee grounds are organic, right.  They chew like silt.  The Eagle Ford is organic.  I have seen the samples near San Antonio and the lower Eagle Ford has a vitreous luster, 1/3 like instant coffee crystals.  It is waxy, sometimes earthy and has a resinous feel when ground to powder for testing.  Boil the carbonate out of some Lower Eagle Ford samples and you get silt.  Yes, I know that it is a shale.  There is probably a lot of clay, but my coffee experience suggests that the organic content made the original Eagle Ford act like an organic silt (OH).

Chase that idea down, you Eagle Ford petrophysicists and stratigraphers!

We, Moderns, driving our air-conditioned cars, in instant touch with any part of the world through our cell phones and cocooned in our warm electric or natural gas heated homes, cannot appreciate the outdoor recreations of our ancestors. Ponder a river race from New York City in 1900.  A thousand people watched a rowing race on the Hudson River from docks and from boats. These people wore wool jackets, leather shoes and ducked under umbrellas when the wind and rain began to blast.  Hundreds more watched from rowboats, sailing schooners and small steamships that rocked in squalls and waves.  Five hundred stood on a wind-blown barge, the women screaming as larger waves rocked it.

My story comes from a rowing contest on the Hudson River, a venue that is no longer acceptable as a regular racing location, but active recreation in American cities was more rugged.   The rowing season spanned a short time, from Memorial Day to Labor Day.  The weather was more often stormy and cold than not.  Races were interrupted by ocean-going steamships and tugs pulling or pushing long strings of barges. People went outside and dared the elements. Today, people do not seem to be as hardy, and perhaps that is too bad.

Old Pick

Field Map:  A roll of paper, often stored vertically in a map rack, with geologic information across a wide geographic area.

Map Tube:  A container for the field map, bent on the master bedroom ceiling by the geologist’s wife, who is swatting a bug while he is far away in Texas, drilling for oil.

I have been told by a friend (A.K.) that oil business researchers are building some kind of brain to gather and to be able to recall rock outcroppings from anywhere in the world that match what is being discovered in new wells.  Words cannot explain this concept adequately in a small space.  I don’t want to be bored and I don’t want to bore you, dear reader, but lets look at this effort from another angle, experience.

Forty years ago, computers did not exist.  Geologists got their experience from going to college, talking to and drinking beer with their professors, reading books and doing field work.  Older geologists were walking libraries.  All oil companies still have them, hidden away on an upper floor of headquarters or hired as consultants.  A computer is an aid to this treasure trove of experience.

Imagine this!  Geologists and field assistants pour over rocky hills. Yes, those rocky areas along the super-highways of America; Route 78, Route 80, Route 70, Route 66, Route 35, Interstate 5 and even the Taconic Parkway; have “rock outcroppings” that can deliver detailed information that could “save” an expensive oil well or turn a ’squeaker’ into a “gusher”!

It is important to remember that an outcropping is like a wedding cake.  It is three dimensional with a length of thousands of feet, a height of tens of feet to hundreds of feet and a width of a few tens of feet or more.  The width of an outcropping in the wet, tree and shrub-covered Eastern United States is a few tens of feet, disappearing into a hillside……but,…in the arid western part of the Country the outcropping can extend for miles from the roadway.  It can be viewed, measured and interpretted from airplanes like the rocks in Utah and Colorado.  Google “Moab” , “Zion” or “Bryce Canyon”.  Look up the “Navajo Sandstone” and you can guess how much easier it is to “read the rocks!” in the West than in the East.

Let’s say that you were in the west in one of the parks that I mentioned or in another area where a wall of rock is esposed.  Let us assume that the rocks are flat-lying and the road is flat-lying, also.  Pick a distinct band of distinct material, something that catches you eye, then follow it.  This is called, “walking out” an outcropping.  If you are following a sand, the bottom may dip or undulate, it could be curved.  If the top of the sand or sandstone (sand or grit turned to hard rock) is flat, you are probably looking at a channel.  (Note: Geologists write book chapters and articles about channels).  As you follow the bottom you may find a bottom area of bigger granules or even cobbles.  This really is a channel or something like.  You can imagine what formed it; an active river channel carrying boulders and laying them up along a bend, a sandy beach inside the curve.  If this was a deposit from modern times, people would have pulled up a canoe on the beach and had a picnic.  Go ahead, imagine, dream, even..the rock is not a critic.

Let’s get one thing straight, before I start.

I am talking about Detroit, Oregon.  The locals pronounce the name with the accent on the first syllable.  Please bear with me, say it,…..DE-troit.   Saying the name this way at the Mountain Home grocery store in DE - troit, makes the decent folks of this small village, tucked away in the Cascade Mountains, on Route 22 (the main highway between Salem and Bend) feel that all is well with the world and ….NOT suspect you of being an Easterner.

This is my RAVE about Detroit and all things Oregonian.  The people are nice, but I am talking about the scenery.  Oregon is GREEN and DAMP.  It is mountainous and has VOLCANOES, pointed peaks that dot the skyline on the east side of the Willamette Valley.  If you visit Oregon, you will fly into the one large airport in the state and you will be in the Willamette Valley.  You cannot help seeing volcanoes!  All the jetliners pass three of them when you fly in on the approach to Portland.  To the left of the plane (you are flying west as you come in) is Mount Hood with glistening ice glaciers and a snowy summit.  With a fair pair of binoculars, you probably can pick out mountain climbers on the summit.

But, it is the trees that “Wow” you and Detroit is a great place to see the big trees along the highway and on the mountains.  My wife and I took a drive, here, today and enjoyed my old stomping ground in the woods.  We had gotten too used to the forest, but visitors just stare in awe at the trees. The trees are giants, leaping up to 180 or 250 feet high alongside the road.  Dark shade of their overhanging branches gives a sense of mystery, even foreboding to the smaller roadways that turn off Route 22 and go up the steep valleys.  In summer mornings and sometimes into the afternoon, tree branches drip dew onto the roads.  Green moss, intrudes the right of way from the roadside.  The trees parade up the mountain sides in crown after crown, gowning the mountainsides and edging around rock ledges that overlook the town.

The bottom three hundred feet of the valley is filled with the Detroit Reservoir.  The dam turns electric power as part of the Bonneville electric network.  You see, Detroit is really “new” Detroit. The old town is drowned in the Santiam River channel with its old railroad grade, turntable and foundations of small homes from the 1950s.  Detroit, the new town, sits on a glaciated shoulder of the Santiam Valley and grabs the Breitenbush River Valley.

Do I HAVE TO bring in my rental car?!  Kia and I don’t want to come in, even if you want only to check his mileage.  You see, we have become inseparable.  We have had so many Adventures and are afraid that you might take him away and commit him to city driving around Houston! How pedantic!

We two have been through a lot!  We pulled into the cheesesteak house in Cuero and were cooling our heels in one of the booths sipping rootbeer when Kia revved his engine at one of the leggy waitresses (So, he likes “Long and Tall”) and got kicked out to the curb to wait for me to finish up.  Undaunted, the little guy made his own plans.  He left the oil well left location when I was catching some Zz’s in the mudlogging trailer and met a cream Beemer at the new railroad grade.  I could tell of his rendezvous, because his tire threw a stone off the side of the gate trailer (Sorry, Barb!) on the way out the next day.

Kia endured the following hot days in heat and blowing dust, without complaint, as the heat grew and fell off into moonlit nights.  I thought he was happier in Cuero, he uttered not a miss and bounded merrily across the ruts of narrow farm roads back into town.  When the job was done, we drove back to Houston.  The Beemer was at the grade, winking her parking lights, waving her sunroof cover and beeping, plaintively.

Kia also brought ‘a little special SOMETHING’ to downtown Kenedy.  We sachayed around and over bumps in the highway asphalt on the way west to another well.  Kia dutifully took me along different county routes into town, almost always in the early morning hours. While I was sleeping, he was seeing his new girlfriend, behind the Rialto.  A cute yellow Cutlass flashed her headlights and driving lights in the dusk at him as we headed home to Houston.  She beeped three times in farewell as he tooted his horn and tagged his taillights.

And…he got me home from great distances, 300 miles from Laredo in the heat, 200 miles from ‘Lousiana’ and another 240 miles from San Antonio.  I had so much fun, I don’t think that I have billed those miles, yet.

So, we are pals.  I don’t want to say goodbye to this steady little friend.  I might have to give him up, but perhaps, we will see each other again.  If we go our separate ways, I can imagine Kia at that Cuero railroad crossing or behind the Rialto.

I went down to Texas to join the new oil business in 2011.   The work was exciting but, for a time, my involvement was cut short  by the Heat Wave of Plus 100 degree temperatures.  Meteorologists called this phenomonan “The Heat Dome”.

One town, Cuero, Texas, was rockin’!  New schools and athletic facilities and practice fields dotted the ridge east of the town center.  The downtown was renewed and there was a restored City Hall and new police station.  Cell phone service extended into the countryside, so that 7 miles away, I could call home to Oregon.  Ah, those moonlight phone calls to my wife!

Kenedy, Texas, seemed not to be so lucky.  Downtown was almost completely shuttered and the Rialto, once the center of social life was boarded up.  The parking lot behind this movie house was chained off.

What was one difference?  Cuero had received oil and gas capital for to its new growth. An independent oil company from Houston had a large and orderly branch office. Downtown Kenedy seemed not to have received the same kind of attention. The downtown was blighted with only a few business places in use. The Rialto, the movie house was boarded up.  Symbolic of this sad contrast were the railroads.  I like railroads and lament the closing and ripping up of track and structures when they die.  The railroad in Cuero was restored.  The roadbed had new ballast, crossings were rubber tiled and clearly signalled.  The railroad in Kenedy was an overgrown pathway, that led right through downtown.  New growth and commercial activity was two miles away along Route 183.

Old Pick

My work on a wetland issue in Oregon is gradually wrapping up. Wetlands are a result of existing land form and hydraulic and depositional processes that happen upon that form. Wetlands exist in the midst of branching stream and river channels where there is a sudden decrease in slope. In the case of the great delta of the Mississippi River, the change in slope is at the mouth of the river on the Gulf of Mexico where the great river has deposited a long delta. Large or small, the deposits of a delta are channels, sediment and reed area.

In our present experience of paved road and suburban ease, wetlands are a nuisance. They hinder and bog down and prevent growth. This is a ignorant view, yet books have been written about engineering wetlands away or to smaller sizes.

Wetlands have the following beneficial roles.

a. They detain flood water.

They slow high water flow in their systems of meandering channels and reed-lined pools.  The height and destructive force of downstream water is less during a flood, because the water that would have joined in on the destruction is held up in the wetlands.
b. They make stream water clean.

Wetlands act as large filters, completely without paying people to operate control gates and filter beds.  You have heard of activated charcoal as a filter. Imagine many thousands of charcoal filters created by biologic decay of grass, straw and moss. The cleaning is done by Nature!
c. Wetlands provide special habitat.

Go to a wetland and you will find fish, bottom land song birds, waterfowl and geese, turtles, amphibians and salamanders.  Being lower and out of the wind, wetlands are warmer, and provide hiding and warm natural blankets of low brush and reeds for animals to lie down in and to nest.  Some wetlands insects, plants and animals are different than at your homes.  Other animals sleep in the wetlands and walk past your windows during the daytime. Roamers, like deer and foxes find protection.  Local, less well-traveled animals, like Beavers build their homes and dams in the wetlands, and provide deeper quiet water for fish and ducks.
Wetlands are not only an intrinsic good, they are a vital piece of an unpolluted landscape.  Healthy wetlands show that people living in the region have regard for their “habitat” and probably have respect for one another.  Don’t fill in the wetlands!

This post is about the great hydraulic engineers of nature, Beavers. They go by several quaint names.

“Beaver” is in itself, a quaint “Country” or, should I say, “Urban” term, because one of my most surprising encounters with one was at an accident scene, near the Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City. I had stopped to lend First Aid assistance to an old couple who had been involved in a automobile collision. The old couple was rattled and the woman was about to get out of the vehicle after arranging her hair and straightening her hair. I urged her to remain seated and offered encouraging and comforting words. The first aid squad came right along. I went back to my car. In the small swamp nearby and contently nosing a small tree limb down its improved canal was a beaver. He/she/ it was not minding any of the frantic human activity on the overpass.

Beaver are common in Oregon. They are in the Coast Range and Cascade Mountains. They are in streams and wetlands of other parts of the State. Beaver dam on river by Luther C. Goldman, U.S. Fish and Wildlife ServiceFrench trappers hunted them in the streams upriver of Oregon City and brought their pelts one hundred miles downriver through the Willamette and Columbia River system to the English-owned Hudson Bay Company trading post at Astoria. The French name for Beaver was Champoeg (pronounced “Sham pooey”). A trading post by that name, was located on the low east bank of the Willamette River, 25 miles upriver from Portland.

Beavers are pesky. They carry on their dam-building and canal-widening activities in almost every valley, regardless of human endeavor. Beaver use road culverts as tunnels between their lodges and forage areas. One set of beaver parents raised a series of dams alongside one County highway in the Oregon Coast Range. The water soaked in the highway embankment, causing our state road engineers problems with road fill and culvert failures.

Now, to Dad and the Boomers. Oregonians call beaver this name, “Boomers”, for their penchant to slap their tails on pond and river surfaces to frighten other animals and trespassers away. Beaver seem to be private and have plans of their own. They float their ponderous bodies on water impounded behind their dams, sliding of the top of the dams to enter the next constructed downstream pond. Beaver don’t dam up great rivers, such as the Connecticut River of the coming Dartmouth scene, but they travel along the river to sloughs that are blocked by their constructions.

Dad was fishing on the Beaverkill River, between Fishkill and Roscoe, New York with me in 1967. The sun had set over the hills at the Hansell and Gretel Cabins on Route 17 and Dad was fishing the glassy calm stretch below the Big Gut Pool. Dusk was deepening into a dark gray tone and Dad was having trouble seeing his 6X (For you, that is one pound test line, Jerry!). Suddenly, there was a great splash, and Dad thought that a great Brown Trout was rising. I was one hundred yards upstream, flipping a huge cream variant just below the Shale slab that was leaning against the vertical cut bank of the river. “Splash!, …. I backed up out of the deeper water and walked down the shingle and sand to nearer Dad’s position in mid-stream. His lapel light was lit and he was changing flies and muttering, impatiently. The mess of trout that we had caught so far this weekend were small and He WANTED this fish! “SLAP” and then…..’zag’… the fish had turned and was tracing a sharp wake on the surface, oblivious to my father’s furtive casts. This was NO FISH. I waited for the end of the run and then a dark paddle-like object appeared out of the water and “SLAP!”. Now, you don’t tell a middle-aged man with a new set of bifocals that he is fishing for a beaver. “That might not be a fish”. “I think so”, he said, but the idea was planted. Up out of the water came the beaver’s nose and whiskers, followed by the rug of his fur as he turned in full view and cut away from us. No big fish, tonight.

Roll forward to 2003. Dartmouth crew teams are practicing several miles upriver from the school boathouse. Suddenly, one boat is charged by an angry swimming animal and the rowers move the boat swiftly away. Now, the teams are on their guard against an angry beaver and some are afraid to enter that portion of the river. The news makes the New York Times as a small item of interest. I can imagine that beaver, not so much “afraid” as offended, it’s purpose of using the river to go somewhere being interrupted. “Scram, this is my river, give me room or I will bite that thing, I care how big it is!”.

Oil producing regions in the United States are now being joined by new areas of exploration. This news has been trumpeted in traditional oil business capitals (Denver, Los Angeles, Houston and Oklahoma City). The increase in oil and gas drilling action has been noted extensively in Eastern U.S. newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times. The news is sandwiched between reporting segments in Television Evening News.

You have seen her, the swank well-spoken in a dark suit on the TV commercial with an elevator going down through rock layers. As a little boy, I recall that ride, a long elevator ride from the top of Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks. The elevator car went down through rock layers and ended at a damp horizontal tunnel that led to a high parking lot on the mountainside. In the current story, the elegant woman took an elevator in a glass tube, that represents an oil well. The well angles into horizontal extensions. These extensions are part of unconventional drilling, wells that don’t only go “straight down”, like they used to do.

The wells are grabbing more hydrocarbon-bearing formation. Drilling in the continental United States is starting to jump. Drilling activities have spread beyond the older oil fields. New oil capitals are springing up in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Binghamton and New York City. Most of the workers in the new fields are from “oil country”, but new workers and trained engineers and geologists are starting to be drawn from Eastern Colleges. Pennsylvania State University has held two annual petroleum technology festivals. With dying environmentalist reluctance, other eastern schools are allowing their graduates to enter the oil business.

They SHOULD do this!

All the improvements in wind power and electric transportation are not yet enough to power a great country. Light a match above a small can of gasoline and stand back. Harnessing of that energy rapidly drives our cars, trucks, trains and cargo ships. The Toyota Prius, the best marvel of this time, uses electrical energy only to overcome inertia. The movement is like moving through First gear in a jeep. The rest of the vehicle movement is done by internal combustion of fossil fuel, the stuff we drill for. For all the environmental problems and end-of-the-world scenarios for global warming, there is nothing better than gasoline. I am following the main point of The Prize by Daniel Yergin. The country that has fuel at the least price is one that has economic advantages. Oil is power. It should be pointed out that such advantages can be used well (Examples are the United States, Saudi Arabia and England) or misused (Consider militarizing and slaughter of civilian populations in The Sudan, raising of paramilitary police in Iran, and mercenary armies employed by Libya).

Cheap oil gave the United States the American Dream. The fanning out of hard working immigrants from American coastal cities into the rest of the nation increased the number and variety of jobs after World War II. Green lawns, air conditioning and color television became expected standards of a high standard of living. In 2008, the American Dream “hit the Wall”. The fantasy could not be kept alive. Still, the new oil and gas rush is a great help, economically, and technically. Great new fuel reserves provide jobs and quick energy for all uses. It is here in America. It is ours to drill. Technically, there is no better practical training in business. The technology is transferable to definition and management of natural resources, such as ground water and even inventories and maps of the land surface. So we have time, and a fine time it is going to be.

An Oregon news team was waiting on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean watching the ocean level receding and tsunami waves rushing into shore and into the Siletz Bay inlet. The tsunamis had been generated by the Sendai, Japan earthquake of March 11, 2011. Fortunately, near Lincoln City, Oregon the waves were small, but the event was not over at the coast and there was still a possibility of larger waves appearing. Along the beach, people were walking unaware and uncaring about the danger. A man walked his dog. A youth was prospecting for a good wavelet on which to toss his boogie board. A man brought his wife along, while he prospected for agates that he knew would already be washed up by the tsunami waves that had just occurred. One of his fellow agate hunters was caught by the knees from a tsunami. Very fortunately, that soul was not taken out to sea.

The news crew, wave watchers and a local fire marshall posted on the bluff were peeved by these ignorant and uncaring acts. The fire marshal blared his siren and gave shrill warnings to the witless youth, who finally gave a “thumbs up” signal and sauntered away from the beach. The agate hunter and his wife ignored the warning, hunched over in their search. Morons.

Yet, faced with the known prospect of a great quake that will affect me or my family, I look at the dilemma and “cover my eyes”, forgetting the prospect of little food, no electricity, a cold house and nowhere to go. I sit here in my living room, looking out into the overcast morning sky, saying to myself, “Do I really want to stockpile food? Should it be wheat to prepare and cook or instant macaroni and cheese to heat over a camp stove? How much camp cooking fuel do I have? Do I really want to go outside to the shed and find out?”, because a week has passed since the Japan Quake and I am starting not to care, again.

Old Pick

Over the last few days, I was shocked to discover that a tsunami can climb up a river valley. The source of such unusual behavior is a Great Quake. The great quake to which I refer is the Sendai Quake of March 11th, 2011. Yesterday, Harry Smith of CBS News, pointed up the valley in which he was standing and the camera caught total devastation that was considerably above the original 21 foot height of the tsunami. Mr. Smith pointed to a sign, far up the valley, that marked the beginning of a designed safety zone. Devastation extended a mile upriver of that point.

WHY? A partial answer came today when a British news crew for CNN visited a narrower valley that was protected by great storm barriers. The thick barriers, that had resisted tsunamis before were destroyed, the giant sections of concrete laid over like beached ships with protruding I-beam wreckage. This was done by tremendous force. The tsunami waves from this event were much stronger than the waves from previous events. The camera team went to the destroyed village. The town site seemed to be considerably higher, maybe a hundred feet above sea level. (Update, April 2011: A former head of the U.S. Tsunami Center indicated, later, that some of these waves rose to an elevation as high on the Japanese coast as 130 feet above sea level).

The destruction in these valleys, bordered by headlands in East Honshu Island, cries out “WARNING” for the bays and headlands along the Pacific Northwest coastline. The higher headlands and the narrowing valley walls seem to focus and to intensify the power of a great tsunami so that it climbs.

What does this say about our longer river valleys in California, Oregon and Washington? It may say that we would be very wrong to assume that after a moderate or reasonable distance upriver, people would be safe. The valley walls would focus and preserve the energy of the waves.

The driving question is “How much energy will a tsunami wave have from the great quake, the “Big One”, that is to hit the Pacific Northwest? I don’t know all of the dynamics. I have heard about the great wavelength of a tsunami wave. Let’s just talk about speed. A tsumani comes across the ocean at the speed of sound, about the time that it takes to fly to Japan. The frequency of a 15 foot storm swell with five feet of wind-added wave height from the gale that coming to Oregon, tomorrow morning…is one wave every 14 seconds. Imagine that you are standing on a 25 foot dock and a wave that size comes every 14 seconds. I don’t have enough information, but you can begin to imagine that the wave from this oncoming gale has a lot of kick. The tsunami has SO MUCH MORE power and everyone has been held spellbound by the waves that picked up whole cities, ground them to kindling and rubble and moved them away.

Let’s consider the lifting power of the Sendai tsunami waves. One close-up photograph had a strong message. It was a picture of the deposit that was left by the waves. The site was several miles inland from the sea. The big pieces of the deposit were wreckage of houses, half-buried automobiles and everyday home contents (plastic bins and family items). The upper layer in this particular picture was a 5 foot thickness of smashed lumber. The material that held all of this flotsam together was coarse-grained sand from the ocean. It takes a lot of energy for flowing water to suspend and to carry this coarse material. This sand load and the suffocating and smashing damage that it must have done shouts out that the energy in the tsunami waves was tremendous. The energy was proportional to the size of the earthquake. The released energy of the great Sendai earthquake powered these waves. The great earthquake that will arrive before AD 2050 off the Pacific Northwest will also have the same scale of destruction. Many people who think they are safe will die along our coasts and riverways.

Close attention to cell phone video from Tokyo homes and workplaces shows that this great earthquake (Measured as the 5th largest quake on seismographs since 1900) was a real surprise to the people in Japan.  Quakes happen all the time in that country and people are accustomed to big and moderate quakes, so they tried to wait this quake out, also.

Not so, with this great quake!  Let’s consider one scene recorded in a Tokyo home.  The quake came with a large shock and the room shook.  The glass tea cups clinked on their handles as they dangled from hooks in a dining room hutch for 20 seconds.  Then, the shaking got out of control, the tea cups shattered, furniture danced and shelves and taller furniture fell over as window glass broke and cabinet doors flew open.  Out in the street, now, the picture-taker could not stand.   The intensifying sequence was repeated in workplaces.  In a newsroom, swaying turned to violent shifting back and forth and high flat screen computer monitors diving off shelves and table tops onto the floor.

My quick point, in this writing, is that the early part of the quake gave people in buildings time to react.  First floor occupants could leave the building.  Higher floor residents could get under their tables and in doorways to find safety.  A take-away, perhaps, is that in this quake and in the coming Big One, people could run out of a building, if there are not many other people.  It is safer outside and in the open during a great quake.

Casualties were greater by a multiplier of about 100 times in a 21 foot tsunami that raked low-lying shoreline areas of NE Japan.  As of this writing (March 16th), 3800 people have died, 8200 people are missing and 2200 people have been injured.  Worse, yet, a set of nuclear reactors lost cooling water and a crisis of radiation release and reactor meltdown continues.

The Sendai quake is, in many experts’ words, going to be the mirror image of the earthquake, the Big One, that will hit the Pacific Northwest before 2050.  The scale of the earthquakes and the size of the tsunami are equally destructive, although the Big One may come as a 10 (1000 times stronger).

Old Pick

I had dinner, recently, with a young major oil company geologist who could not get his bosses to let him look at relevant rock outcroppings to his reservoir study.

In 1983, Gulf let me visit the sand dunes near Waynoka, Oklahoma. The trip was an eye-opener for my understanding of cores from a dune sand oil field in Wyoming. I was doing a connectivity study for getting more oil out of the Duvall Ranch Field. The field trip changed my perspective and gave me confidence in my project work.

The recent field trip that I speak about was taken by geoscientists of Apache Corporation. Here is the link: http://www.apachecorp.com/explore/Browse_Archives/View_Article.aspx?Article.ItemID=337