Tam has a recent post concerning military training in LA. It reminded me of an incident that happened back when I worked in Big Oil.
I was called into a meeting where I met a Special Forces Major from the Joint Readiness Training Center and a Spooky Civilian. (The civilian was wearing a lapel pin replica of the Meritorious Service Medal). We exchanged business cards and they made their pitch.
This was about a year after the First Gulf War. It seems that the military had some difficulties in destroying Sadam's offshore platforms and they wanted to train on how to do it better. They knew that the oil industry needed to remove our platforms at the end of their life and they were offering to do the job for us at no charge. They just wanted the fun of blowing the thing up and learning how to do the same to the enemie's platforms, should it become necessary.
While their offer was indeed interesting, we explained that not only did we have to remove the platform, we had to clear the sea floor of debris and could not leave any scrap steel that could snag fishing nets or otherwise make a hazard. This pretty much killed the discussion.
Things continued on with a short discussion of a terrorist drill where they would perform a HAHO jump with the intent of landing paratoopers on the platform while SEAL Team 6 infiltrated from below. It sounded like fun but we were concerned about what a bunch of Louisiana red necks would do if they suddenly had armed men dropping in from the sky and climbing the platform legs.
We took a short break before we adjourned. When I came back to the meeting, I noticed that the business cards that I had left on the table with my note book, had disappeared. It was as if it had never happened.
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5 comments:
My friends who work on the rigs would have a cow! And probably get felony convictions for their (quite natural) response to that sort of suprise. I'll be laughing all day thinking about that.
It's been done a few times... Just not with 'manned' rigs...
A friend who spent some time in the North Sea told me about an incident where the Brits made a training assault on one of their platforms. One of the assault team was cold cocked by one of the rig hands. It seems the rig hand had been in the SAS and still retained his skilz.
As a Brit myself, your comment about the North Sea rig story is hilarious. That must indeed have gone down in the annals of rig worker pub stories. Just out of curiosity, do you happen to know what happened next, I mean did the assault team go after the former SAS guy, or they all just had a good laugh (well excepting the chap who was unconscious!).
As you can imagine, there was a WTF moment when they found out that the lamb had teeth. They called a halt to the exercise to get it sorted. I imagine a few pints were downed when back on shore.
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