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Show Was Testing Well .... $300,000 Oil Well Fire Destroys Rig A $300,000 fire that destroyed j an oil drilling rig at the Whit-1 lock-Taylor oil well in the I Roosevelt Pool near Bennett, Wednesday morning, was i i brought under control by late afternoon, with no apparent damage to the well itself, according ac-cording to Charles Johnson, official of-ficial of Carter ' Oil Co. Two workers suffered injuries during dur-ing the fire. The blaze, which was set off at 7:45 a.m., toppled the new 122-ft. drilling rig of the Kerr-McGee Kerr-McGee Drilling Co. in 15 minutes. min-utes. It was over the Whitlock-Taylor Whitlock-Taylor No. 1 field well some distance west of other wells at the pool. Injured were Carl Sweatfield, driller, and Tom Abplanalp, rotary ro-tary helper, both Kerr-McGee employees who were on the derrick der-rick floor when the fire started. They suffered superficial burns. The blaze was extinguished about 1 pjn. by the fire fighting equipment of the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co. and the Vernal city fire department. Other members of the drilling crew escaped injury or death because they were off the derrick der-rick floor mixing drilling mud near the rig. No derrick man was atop the steel pylon. The mishap occurred following follow-ing a test of the welL According to rig hands on the well, natural gas began to bubble bub-ble up through the drilling mud' in volume. They theorized that when a rotary helper started to close the electrically operated "blowout "blow-out preventers," which shut off flow of material from the well head, a spark from the electric motors ignited the gas. Flames halted efforts to close the preventers, located under th derrick flooring. Oil base mud, used in drilling the well, also caught lire, adding add-ing to the blaze. The fire was finally extinguished extin-guished by flooding the well head with chemicals from Vernal Ver-nal city fire department equipment equip-ment and a flood of water from the Halliburton trucks. Drilling equipment of the Kerr-McGee firm was described as "virtually a total loss." The Whitlock-Taylor well apparently ap-parently was not damaged as result of the fire and operators believe that completion attempts at-tempts can -be resumed as soon as a new rig is moved in. Carter Oil Co. is operator at Roosevelt Pool. The Whitlock-Taylor Whitlock-Taylor well is on a Phillips Petroleum Co. lease. Phillips, Carter, Stanolind Oil and Gas Co. and others have joined in a unit plan of development at the field where oil was first discovered in 1949. |