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For Environmental & Support Service Professionals BAKKEN EXTRA: Ministry serves oilfield workers in many ways PAGE 18 EYE ON THE INDUSTRY: Emergency crews prepare for the worst PAGE 58 www.GOMCmag.com | DECEMBER 2014 TM C COMPANY PROVES ITS VALUE TO BAKKEN CLIENTELE BY PROVIDING YEAR-ROUND SERVICES AND UNWAVERING SAFETY PRACTICES PAGE 12 THE COLD Conquering

Conquering The Cold

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Page 1: Conquering The Cold

For Environmental & Support Service Professionals

BAKKEN EXTRA:Ministry serves oilfield workers in many ways

PAGE 18

EYE ON THE INDUSTRY:Emergency crews prepare for the worst

PAGE 58

www.GOMCmag.com | DECEMBER 2014

TM

C COMPANY PROVES ITS VALUE TO BAKKEN CLIENTELE BY PROVIDING YEAR-ROUND SERVICES AND UNWAVERING SAFETY PRACTICES PAGE 12

THE COLDConquering

Page 2: Conquering The Cold

Cover Story

C Company operators (from left) Matthew Searles, Peter Okyera and Anthony Henry use a Vactor HXX Hydroexcavator to clean an oil spill at a site near Williston, N.D. C Company began operating in the Bakken Shale play in 2011 with just one truck but has since expanded to several trucks and over 30 crew members.

Page 3: Conquering The Cold

eth Church, his family and partners all decided to use the experience of working in the cold weather to expand their company and start up operations in the Bakken Shale play in North Dakota.

C Company, up until 2011, had only been operating in the Alaskan play, but Church decided it was time to take advantage of the Bakken oil boom and expand into the region. He saw big opportunities and a lack of competition in the region’s hydroexcavation services.

“I thought they really needed a dedicated provider so we committed ourselves to being that solution and providing quality hydroexcavation service in the Bakken,” Church says.

Church, along with his family and business partners Kevin Karella and Andrew Rossow, opened C Company’s Williston operations in 2011. What began as a one-truck operation has now turned into 30 employees providing 24/7 service throughout the Bakken with nine trucks.

“For a company like ours to come to this area with one truck and only one customer, and today here we sit with nine trucks and master service agreements with over 65 percent of the producers here in the Bakken, is astounding,” says Darrin Kittelson, director of operations for C Company. “The proof is in the pudding. We went from the little guy on the block to one of the bigger hydroexcavation firms here.”

The company does everything from potholing and exposing underground utilities all the way to cleaning rigs and oil spills.

“Anything you can do with a hydroexcavator, we’re currently doing,” Kittelson says. “Hydroexcavators are very versatile pieces of equipment and we cover a lot of different types of work.”

PREPARING FOR THE WEATHERCold-weather experience has helped fuel C Company’s success

in North Dakota, allowing the company to pick up jobs that others aren’t equipped to handle.

“In winter, the supply side of service changes in the Bakken,” says Dave Long, general manager for C Company. “There are a lot of companies that either aren’t prepared or just aren’t willing to face winter conditions so they’ll head out and come back in the summer.”

S

C Company proves its value to Bakken clientele by providing year-round services and unwavering safety practices By Cory Dellenbach | Photography by Shawna Gooch-Egge

C Company operator Anthony Henry uses a digging wand to remove contaminated soil at the site of an oil spill.

THE COLDConquering

Page 4: Conquering The Cold

As a result, C Company picks up more oil spill jobs in the winter months when the number of responders decreases. Long says they take pride in those jobs because they allow them to show clients the thoroughness of their work. They make sure the scene is always cleaner when they leave than it was before the spill.

Dealing with cold temperatures can be tough on employees and equipment, so the company has set up training seminars for dealing with the extreme elements. Kittelson says supervisors in the field are training employees on a daily basis in addition to the training that takes place at the company’s facilities.

“You’re training your operators to protect themselves and the equipment in the cold,” Kittelson says. “We are constantly implementing new training and awareness about how we operate in subzero temperatures and how it can affect our day.”

Personnel are taught how to dress for winter, Kittelson says. Employees have to pay more attention to what they wear to work, making sure they are layered up, but not dressed so heavily that they overheat.

“A good comparison for the weather here would be watering your lawn when it’s 60 below outside and windy. That’s what our operators face on a daily basis,” Kittelson says. “We’re dealing with water in some really poor weather conditions.”

Weather is also a big factor in equipment decisions. In the winter months, North Dakota can be blasted with heavy snowfall and can experience temperatures as cold as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. “You just need extreme technology and extreme weather protection,” Church says.

“We realized early on that this is a dangerous work

environment; we need to be leaders in the field of safety

from the very top level of management to the guys

sweeping the floors and we’ve put a premium on safety.”

Seth Church

C Company director of operations Darrin Kittelson (left) and owner Seth Church (right) discuss a cleanup project with a client.

C COMPANY GENERAL CONTRACTORS LLCLOCATION: Williston, N.D.OWNERS: Seth Church, Kevin Karella and Andrew RossowEMPLOYEES: 30-plusSERVICES OFFERED: Hydroexcavation, tank cleaning, utility locates and oil spill cleanupSERVICE AREA: North Dakota and AlaskaWEBSITE: www.vac-trucks.com

C Company vehicles are equipped for the cold weather that North Dakota sees each winter. Every truck owned by C Company has its hoses wrapped and heated and the water inside the tanks is constantly recirculating to keep it from freezing. There are hot-water heaters on the trucks as well.

Page 5: Conquering The Cold

The C Company crew, back, from left: Richard Markrell, David Kunce, Christopher Gladden, Russell Bass, Isaac Finkenbinder, Charles Reynolds, Kody Covington, Dave Long, Seth Church and Darrin Kittelson. Front: Anthony Henry, Matthew Searles, Peter Okyera, Aaron Smith, Carl Wells, Kelly Harrelson and Fred Karella. The crew stands in front of a fleet of trucks the company owns, including a 2014 Super Products Mud Dog on a Peterbilt chassis; 2014 Vactor HXX on a Kenworth chassis and a 2011 Vactor Guzzler on a Kenworth chassis.

C Company didn’t start off servicing the oilfields of Alaska or North Dakota. The company originally built homes in Alaska.

Nels Church, along with a business partner, started a general residential contracting company in 1968. During the following years they built pre-cut and prefabricated homes throughout Alaska. In 1984, Nels and another partner formed C Company Inc. with the primary purpose of performing public and private commercial work, performing jobs in remote areas of Alaska requiring precise and detailed planning and oversight.

In 2000, Seth Church, with the assistance of his father, Nels, started building speculation homes. After five years they decided to once again enter the commercial market. C Company renovated and assembled a 200-capacity crew camp for Pioneer Oil, and an office complex and crew camp for ENI Petroleum on the North Slope.

“I started with my family building houses when I was 17,” Church says. “We were in the construction field and moved into doing some oil and gas services. There was a steep learning curve transitioning from home construction to oilfield services. However, we found the same principles of customer service, quality of work and safe work practices were true in both industries.”

Through its Alaska division, C Company offers a variety of oilfield services.

“Our Alaska division offers hydroexcavation, spill cleanups, trenching, daylighting and tank cleans,” Church says. “We also offer freight and equipment transport in Alaska and stateside.”

FROM HOME CONSTRUCTION

TO THE OILFIELDS

Page 6: Conquering The Cold

C Company utilizes hydroexcavators from two different manufacturers: Vactor and Super Products. The company has both Guzzlers and HXXs from Vactor, while on the Super Products side they run Mud Dogs.

All of the trucks are equipped with large freshwater tanks, Hotsy industrial pressure washers and isolated debris tanks that allow for proper disposal of hazardous waste.

Church says about 60 percent of their trucks are Vactors and 40 percent are Super Products. The newest Super Products hydro-excavator arrived at the shop in October.

“We’ve got some of the most cutting edge technology as far as cold weather that Vactor has ever done,” Church says. “We’re talking directly with Vactor and Super Products on a regular basis and communicating our needs. We’ve had the president of Vactor in my pickup truck with his product developer riding along for a couple of days just showing them what our specific needs are, and they’re making changes so that they can take care of us so we can take care of our customers.”

C Company also wraps and heats the hoses on the trucks. There are hot-water heaters on the trucks and the water in the tanks is constantly recirculated to keep it from freezing.

“We obviously set up our equipment to operate and we’re going above and beyond what most people have to do with their equipment,” Kittelson says. “If we run out of water we may have just caused major damage to our equipment, whereas people in fair weather don’t have to deal with these types of issues.”

When the weather isn’t so brutal, C Company is mainly cleaning rigs and hydroexcavating for utilities, Long says.

BUSY CREWS

C Company has crews working in the oilfields 24 hours a day, every day of the week in every season of the year.

“We’re here to work. We’re here to provide a service, and if you need it at 3 a.m., we better be ready or we need to go home,” Long says, adding that he often tells his crews they can call at any time of night if they need him. “I’m the general manager, but they can call me anytime to help them work.”

Many jobs present tough safety challenges, including confined-space en-tries, hazardous chemicals and complicated equipment, and C Company puts a big emphasis on work site safety.

“We go all the way down to the job level. Job Safety Analysis [JSA] is something we perform on each and every job,” Long says. “Our team on the job is prepped before they ever leave the shop, when they get to the site and after.”

Before leaving for a job site, crews discuss potential safety hazards at the site they’ll be servicing. Once they are on site they’ll meet again and take a

look at all the safety hazards and discuss those. Following the work, the crews will meet again and talk over what hazards they saw, what they were able to mitigate, what they were able to control and what they could eliminate.

“They put that all down on paper and we talk about it when they come back to the shop,” Long says.

The company also holds weekly behavioral management safety meetings where the safety officers review the JSAs and do spot checks on jobs to see how employees are performing.

“We’re looking at whether they’re following the rules, whether things could be done better, and we bring those back to the office and talk about those in our regular meetings and try to change our safety culture for the better every day and every week,” Long says.

Church notes one particular job they handled in August took the confined-space safety program to a whole new level they hadn’t seen in the Bakken.

“It was a stretch for us, we had to bring up our game as far as safety,” he says. “We realized early on that this is a dangerous work environment; we need to be leaders in the field of safety from the very top level of management to the guys sweeping the floors and we’ve put a premium on safety.”

EXPANSION COMING UP

Church would like to see his company expand in the region, but that will depend in large part on how long it takes the company to train employees.

“First and foremost, our growth is predicated on the success of our perfor-mance and where we’re doing work,” Church says. “We would like to see con-tinued work in the Bakken, the North Slope in Alaska, as well as Wyoming. We would like to move into Wyoming and then perhaps Colorado; that would be within the next three years. We’d like to see some solid but attainable growth.”

Long says he’d like to see the company grow, just like they have been, adding trucks each year.

“I’d like us to lock in a few more clients and never ever lose one,” Long says. “We’d like to see safety continue to grow. We want to keep seeing our guys wearing their PPEs and coming back with all their fingers and toes and more ideas about how we can do this better and faster and still be just as safe.” GOMC

C Company operator Matthew Searles prepares to clean an oil spill with the 2014 Vactor HXX Hydroexcavator.

Hotsy Cleaning Systems800/525-1976www.hotsy.com

Super Products LLC800/837-9711www.superproductsllc.com(See ad on page 11)

Vactor Manufacturing800/627-3171www.vactor.com(See ad on page 35)

more info

“We’re here to work. We’re here to provide a service, and if you

need it at 3 a.m., we better be ready or we need to go home.”

Dave Long

Reprinted with permission from Gas, Oil & Mining Contractor™ / December 2014 / © 2015, COLE Publishing Inc., P.O. Box 220, Three Lakes, WI 54562 / 800-257-7222 / www.gomcmag.com