Since we got rained on so hard yesterday and last night, hardly anyone showed up to work this morning. The roads and site were too muddy for the trucks to operate safely, so only a few people came in with excavators for water management and with laptops for paperwork. That definitely made my life easy! I only had to keep track of a few people and pieces of equipment, all of which I knew the names of. Overall it was a good first day without the PM by my side. I got lots done, and was able to lighten the paperwork load from other people. That makes me feel at least like I'm helpful.
I spent about an hour today away from paperwork to go on a tour of the site. Originally, it was just to be a tour of our landfill site, but it ended up being a huge tour of the entire oil sands area! Boy was that ever interesting.
The type of oil sand mining they're doing up here is called SAGD: Steam Assisted Gravity Draining. Basically what they do is drill two wells in an L-shape with one horizontal part about 5m below the other. Picture them as nested L shaped wells. They blow super hot steam down the top well which heats up the oil (you science folks know that heat reduces viscosity) so that it runs downwards through the sands and collects in the lower well. Then the crude oil, and whatever water ran down from the steam, is pumped out from there up the second well. The horizontal wells are maybe 100m below the surface, which is pretty impressive! Above ground you see the wellheads and some piping, and sometimes a steam generator, storage facilities for the oil, and some buildings for workers. Anyways, if you're interested in this stuff, it's probably best to just google it.
Tonight we had steak & prawns for dinner. I've been told we have something special like that every Saturday night. The food is so good here, I have to say. Luckily they always offer a ton of fruits and vegetables, including healthy snacks you can take with you whenever you want, otherwise I'd be getting really... large.
I wish hiking was a possibility around here. The forests are so beautiful and I'm getting pretty tired of riding in trucks and never walking anywhere. We aren't really allowed to even walk on the roads because there are too many trucks going by. Maybe there is somewhere I can go to and explore. Perhaps on my day off. When we went in to town the other night, I saw some of the things you can go and do. It's exactly what I thought: rodeo, gun range, racetrack. I might have to try the gun range.
Well, now that I've bored you readers to death, I'll stop talking.
Goodnight!
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