By the time you read this, the 2002 hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico officially will have ended. This year's season has not been without interest. In early October, hurricane Lili came ashore south of Lafayette, La. As hurricanes go, Lili was fairly tame - a category 2 storm that had been a category 4 storm less than 24 hours before. There were no deaths attributed to Lili, but it did cause considerable damage.
Two jackups were lost and one damaged. One floater was set adrift, and six production platforms suffered major damage. For all our technological progress, we still don't have all the answers, and never will.
Speaking of answers, our brainteaser section (see page 79) has allowed us to look at a number of potential technological answers, some serious and some Rube Goldbergish. And that has rekindled within me a longstanding interest in the technological history of our industry. I have put together a fair collection of technological history over the years and have written about it, often with a group of friends, here and there in both the trade and academic presses. I'm not necessarily tooting my own horn - even if I wanted to, I lost the horn in the bust of '85. There is a message here, which I'm getting to.

There is some good stuff out there. Bet you did not know, for example, that from 1942 to 1944, Halliburton was one of the largest consumer of bananas in the United States. In fact, the company went through 38,800 pounds between February 1942 and August 1944. Yep, 38,800 pounds, consumed by Halliburton Brown & Roots Brownship division. Curious? Okay, Brownship built various U.S. Navy ships during World War II at their Greens Bayou shipyard near Houston. The ships were launched sideways into the bayou. Wartime restrictions being what they were, lubricants were in short supply for greasing the launching ways - but bananas weren't.

Or how about the gimbaled rotary table? I got this one from Howard Brain more than a decade ago. Brain was with Texaco then but had been with Shell on the original Staflo design at the beginning of North Sea operations. The Staflo was the first semisub designed for the North Sea. The violent nature of North Sea weather led to a number of innovations, some on target and some not. The North Sea is a violent place in the winter, as many of you know, with fierce storms and nasty seas. Early design ideas based on North Sea weather led to a gimbaled rotary table on the Staflo for fear that without a flexible joint between the hull and the drillpipe, there would be continuing failures of drillpipe in heavy weather. It wasn't so, and the gimbaled rotary table went the way of the dodo bird.

There is a lot of fun to be had from history and a lot to be learned from it. But I see less and less of it being written or even discussed. And that is the message. If we don't do a better job collecting, storing and disseminating our history, both the humorous and the important, we will lose it soon. Already, my father's generation - those who built the post war infrastructure in the '40s, '50s and '60s - is rapidly fading. And my generation - with layoffs, retirements (voluntary and otherwise) and age - is leaving the industry in large numbers. And when they are gone, the history goes with them. If you have stories, documents or recollections, please think seriously about how you might preserve them for all of us and for our posterity. Contact a university or a museum. If you don't know any, we will gladly recommend one. Or contact me. At Hart's, we have an active interest in the history of the upstream industry.

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