Chapter 18

"The biggest problem that we have seen lately is the fact that there are just not enough trained personnel available for all of the projects we have going on right now and we are not keeping up in either the Mechanical or Electrical divisions." Rick stated during our monthly update meeting.

"Where are we seeing the most problems right now? Or is it everywhere? I asked.

"It would seem that the northern operations are having the biggest problem. We have a lot of people that are refusing to go to camp and just not enough manpower to go around even if we forced everyone to go to camp." Rick answered.

"What do you mean go to camp? Shannon asked.

"Quite a bit of our work is in very remote areas; it is not feasible to have our people drive to the jobsite every day so the oil companies have set up big camps in the area where they are working and everyone stays there for the duration of the job they are doing. Sometimes it is a couple of months or more." Rick replied.

"That does not sound like it would be much fun" Shannon stated.

"No it probably would not be fun but every oilfield service company is doing the same thing." Rick said.

"What about in the winter? Don't they get cold in those tents? Julie asked.

"No you have it wrong" Rick grinned "They set up a sort of little town with trailers and a big kitchen. The men sleep in a heated room and get hot food for most meals. They put all the trailers together with covered walkways so you can move from one building to another without going outside."

"Oh that sounds better. Still that is a long time to be away from home." Julie said.

"Yes it is but the employees get a bonus when they are in camp so it is not as bad." Rick said.

"If it wasn't too bad then the men would not be refusing to go to camp." I said.

"That is a new development since the cold weather started. Most of the men wanted to be in camp all summer." Rick replied.

"So what has changed to make it so bad now? Are they using the same camps or has that changed as well?" Julie asked.

"I am not sure what has changed. I guess we will have to ask some of the men and find out what the problem is." Rick stated.

"Ok Rick why don't you book a plane for you and me to go and talk to some of the men and see what is going on. As for not having trained people how many apprentices do we have compared to qualified tradesmen? I asked.

"Right now we have one apprentice for every five tradesmen." Julie replied looking at her records.

"Let's get on a hiring blitz and get at least one apprentice per journeyman. We should also let the trade schools know that they will be getting a lot more apprentices coming at them over the next few years." I said.

Julie nodded as she was writing things down. "We will have to start going to high schools to find the people as we have been advertising in all the papers for people for months now and have not been able to hire enough for any of the divisions lately."

"Ok then let's do that. Anything you can come up with. Just remember if we get them before they go into the workforce we will have a better chance of training them the way we want." I responded.

With that the meeting broke up everyone having something to look at. I wondered back to my office and thought about the problems we were having and decided that nothing much had changed over the years we still had the same issues and no good way to resolve them.

Rick and I flew up to High Level and talked to the managers and a few of the supervisors about the problems they were having. All of the answers we received were the same. It would seem that in the summer there were not as many people in the camps so the few people that were there had rooms to themselves and the TV rooms were not that busy so you could watch what you wanted and go to bed whenever you wanted without worrying about someone coming in and waking you up in the middle of the night. The washrooms were shared amongst an entire wing of the trailers which could be as many as six or eight with four rooms per trailer and at least two men per room; some of the trailers had four men per room.

While Rick and the others were having their meeting I went to get a cup of coffee and started talking with a couple of the tradesmen in the coffee room. They started to tell me about some of the camps they had been in. Apparently they were not well heated the food started to get on your nerves after a while. They told me that today was Tuesday so every camp in the area would have roast beef, turkey and pork chops for supper. Everyday of the week had a different set of choices but the choices were the same week in and week out. None of the guys I talked to said they would not go back to camp but they all said they would rather not.

Rick came and found me to ask if I wanted to go with him to check one of these camps out as there was on only a couple of hours drive from town. I told him I would like to go for a drive but we should get a camera to take some pictures as everyone will be asking all kinds of questions when we got back home.

After bouncing our way over one of the worst roads I have ever seen I was really happy to see the camp. There were four of us in the Suburban we drove and it was an interesting trip as neither Rick nor I had any experience in the oil and gas industry. The two supervisors that took us out to the camp had only worked in the oil patch as they called it. They explained to us about the fact that most of the work had to be done in the winter as the roads would not support a drilling rig in the summertime. They needed a good layer of frost in order to get them around on the trails they called roads.