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Louisiana remembers early offshore industry Minerals Management Service documents birth of offshore oil and gas following World War II with interviews of more than 500 pioneers Cain Burdeau Associated Press Writer
The Oil Patch is getting old, so old it’s become history.
It wasn’t long ago — just over a half century — when the Oil Patch was the newest thing going.
Young couples from all over the South boogied down to the Bayou State to get good-paying oil job as roustabouts, drillers, welders, surveyors and engineers at companies like Phillips and Esso.
Overnight, sleepy moss-hung towns on dirt roads in south Louisiana turned into hopping highway stops. Company subdivisions sprang up to accommodate the influx of workers — young couples happy and free after World War II. Early days being documented More than five decades later, public officials, historians and anthropologists are getting round to the realization there’s a need to document and celebrate this corner of the world where the offshore oil and natural gas industry got its start.
The National D-Day Museum, a war museum in downtown New Orleans, plans to host an audiovisual tribute to the swamp surveyors, riggers and boatsmen who invented offshore oil exploration with the help of new technology that sprang from World War II, like the Higgins landing craft.
In the meantime, a traveling exhibit currently at the Southdown Plantation in Houma, La., called “The Pioneers of the Offshore Industry” is drawing crowds of longtime oil field workers who recall the “old days,” so convincingly portrayed by the 1953 film “Thunder Bay” starring Jimmy Stewart as the oil wildcatter trying to drum up interest in his invention — a storm-proof drilling platform.
The exhibit — which includes an engraved aluminum hard hat handcrafted in Jakarta, Indonesia, a “Wildcatter” board game, drill bits and historic pictures of early wooden offshore platforms — will be on the move throughout the year as it makes the rounds of Louisiana’s industrialized coastal cities. MMS interviewing pioneers Much of the excitement has been sparked by a four-year project by the Minerals Management Service to document the social and historical consequences of the offshore industry on Louisiana. The study, which included about 500 interviews with “oil pioneers,” will be handed over to a research center for public use.
“Very little has been written on the industry,” said Harry Luton, a social scientist at MMS. “There’s a lot more written about the auto industry and how it changed Michigan over the course of time even though the oil industry was even larger.”
Just as Ford, Buick and General Motors changed the culture and economics of the Great Lakes State, oil companies transformed south Louisiana.
“Things were really very busy, and companies of all kinds were moving in. There were no places to live so people who did have property started to build subdivisions and there were a lot of trailers because they were easy to move in and set up,” recalled Billye Grice, who moved to Morgan City with her husband in 1954.
Grice, one of the 500 people interviewed for the study, and her deceased husband, Jesse, ran a photographic shop in Morgan City specializing in offshore work. Jesse Grice’s photographs are prized as some of the only existing photos of early platforms. Hard times hit in ‘80s And just like the auto industry, when hard times hit the Oil Patch in the early 1980s, thousands lost their jobs and the region underwent a shocking depression. Luton said more people were laid off in Louisiana than in the downsizing of the auto industry.
“People lost their houses, everything they had,” Grice said. “That’s when the oil fields shut down and started moving out of the area. They (oil companies) just went to various and sundry places. That’s just the way they do it in the oil fields. That’s the way they’ve always done it; they stay around for about 30 years and then just move on.”
While oil activity in Louisiana’s bays and swamps declined, much of it moved further offshore and evolved into today’s high-tech, multibillion-dollar industry in the Gulf of Mexico.
The boom in offshore work was the “big story” in the latter half of the 20th century, MMS says, with worldwide offshore production jumping from 14 percent of the world’s oil supply in 1974 to about a third today. And nearly a quarter of the world’s natural gas comes from offshore, according to the agency. Cajuns pioneered offshore Experts credit Cajuns for pioneering the offshore industry.
“People converted everything from shrimp boats to trucks to their backyard welding shops into companies or equipment that would serve the oil and gas industry,” said Diane Austin, an applied anthropologist with the University of Arizona who conducted many interviews for the project.
In the process, the Cajuns got rich and left behind their family farms, dropped the hoe and the fiddle, and got jumping with the 20th century, historians say.
“When they started pushing south, people from the North didn’t have the knowledge or willingness to push into the swamps,” Austin said.
The work fell to people like Nelson Constant.
“We worked water, we worked land,” said Constant, recalling his days packing cases of dynamite, motors, pipes and seismographic instruments on his back through swamp and marsh looking for oil.
Constant, 90, was born in 1914 in Kramer and worked his way up to surveyor and permit man for Humble Oil Co. and Esso.
“You didn’t worry about the alligators. The worst part when it was dry you had to bring water to drink,” he said. “There would be these puddles, and you’d have to chase the snakes out so you could get some water. It was rough, really rough.”
But life on the air-conditioned quarter boats, which took the surveying crews out on 10-days trips, made up for the hard work, he said.
“We did have good food,” he recalled. “Roasted chicken, roasted duck, fish; anything you got in a restaurant.”
He added: “You had a lot of grumbling, but when everyone got back on the quarter boat, everyone would gamble, and be just as good as could be for the next day.”
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