The Drilling of Atlantic No. 3 (Page 6)

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Stafford recalls he had just pushed the Hosmer into place and the pressure on the surface casing was building up.

...We were standing there - all the valves closed - all of a sudden a sizzling underneath...the weld had begun to open up where the 7 in. flow line was welded into the 10¾ in. casing. The hissing was getting louder and all of a sudden it just went bang. A bunch of shale had blown up around the bottom of the head and just plugged the annulus off solid. Cody had one of these big hats on and he looked at us and started saying, "God damn, God damned, jumping up and down. He threw the hat off and he jumped on that a couple of times, I pulled my old clothes off and I was going to throw them in the boiler but the boys said, "No don't. We will clean them." They had one of those old steam boxes there, I was soaked with oil - if anything had caught fire it would have been goodbye for all three of us that were there."¹⁸

The morning of March 8 saw curious local residents and oil workers coming over to the wild well for a better look. Paul Fandrick recalls the oil spraying over his farm three mites to the south, blackening the snow which was still 2 ft. deep. This oil spray was to continue through the summer, and when the wind blew from the southeast, it would settle on Devon clothes lines, one of them being Elsie Kerr's. The frost was still in the ground, except for the mud pit, which had thawed, The violent force of the oil and gas flow, along with shale, made it nearly impossible to deploy the Hosmer, let alone get near the rotary table.

Jack Pettinger and Paul Bedard¹⁹ were just finishing a cementing job that morning when they saw the black plume. They had already run a number of plugs at Atlantic No. 3 and knew how serious the lost circulation was, They immediately drove over to see how they could help, They left their trucks spotted out on the road, Little did they realize that nearly all of their waking (and sleeping!) hours would be spent from then until November helping win the fight.

In retrospect, the fact that Viking gas had started to charge the overlying sands (Belly River and surface) from February 17, (the date when the D-3 was contacted and circulation partially lost) suggests that the well may have already passed the point of no return by the time the D-3 lifted off the remaining mud column on March 8.