Accidents Will Happen

Some people are accident prone.  It’s a fact. They have a higher predisposition to kitchen injuries, car crashes and the like and it’s a bloody miracle that some of them make it through adolescence without limb loss.

I had a field assistant once who suffered more accidents in a short period of time than anyone I’ve ever met. His name is Nejav and he lives in a small village in north-central Iran. My western geo-colleagues nicknamed him Yes-Yes because that’s all the English he knew.

Yes-Yes was/is a funny man. Happy as a clam at high tide, he cheerfully carried my backpack and rock hammer as we tramped across thousands of square kilometres taking stream sediment samples and prospecting for mineral deposits. He was with me when I went through my tortoise-signing phase and later on, he trained as a drill offsider to work on the drill rigs as we poked the first holes into the Zarshuran gold project.

My first inkling that Yes-Yes might be a few coat hangers short of a wardrobe when it came to field safety was when we were investigating a zinc prospect called Chichaklu (essentially “the place of flowers” in Turkish.) We found an old adit and before I could stop him, he was inside flushing out bats.

Bats In My Belfry

Bats don’t frighten me, in fact I really like them, but caves full of them are not healthy places. You can catch nasty fungal lung infections from their droppings, that is if you haven’t been bitten and die a horrible, slow death from rabies first.

Yes-Yes emerged after a couple of minutes, grinning from ear to ear, with a bat holding onto the index finger of his left hand by its teeth and another clamped onto the top of his head. When we got back to Takab, our base, I took him to the local clinic and had the doctor explain to him in the local Turkish dialect the multiple health issues associated with bats.

Crappy Drillers

The next summer, he worked on the drill rigs at Zarshuran. We’d hired a local Iranian company to handle the drilling; not such a good idea in hindsight as western concepts of health and safety were lacking. The drill rods -big, heavy 3m PQ rods- were haphazardly stacked and one night shift, the whole oily lot collapsed sideways and a couple of them landed on Yes-Yes’s ankle, breaking it. That was his second visit to the clinic.

But he recovered fairly quickly and was back to work toward the end of the summer season. We weren’t able to drill through the winter because the camp wasn’t winterized, but we pushed it as late as we could up to the point that our water line was permanently frozen.

Kaboom

The night shift drillers made a habit of filling a large oil drum with diesel fuel and lighting it to keep warm. It was a nasty, smelly fire but they seemed to think it helped with the night time cold.

One night, I was looking across the valley to the drill rig which was maybe half a kilometer away. I could see the oil drum fire burning bright orange, silhouetting the drill crew. As I watched, a black shadow figure -I could tell it was Yes-Yes from his limping gait- walked over to the drum and lifted up a jerry can to pour more diesel in. The drum erupted and a large ball of orange flame spilled out onto the ground. Yes-Yes started jumping around, arms flailing, beating out the patches of burning diesel on his overalls. That was his third visit to the clinic; treatment for minor burns.

At this, point, you’d think I’d have realised that Yes-Yes was cursed but no, I assumed we’d had a spell of bad luck and he just happened to be there on the receiving end each time. Not so.

Fourth Time Unlucky

Unfortunately, his fourth visit to the clinic was no laughing matter.

The following summer we were back drilling again. We had an Australian drill crew on site supposedly to prevent the kind of cock ups and delays we’d had the previous year. Yes-Yes was hired as an offsider again and was working with the day shift crew.

Late one afternoon, I noticed the drill rig had shut down and heard shouting. One of the crew was running back to the office calling for help. I grabbed our local geologist, Peyman, and we jumped in the truck and headed to the rig.

Yes-Yes was lying on the ground unconscious, foaming at the mouth, with blood coming out of his mouth and nose. Not a sight I ever want to see again. Peyman, a big lad, immediately picked him up, stuck him in the truck and headed off as fast as he could safely drive on the dirt mountain roads. The nearest clinic was 45 minutes away and he had to get Yes-Yes there quickly. We were all convinced he was going to die and basic first aid training was of no help. Plus, there was no way we could rely on an ambulance getting to the camp the same day.

The Will Of Allah.

The Australian driller in charge was frightened and in shock. Convinced that he was going to be arrested and jailed for safety violations, he was mumbling to me about having to get out of the country fast. He wanted to be driven to the Turkish border where he’d walk across to what he thought was safety. So, I asked another local geologist to call the police on our sat’ phone and report the accident and ask what we needed to “officially” do. Ten minutes later he was back. The police didn’t care. None of their business. Apparently, it was Allah’s will and they had no intention of coming to the camp to investigate.

When I pushed the driller for information on how the accident happened, he told me the drill rods had become stuck and wouldn’t turn. He thought perhaps the drill bit had burned in – become too hot from friction as it turned- and had partly fused with the rock at the bottom of the hole. In an effort to break it free, he’d cranked up the torque on the rig, thinking that the thick PQ rods would be strong enough to hold until the drill bit broke free.

Unfortunately, we didn’t know at the time that these were sub standard, locally made rods; poor quality steel with badly machined thread along the joints where the rods screwed together. On such large rods, the thread was crucial and had to be precision machined to work properly under extreme loads. The thread had failed between two rods, just above the drill collar, which is where Yes-Yes was standing waiting to take the rod off when it finally emerged from the hole.

When the joint failed, the rod that was attached to the top drive mechanism finally broke free under enormous torque. It whipped around at high speed catching Yes-Yes across the torso, driving him backwards onto the drill derrick. He was slammed against a large wrench bolted to the derrick, which hit him horizontally across the small of his back. It was a one-two punch that left Yes-Yes seriously injured with kidney and lower back damage.

Work No More

He was in hospital in Takab for a few days, and then we had him moved to a clinic in Tehran where he spent 3 weeks undergoing specialist treatment and pissing blood more or less constantly. Sadly, it took him a long time to fully recover from his injuries.

I didn’t see him again after the accident – I rotated out of Iran back to Europe and never went back. Yes-Yes never worked for us again but perhaps, on balance, it was for the best. He was the most accident prone person I’ve ever met.

Don’t Forget

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