President's column
What is that smell?!
As a small boy, after doing the chores on one sunny summer day, I was happy to have a farm to run around on with lots of distractions. Life was grand, and the farm was my oyster.
Suddenly, there was this awful smell like rotten eggs wafting from the field. The nearby drilling rig was in operation but something unexpected had happened, and the crew was reacting to the situation. Dad was not sure what to do but was quite concerned about his 5,000 chickens. Chickens, like canaries in coal mines, are quite fragile when it comes to gases in the air. There was no way he could isolate the barn from the smell, so he gathered up the family and, similar to what you would do in a prairie storm, we went to the safest place in the farmhouse to wait it out: the basement.
Now, most of you reading this story know exactly what was going on, and—as I am still alive to relay the story—the worst case did not occur. Not a single chicken died, and more importantly, not a single member of the Spady farm family succumbed to the killer hydrogen sulfide gases gathering in the low spots, such as the basement.
Not much was ever said about the incident, and I am not sure if Dad ever followed up with the company man on the rig. We were pretty happy to have the novelty of a drilling rig on our farm, and benefited from the surface payments (royalty in Alberta at the time, as now, was generally held by the government). When I grew up it was a normal sight to see large piles of bright yellow sulfur byproduct at nearby gas plants awaiting shipment for agricultural use. This was all part of the new and exciting world of oil and gas that was eclipsing agriculture as the new provider of local jobs. I still drive the farm equipment around that old wellhead when I help with the crop seeding and harvesting. We have co-existed quite nicely for 50 years.
