Overview: The tough-job contractors at Riley Industrial Services take on the biggest challenges the oil and gas industry can throw at them
George “Sonny” Riley II enjoys tackling jobs that most businesses won’t consider attempting – like sandblasting and repainting a 2,000-foot-long natural-gas pipeline suspended 200 feet above the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in southwestern Wyoming.
“Only two other companies in the United States bid on that project,” says the 75-year-old owner of Riley Industrial Services Inc. Based in Farmington, N.M., the company does industrial cleaning, primarily in oil and natural-gas fields, refineries and utility plants. “I enjoy challenges, those unusual jobs that are out of the ordinary. It’s a game, I guess. It challenges your abilities.”
The Flaming Gorge project, which the company took on six years ago, did just that. For starters, it took more than a day to drive around the reservoir to the remote area where the Wyoming-to-Washington Northwest Pipeline Corp. pipeline crosses the reservoir formed by a dam on the Green River.
“It’s some rough country,” Riley says. “To get vehicles from a plateau down to the ledge where the pipeline starts to cross the Green River on the east side of the gorge, you have to do what they call ‘snubbing,’ or tying a steel cable between a truck and a bulldozer that acts like an anchor as it follows you down. If you don’t do that, the trucks couldn’t stop because the brakes wouldn’t hold – there’d be runaways. Then to get out, the dozer has to pull you out.”
Then there’s the small matter of the job itself. Riley crews had to fabricate carriages that could hold workers and sandblasting and painting equipment as they traveled along, suspended under the 42-inch-diameter pipeline, as well as catch paint chips and paint overspray.
“It was dangerous work,” Riley says. “We had to sandblast and vacuum simultaneously because the lead-based paint, which had aged out and was peeling off, cannot fall into the Green River. It took us about a year and a half (no working in winter) to do all the piping, the towers – everything.
“You’re blasting an area the size of a 50-cent piece and vacuuming at the same time,” he explains. “It’s a very slow process. You might cover maybe a foot and a half every day. Then you have to paint it right away. The humidity there is so high that the pipe will oxidize overnight if it isn’t painted right away. That was definitely the most challenging job we ever did.”
