One of the most novel solutions for a huge problem in tapping the oil under south Louisiana wetlands was the brainchild of a Panamanian saloon keeper who’d never set foot here.
As early as the 1920s, geologists knew that oil lurked below our marshlands, but engineers struggled to find a good way to get to it. At first, they simply tried to move drilling rigs from dry land into the marsh, but that didn’t work very well. It was hard to set up a heavy derrick in soggy silt. As the Shell News reported in its July 1938 edition, “In these coastal marshes where land is scarcely more than a series of floating dirt rafts insecurely anchored by vegetation, there is nothing solid upon which to build a derrick.”
Drillers had to build platforms on pilings sunk deep into the marsh. But that was cumbersome and expensive. An early Texaco rig in Terrebonne Parish, for example, required more than 50 pilings, each of them 60 feet long. Sinking and building a platform on them required more work and worry than most companies wanted to deal with.
