January is typically an uneventful month. After the monetary and culinary excesses of December it a time to lie low. The only notable event was Spindletop. More precisely the 100 year anniversary of Spindeltop. What am I talking about?

Even though petroleum has been in use for thousands of years (caulking canoes and impregnating mumies) people became serious about it only in the second half of the 19th century when kerosene lamp was invented. Wells were drilled, oil discovered and fortunes started to be made. However, until January 1901 it was all on a rather small scale, kids stuff. Spindletop was not the first oil well drilled in the world, it was not the first in the US or even in Texas (Corsicana came first). But it was the first BIG TIME well. In the first 24 hours it produced about 100,000 barrels of oil. Today, that would have a street value of about a quarter million dollars. Not bad for one day!

Obviously, if you are a petroleum geologist you should make a pilgrimage to the Spindletop site. After having lived in Texas for a total of 11 years, one of those in Houston, I felt quite guilty about not having taken the time to visit this shrine. So, when I heard that the local citizenry was going to stage a re-enactment to commemorate the 100 anniversary (how do you stage a re-enactment of a blowout???) I took a day of vacation and headed down I10 to Beaumont.

All things considered, it was a rather miserable day. It was cold, windy, drizzling and serious rain clouds were moving in from the west. Luckily, Beaumont lies to the east and so I was able to out-drive the rain. The weather may have been why the turnout was not overwhelming, but I suspect that a more important reason is that oil just is not sexy anymore. It did not matter, the overall small town feel only made the whole event more endearing. In addition to several loads of shivering school children who were bussed in, the local citizenry turnout was beefed up by the Austrian ambassador, president Bush (the elder), secret service personnel, television crews and the ubiquitous Russian secret agent (lower left in the right photo).

The re-enactment was actually fairly good. It is amazing what you can do with a couple of rock concert-type speakers. I could feel the ground trembling under my feet. The jet of dirty water which shot up from the ground looked similar in volume and size to the photos of the historical blowout - you can compare the two pictures yourselves. The first one was taken in 1901 and I took the second last month. The historical blowout also started with a geyser of dirty water, so on that the simulation was quite accurate. Now, shooting cold water up in the air in January does not guarantee a pleasant rest of the day - even in south Texas. Most of the locals came ready with umbrellas. Luckily, the little wind there was did not blow in my direction. Instead it directed the water towards the multitudes of junior high kids. I doubt may of them are considering a career in the oil industry after that experience.

One trivia footnote. In all of the descriptions of the Spindletop blowout the talk of the “Big Hill”. Well no matter how hard I looked there was no sign of a hill. I started to suspect that they might have moved the location. As it turns out the disappearance of the hill has a more prosaic explanation. First of all it was not much of a hill, something on the order of 5 meters. But to the flat-landers it looked big. It is all relative. As a result of the production, the ground subsided a few meters and the subsequent mining of sulfur associated with the salt dome deflated the rest of the hill so that today there is no trace of it.