Brock Yordy
Good morning, Driller audience, and welcome to the first episode of 2025. This is episode 139, and after a few weeks off for Christmas and New Year's, we're excited to be back informing the drilling and construction industry on the news, policies, and stories impacting the drilling and construction industries. I'm your host, Brock Yordy, and this week in the news, we're going to talk about the long-term relationship between groundwater and surface water. Next, we're going to jump from that relationship into the final results of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, where they released their research on groundwater security. For this week's feature, Dave Bowers, Robert Meyer, and I are going to discuss fatherhood and its comparison to managing drill crews with The Driller's editor, Johnny Oldani, who is a new father.
Happy New Year, everybody. We've just started the second quarter of the 21st century. That is insane to think about. Before we jump into all this great content this week, let's talk some safety.
SAFETY - Fewer Workers are Dying from Hazards
Let's start the year off right with some good news from safety and Doug Parker at OSHA. The headline is "Fewer Workers are Dying from Hazards Where OSHA has Focused Its Enforcement Resources." This preliminary agency data shows a decrease in fatalities in agency-mandated investigations, including significant reductions in fatal injuries from trench collapses and falls, which are the two leading causes of death among construction workers. Here's the quote:
“These numbers are promising evidence that stronger enforcement and collaboration with labor and management, driven by the Biden-Harris administration’s worker-centered approach, is saving lives.”
This came from the assistant secretary for OSHA, Doug Parker, whom we need to cheer one more time because his team, from OSHA compliance officers to consultants, has really made an impact on our health and well-being.
This is an executive branch, just the same as the EPA, that is protecting us and protecting our environment, and this is very important. He continues with:
“Most striking is the improvement in areas we have focused on with employers and unions. Our state program partners have also seen improvements. In the fiscal year 2024, federal OSHA investigated 826 worker deaths, an 11% reduction from 2023 numbers of 928.”
Mind you, there's a caveat in there that says this is excluding COVID-related deaths because we still have those pieces that have really changed our data. We're just a new universe when it comes to extreme weather and these funky viruses.
OSHA's National Emphasis Program on falls, the leading cause of serious work-related injuries and fatalities in construction, saw fatal falls investigated by federal OSHA drop from 234 to 189, a decrease of almost 20%. This is amazing data and again, falls, struck-by, caught-in, electrocution, trench collapse, confined spaces. These are things that our industry sees on a daily basis, and we need to have good safety programs in place, good standard operating procedures in place, and an understanding that we can save lives. This isn't an overreaching agency. This is an agency that is writing regulations in blood and trying to protect as many individuals as possible.
Currently, federal OSHA covers about 60% of the private sector, and the other portion, that other 40%, is state programs. The national reporting by federal and state OSHA programs shows worker deaths in trench collapses declined nearly 70% since the calendar year of 2022. Fatalities decreased from that awful year of 2022, where we saw 20 fatalities before the first six months of the year. The National Emphasis Program came into place, and we still saw another 18 individuals die in trench collapses in 2023. It went from 39 to 15 in 2024, and we ended the year at 12.
Twelve is still too many. Trench safety, confined space safety, falls, and electrocution are things that our industry needs to continue to improve on, continue to respect, and I know we drill and then we dig these four-foot trenches and you go, well, it's not mandated that I need to follow these programs. You need to think about, as we get on our knees to drill that pit list into place, the danger we're putting ourselves into.
Final quote from Doug Parker:
“While fewer workers have died from the hazards OSHA investigates, we still lose more than 5,000 workers each year in largely preventable incidents. While we're proud of the progress, our work is far from over. Reducing workers' deaths means embracing an approach that makes workers' health and safety a core value in every workplace. Only then can we fully address all the causes and factors that lead to workers dying needlessly on the job.”
Thank you, Doug Parker. You've led a great team, and we appreciate everything. Now we have this national heat emphasis from the Biden Administration - safety is bipartisan. I don't care where you fall into left or right, red or blue. The only red we need to be worrying about is when somebody gets hurt. Let's go out, be safe, and have a good 2025. Follow your safety programs. Make sure you're establishing that near-miss program, that you're improving your business, keeping everybody safe, and being the professionals I know you can be. Be safe!
News - Groundwater and Its Connection to Surface Water
This week in the news, let's talk some groundwater and how it is connected to surface water. That's right, we've talked in the past 138 episodes, two and a half years of the Newscast, about the Waters of the United States to the Supreme Court, ASR Wells, MAR Wells, the importance of groundwater. We've talked about it being fossilized and coming out of research from Princeton University and the University of Arizona. NGWA Darcy Lecturer Reed Maxwell, along with other partners, have created a simulation that maps underground water on a continental scale. The results of three years' worth of work studying groundwater from coast to coast.
“The findings plot the unseen path that each raindrop or melted snowflake takes before reemerging in freshwater streams. Following water from the land surface to the depths far below and back up again, emerging up to a hundred miles away after spending from 10 to a hundred thousand years underground.”
What I just read to you is the introduction published by Princeton University in phys.org. That's phys.org. Go find this article, read up on it, and then I'm going to tell you to go to nature.com and get the paper that the research team wrote. I keep mentioning Reed Maxwell because he was once on a Drilling Insight as we talked about groundwater mapping and data. It was episode 18 in 2020. He was our virtual (because 2020 was a goofy year) Darcy Lecturer for the National Conference, and as I mentioned Reid, he had a heck of a team working on this three-year program. The team included, along with Dr. Maxwell, the Integrated Groundwater Modeling Center at Princeton University, Chen Yang, who is now at Sun Yat-sen University China – School of Atmospheric Sciences, and Laura E. Condon from the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona.
Go to nature.com and read the full report. The title is "Unravelling groundwater–stream connections over the continental United States".
I want you to start thinking about how we've seen Supreme Court justices get much smarter as we've seen the cases Texas vs. New Mexico and Sackets vs. EPA, where we talked about that nexus and Waters of the United States. We have had groundwater professionals out there say, “Oh, the Waters of the United States are not groundwater,” and this report is showing us the importance of groundwater connection. I want you to consider we drill test wells or we do thermal networks or all the programs I've been involved in on the East Coast drilling these great geothermal fields, these thermal networks, and we're producing water out of the ground. We're capturing it, we're treating it, and we're releasing it, but if we're looking at this from 10 years to a hundred thousand years moving a hundred miles. We need to be drilling with the least amount of impact possible to an aquifer - the least amount of production water brought out of the ground. That groundwater is important and it's safe.
That leads us right into the President's Council on December 14th. There's a YouTube video of this along with a 51-page document. Remember that our National Groundwater Association (NGWA) submitted comments, AWWA submitted comments, Water Systems Council submitted comments. And we have heard the argument that we should be allowing the states to handle their groundwater aquifers. But again, go to nature.com. Geek out like I did because hundreds of miles, 10 years to 10,000 to a hundred thousand years from a raindrop to a snowflake back into the groundwater. It's connected. So the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology presented its report titled "Improving Groundwater Security in the United States."
This is the letter that starts the 51-page document:
“Dear Mr. President, Your Administration is committed to clean water and healthy communities. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act contain directives and support to improve water quantity, quality, conservation, and use. Together with your Administration’s America the Beautiful Initiative and America the Beautiful Challenge, they are focused mainly on surface water in lakes, wetlands, ponds, and other freshwater resources.”
This is where this is important for our industry to be paying attention:
“Groundwater is an often-overlooked resource across the nation. It resides in aquifers which are underground and accessed mainly through wells, but this subsurface water plays a crucial role in the entire hydrologic cycle, including influencing surface water. Groundwater is vital for agriculture, domestic manufacturing, construction, mining, energy production, and other applications. Moreover, it provides drinking water for half of the U.S. population and nearly all rural residents.”
We've talked about how there are 14 to 16 million private wells - less than 11% of our voting population has private water. We’ve talked about the U.S. population and how much from surface water reservoirs to groundwater is being utilized. This study states, and this is where it becomes water security, 50% of our population is using it. This is a big deal back to their letter:
“Consequently, groundwater is fundamental to the nation's health, food, water, energy security, and economy. The U.S. is facing a serious and unprecedented groundwater challenge. In many aquifers, groundwater withdrawal has outpaced natural recharge, which is exacerbated by the changing climate and precipitation variability. Much of the water in the major aquifers in the U.S. is fossil water, recharged over 10,000 years ago, and will not be replaced naturally on human timescales. In the western U.S., groundwater resources are being depleted at alarming rates, mostly from agricultural withdrawal. The depletion has caused land subsidence and earth fissures as well as permanent reduction of storage capacity.”
Again, this is why we talk about aquifer storage and recharge or managing aquifer recharge. This is our future. We did a story last year about the Ogallala and two of the three water districts in Kansas were doing water conservation initiatives and the third one was not. We are using a resource without knowing the impact. We still have 75 years of this century left and I want you to think about from atmospheric rivers in the western United States to the wildfires that are happening in LA, where two years ago we watched trillions of gallons of water dumped this year, massive fires onto the letter.
“The depletion has national and global consequences as non-renewable groundwater in the west is embedded in agricultural products transported to the rest of the U.S. and in agricultural commodities exported globally. Many federal agencies have programs to measure the quality and quantity of groundwater, as well as conservation programs for sustainable use of groundwater.”
The letter goes on to state that we as local areas, municipalities, cities, states, and federal agencies all have to work together. All governmental and non-governmental organizations, professionals need to come together. We saw this with this PCAST. Let's throw out thinking right or left or red or blue. This is bipartisan groundwater security and as we've seen the state of Georgia pass legislation that if you have more than an acre, you can have a private water well, and we should empower everybody that's possible to have a groundwater professional come in and drill - have your own private water. Well, it's a right, but with that right comes the responsibility of conservation and protection and that's where we're getting here. Go check out this data, the 51-page document. Go watch the YouTube. Sure, is it a piece where we go, oh, this is state, this is local. The water that's under my feet is my water. That’s a silly thing to say as we've seen from the Princeton and Arizona University three-year study how it's interconnected and then we watch Supreme Court Justices make decisions. We have to have the best data. We have to be advocating and these are things that should be on the top of our mind. It's 2025. Groundwater conservation, regardless of who's in office, is a top priority for us.
Remember, we're going to have the best clean air and the best clean water that the United States has ever seen. That was the promise coming into the next four years. Let's hold ‘em to it.
For this week's feature, this is an excerpt of Dave Bowers, Robert Meyer, me, and Johnny Oldani (our new editor – you might've met him at the national conference in Vegas) from the Newscast a few weeks ago. We had so much fun during the original filming, that a discussion was sparked from the news that Johnny’s wife was going to have their first child at the end of January. Well, just like drilling and Mother Nature likes to mess with us, pregnancies are no different, and Johnny's son came New Year's Day. So congratulations!
I want to introduce this piece where we talk about fatherhood, parenting, and managing drill crews. It's a good way for us to end this first episode of 2025. If you see Johnny on LinkedIn or Facebook, congratulate him. Welcome Oliver! I hope you get to be a future driller or you become the professional you want to be one day. I hope you enjoy this.
Fatherhood and Drilling – It’s the same thing
We have three dads on here and you're going to be a future dad by the end of January. So gentlemen, we need to give him one piece of advice that just the same as what do you wish you would've known when you first started on a drilling job? What would you wish you would've known becoming a father?
Robert Meyer
I'll go first. It's the same thing.
Johnny Oldani
Funny, because that's exactly what my brother said.
Robert Meyer
You can never make it all make sense. The things that come out of my guy's mouth sometimes and the things that come out of my kid's mouth sometimes I'm just like, what? It's the same thing. It's the same response. You can't ever make it all make sense.
Dave Bowers
I can give you one other thing here in a little different position than the rest of these gentlemen. You're in the new father position. These other two are in the kind of early to mid stage position. I'm on the other end where I have adults now. I will tell you this, every single moment you get now, cherish. Because once they do move on, and it does go fast, you won't get to stop parenting, but you will get to stop seeing them.
Brock Yordy
That's beautiful. Dave and I will take it back to the drilling industry as well. Just like an infant and a toddler and a driller and an assistant, everything's a hammer, so be prepared. And the second thing is no different than if I am tripping out of the hole or I'm on a job site and I'm looking at things, every one of those hoses that can explode or when I break that connection and I could get muddy - the same thing happens every time you have an opportunity to change a diaper.
Dave Bowers
Let me tell you, this is probably the best advice I can give you about right now at no time, especially if you have a boy, at no time should you allow more than about a half a second from dirty diaper to cleaner diaper, at least setting on in the way because they are love target practice.
John Oldani
Yeah, that’s great advice.
Robert Meyer
Very good. I've never taken a single piece of advice more to heart. That is so true. Oh my goodness gracious, and especially with boys. With my daughter that was never a problem. But with my son, oh my Lord. It's like, dude, how is your foot already covered in poop?!? How did that even happen?
Dave Bowers
Right? No, you have to move so fast. Faster than you ever have moved in anything else you've ever done in your life.
Johnny Oldani
That’s where the dad reflex is coming.
Dave Bowers
Got everything ready. This is off, clean this off. Boom. Formula one pit crew style is the best way you want it. Now you're not going to start being fast at it, but you're going to get fast at it, and you will eventually be pooped on, peed on, thrown-up on, everything like that. Just deal with it because it's just going to happen. There's nothing you can do and you won't trade it for the world. We can tell you all these things but you're about to feel something that you never knew you could feel.
Brock Yordy
Pee in the mouth. Yes.
Dave Bowers
Yes.
Brock Yordy
Alright, thank you so much for your time today, gentlemen. Thank you, Johnny. Welcome to the team. You'll be getting content from these two men and several other great contributors from around the country and you and I will get on sometime soon to a call to action to see if we can't get some more great knowledge sharers like we have with Dave and Rob here.
Robert Meyer
And Johnny, just so you know, Chelsea knows, and Brock knows my style for writing articles is pretty rough-and-tumble and I wait, and I wait, and I wait, and then I write for a couple of hours. I don't proofread it, I save it, and I send it.
Johnny Oldani
Perfect.
Brock Yordy
Fueled, fueled by Copenhagen and nine cups of coffee.
Johnny Oldani
It's better than a crayon.
Dave Bowers
Hurtful.
Brock Yordy
I'm not even going to make a comment on why Rob doesn't have crayons available to write those…
Closing Segment
Thank you for joining us for episode 139, the first episode of 2025. The Newscast started in 2022. This has been a wild ride and we've been having so much fun while doing it. I want to thank The Driller team and welcome Johnny, a new dad. We're still looking for great contributors. We have so much to share this year from rig innovations to policy to safety, to what is important most to us in drilling and construction.
Go out, be safe, be smart, find the next generation. Recruit them, empower them. Be profitable. Welcome to 2025, everybody.
