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11 Days in Saudi Arabia As part of my operations support responsibilities I was asked to fly to Saudi Arabia to help out on their first recent fiber optic installation. They had completed a similar job a couple of years ago but no one was still around who completed those jobs. The job was being organised and run by a Chinese guy who could have probably completed the job by himself but the consequence of failing outweighed the cost of sending me out to help. I started my journey flying to Bahrain and then driven into Saudi before being dropped off at the Euro Village Compound in Al Khobar. I stayed here for two nights before being driven off into the desert with the equipment. The town we were staying in was called Abqaiq and is home to the world's largest facility for stabilising crude oil ready for transport. Wikipedia claims that a moderate to severe attack on the facility here would slow production from 6.8 million barrels a day to around 1 million barrels. This could go somewhere to explain the excessive number of security personnel in the area and our difficulty in getting permission to do the job from the government. We were visited most nights by the military police who came to check out paperwork, but other than the paperwork, the security is really just a big show and would not stop anyone determined to cause damage. The temperature this time of year in the Abqaiq desert was a mere 45-50C during the day and 30-35C at night; the first few days were pretty deadly but there was a nice breeze which kept things bearable. Working at night was actually quite a nice experience. Because it was Ramadan, all of the shops and restaurants were closed the whole day and only opened from about 8pm to 2am; this made food a serious problem and resulted in many crappy meals consisting of just crisps and biscuits until the evening. To make things more complicated the Muslim guys on the job were not able to work the whole day as they were fasting and not allowed to drink or eat anything during daylight hours. We ended up working 6am to 12 noon, and then again from 6pm to 12 midnight; and then a 30+ minute commute from the apartment to the well site each journey. Well GPS Coordinates ABBQ 376 - +25° 56' 55.39", +49° 41' 13.12" ABBQ 406 - +25° 57' 01.92", +49° 41' 11.65" |