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Memory of the month the way things were. (Part Twenty Three)

Saudi Arabia 1

Having had an X-ray and jabs I was set to head off to Saudi and that very morning as I was on the plane, Calor gas rang home to offer me a permanent job at their plant at Lee Mill on the outskirts of Plymouth, so Angela had to tell them "its too late he’s gone again!". Landing at Dhahran I was supposed to be met by somebody, but of course no one was there so I thought I may have a problem here as all signs were in Arabic and no one spoke English on top of that I had no company name or phone number. Luckily after some time a couple of chaps showed up and we went to a large house that was rented as a base in Dhahran, this was an American company based on Grand Bahama Island which would be a problem later on.

I had a couple of days to waste until a couple young Americans arrived and then we would head off to the site. The house was run by an English couple and I was asked to accompany the housekeeper to the supermarket to get supplies, she was about thirty with long blond hair past her waist a rarity there, so the local men would try to stroke her, hence the escort so I felt like a bit of a minder. On the third day we left for the job where we would be based, Sakaka, an ancient town grown up around an oasis some 755 miles from Dhahran.

The Americans leading the way in one pickup with me following in another, it was very hot and with no air-con, an uncomfortable drive, luckily at every stop fuel was available which wasn’t always the case it seems so we just kept driving, the heat haze was a problem and at one stage I saw an empty flatbed artic coming but I didn’t see was the twelve others behind it all going flat out, the changing air pressure in and out of the cab meant I could barely hold the pickup on the road so I was much relieved when the last one passed. Eventually we arrived at a town called Arar at the end of the tap line and as we drove into the town there was a dead donkey in the middle of the road blown up like a balloon that no one had bothered to move, that was my abiding impression of the whole town.

The company had a small base there where we had a welcome, a quick shower and a bite to eat before driving the last hundred miles to Sakaka arriving at 22.00 hrs having left Dhahran at 06.00 hrs basically sixteen hours which I thought was fairly good going with stops for fuel and some grub

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Next day was Friday the Arab holy day so no work, however the superintendent asked if I would like to see the job a chance I jumped at, so off we went about twenty miles into the desert before reaching the maintenance area where I noticed a Cat 621 scraper with flat rear tyre, on mentioning this he said the low loader driver that had brought it from Dhahran had let the tyres down because in was bouncing around and they couldn’t blow it up.

Immediately alarms went off in my head, I thought we are over 700 miles from anywhere and they can’t blow up a tyre? I said it’s a pinched O ring I expect, he said can you fix it, yes if you have one and levers. So I sent him off to get an O ring, levers, hammer and a chain block, I had already seen a Cat 944 wheel loader and a compressor handy so all I had to do was start the scraper, push down the bowl to lift the back wheels off the ground. By the time he got back I had the tyre pushed in with a couple of blocks of wood and was soon able to spring off the locking ring replace the O ring ready to inflate the tyre.

Because of the flat spot on bottom of the tyre you have to put the chain block around the middle of the tyre and ratchet it up, this pulls in the centre and pushes the rims against the wheel, then whack in some air as quickly as possible and it’s done, It took twenty five minutes start to finish, but I had a bad feeling for the future. The co-operator