Word: jacketful
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...officers were upper-crust Guatemalan exiles-lawyers, engineers, coffee planters driven out for their politics or stripped of some of their land under Arbenz' Communist-administered agrarian reform program. Castillo Armas himself turned out to be a slender, sallow, diffident man in a checked shirt and leather jacket, with a .45 automatic jammed into the belt of his khaki pants...
...California, but some of them wear high Texas boots while they probe the depths of the Gulf. The system most used for drilling in the open Gulf is a sophisticated outgrowth of the simple, pile-supported platform. Brown & Root, Inc. of Houston starts with what it calls a "jacket": eight heavy-walled steel cylinders, 34 inches in diameter and up to 100 feet long. It sets them upright in two widely spaced rows, and braces them with a criss-crossing network of strong piping welded to their sides. It loads the massive affair (weighing up to 250 tons) onto...
Next step is to drive steel piles, 30 inches in diameter, down through the cylinders. When they reach firm footing (which may be 100 feet in the mud), they are cut off even with the jacket's cylinders. Then a prefabricated deck is jockeyed into position on top of the jacket. The final result is a firmly braced platform high enough above the surface so that hurricane waves can sweep harmlessly below...
Seagoing oil engineers believe that these "permanent" platforms can survive any hurricane that should be expected in the next 50 years, but they are dangerous to ..erect except in a glassy sea. The critical moment is when the heavy jacket is lifted from the deck of the barge and set upright in the sea. Even gentle waves can make it swing like a pendulum, tipping the barge, pulling the crane out of line, snapping thick steel cables. Sometimes an erecting barge has to wait for costly weeks before the sea is calm enough to risk a dash to the drilling...
...industry believes that permanent platforms (probably of the jacket type but set up by much larger and more stable barges) will always be used for permanent offshore oilfield structures. But drilling in up to at least 200 feet of water will probably be done from mobile platforms. When the well is finished, the platform will sail away, leaving only a few piles to protect the top of the well casing...