Well Worth the Effort

An innovative plan by the Hood County Commissioners Court has drawn willing support from big drilling and exploration companies and added thousands of dollars to the county’s road repair fund. The plan has gone a long way in addressing costly damage done to the county’s roadways by heavy tandem trucks traveling to and from well sites The cost referenced is considered in excess of normal road wear and tear in the absence of those same trucks.
Last year Hood County Commissioner Richard Roan, Ph.D., devised a plan for drilling and exploration companies to share responsibility for county road maintenance and was given the green light by other commissioners to research the idea further.
First, Roan approached three of the 11 companies currently operating in Hood County to get an idea of whether company executives would be receptive to such a plan. Those approached readily agreed to participate. Commissioners believed that if truckers were approached directly about contributing to the county’s road maintenance fund, they likely would pass the costs along to the drilling companies by raising their sub-contract rates. Thus, it was decided that the best course of action would be to approach the drilling companies directly.
Commissioners next went to the Texas Department of Transportation for statistics on the damage big trucks cause to roadways. One statistic showed that an 80,000-pound truck could do the same amount of spread damage, per mile, to a road as 9,000 standard automobiles. Added to that was the indicator that trucks traveling to a drilling site make an average of 241 trips from the beginning of well construction through well production. Additionally, after a well becomes productive, there is the additional traffic caused by the necessity of hauling off recovered water from the well site. These facts helped easily convince drilling company executives of their responsibility to assist local taxpayers in maintaining county roadways.
The drilling of wells in Hood County skyrocketed over a period of about 20 months through March of 2007, the time frame covered by this data collection. With about 620 large trucks now sharing the roadway with local residents, commissioners have reason to believe it is only going to get worse.
Armed with statistics and factual information, commissioners next set about the task of determining the cost of materials and labor used in repairing county roadways. A check of records revealed that costs had started rising at the same time drilling companies and large trucks began appearing in Hood County.
By charting work repair orders, commissioners were able to see that the influx of big trucks