Transportation & Stringing: Pipeliners Can’t Leave Home Without It

“Over the years, they’ve continued to do away with sidings because they want to handle the big unit trains of cars or coal. It’s been a challenge for us to find a place to take this pipe by train to get it offloaded. We’re working on the Florida Gas expansion and have had all sorts of problems trying to find locations in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida to unload the pipe,” he said.

Alliance also posed some pretty nasty technical challenges for Dun crews.

“We were working in North Dakota in December when the temperature fell to minus 20 degrees with a wind chill of minus 50. It was harder on the laborers than anyone but we had twice as many as we needed so we let them take turns going in to warm up. We told them we didn’t care if they could unload one load of pipe or two because we didn’t want them to stay out there for any length of time. That was also a real challenge for equipment,” he said, adding that working in bug-filled swamps represents the other extreme challenge for crews.

In addition to unloading pipe for the 525-mile Florida Gas project, Dun has been stringing the Denbury pipeline which is nearing an end, and is stringing a project in Minnesota for Enbridge.

The Dunns did have a separate Canadian company until it was dissolved in the 1970s. During the 1950s they had quite a bit of work in Mexico, so much that Ellis picked up the nickname of “Pancho.”

Johnson said he has little interest in either working overseas or diversifying in case the pipeline business slowed down. Whenever they did think about diversifying, business invariably picked up.

Jewell Dunn, who began working for the company in the 1950s and maintained an active role, was ready to hand over the reigns by 1997 and after a year of negotiations were successfully concluded she sold the company to Gene. The timing was fortuitous because the massive Alliance project was getting under way and helped kick-start the new owner’s business. Johnson also thought it was time to move the offices from downtown Dallas to a site that would offer a more relaxed atmosphere.

He said he wanted workers to feel comfortable with their new management and made sure they understood there was an open-door policy. That quickly paid off with some new innovations.

“One idea they came up with was a turntable to put on a fifth wheel because with these steering trailers, steer tires on the trucks always wore out faster. We thought if we could make this work, it would take a lot of pressure off of those front tires, and it did,” Johnson said.

In his years in the business, Johnson has met an untold number of people who have left favorable memories, but none more so that Ernest and Jewell Dunn.

“One of the most valuable bits of advice Ernest gave me was shortly before he passed away. We had three good years in a row and then all of a sudden we weren’t getting any work at all. He advised me to always remember that we’re going to have peak years and that’s when you’ve got to hang on to your money because you’re going to need it when you have those valleys. That’s always stuck in my mind and I pass it along to my people because it is always going to get slow again.”

The second bit of wisdom Johnson acquired from his mentor was to respect everyone and treat them all the same, be they executive or field hand.