Exhibit 14 Costs $23.50. Schneider's Name Is On The Shift Sheet.
Nobody had ever pulled it. The shift logs of a hole drilled beside Archuleta Mesa record, in the driller's own hand, a void struck at 3,870 feet and a crew pulled off the floor before dawn.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Exhibit 14 is a bound run of drilling shift logs, forty-seven pages, and the clerk in Albuquerque charges fifty cents a page.
Twenty-three dollars and fifty cents, paid at the counter on 11 August 2026.
The request slip stapled inside the folder cover is blank. Not a reporter, not a researcher, not a creditor. The file has been open to any member of the public since 20 September 1988, when Cordray Brothers Drilling Company of Aztec, New Mexico went into Chapter 7 and its trustee filed the job records as exhibits, because the job records were what the estate had to sell.
What is on the sheet
The shift sheets are a printed form the company used for eleven years. Header block, ruled body, one line per entry, signed at the foot by the driller and initialled by the toolpusher.
The header for the graveyard tour of 6 August 1979 reads: WELL/PROJECT, ARC-2. DEPTH AT TOUR START, 3,812. ENGINEER OF RECORD, P. SCHNEIDER.
The body of the sheet runs normally to 05:45, which records 3,846 feet.
Then, at 06:12, in ballpoint, in the driller's hand:
Struck void 3,870. Air foul. Shut in. Crew out.
Nine words and four full stops. It is the last entry the sheet carries and the last entry in the binder written by that crew.
Twenty-four feet in twenty-seven minutes
We gave the forty-seven pages to Berenice Okwuosa-Trumbull, a drilling engineer of thirty-one years, with the header block masked, and asked her what she was looking at. She was not told the operator, the state or the year.
She came back on two things.
The rate. Below two thousand feet this crew had averaged eleven feet an hour for four months. Between 05:45 and 06:12 the hole made twenty-four feet. That is not drilling. That is the bit dropping.
The vocabulary. A driller who loses his mud into a porous formation writes lost returns or lost circ, because that is what the day rate turns on and that is what the mud engineer will be asked about in the morning. There is no such entry anywhere in the 138 earlier tours.
What happened next, in the same binder
Nothing on the 7th. Nothing on the 8th. The forms for both tours are in the binder, ruled and dated in advance and empty.
On the 9th a second crew signs on and the tour code changes to STANDBY. Nine names, and not one of them appears on any sheet before the 6th.
On 15 August the rig comes off the pad. Exhibit 15 is the demobilisation invoicing: $41,880, four loads, sixty-one miles back to Aztec, and on page 9 a line cancelling the balance of the contract footage at the client's instruction.
The hole was never re-entered.
The card in the state file
Under New Mexico rules a hole that is not completed is plugged, and the plugging is filed.
The state well file for ARC-2 has no plugging record and no completion record. It has one index card, dated September 1979, recording that the obligation was assumed by the contracting agency.
That card is the whole of the state's interest in what is at 3,870 feet, and it has been the whole of it for forty-seven years.
What is still shut
Two things.
The gas chart for that tour would say what air foul was. The trustee kept his own index of the exhibits and produced it for us; it lists an Exhibit 14-A. There is no Exhibit 14-A in the folder, on the docket, or in the clerk's receiving log.
And the pad gate log, which would say who was standing on that floor at 06:12, is Exhibit 22. It is the only exhibit in the case under seal, sealed in 1989 on an application nobody opposed. We have moved to have it unsealed. The prime contractor's counsel has told us, in the reply printed below, that he will not oppose us and would like to read it himself.
Everything else in this story cost twenty-nine dollars and fifty cents and has been sitting on a shelf since before most of our readers were born. The forged Dulce material in our vault, PX-1930, puts its deepest floor at 790 metres. This binder is a working document written by a man being paid by the hour, and it stops at 1,180.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
Sources & Method
We were not looking for this. A reader wrote to us about her father's pay stubs, the stubs named a company, and the company's name led to a bankruptcy docket that has been open since 1988. Everything after that was fifty cents a page and a drilling engineer who was told nothing about where the pages came from until after she had written her note.
Who we spoke to
- Exhibit 14, In re Cordray Brothers Drilling Company, Inc., Bound run of daily drilling shift logs, 22 March – 15 August 1979, 47 pages. Copied at the clerk's counter; 47 pages at $0.50; $23.50 paid by card Requested and collected 11 August 2026 The request slip stapled inside the folder cover carries no prior entries. We are the first.
- Exhibit 15, same case, Mobilisation and demobilisation invoicing, twelve pages. Copied at the same counter, same day; $6.00 11 August 2026 Page 9 carries the cancellation line. Page 4 carries the pad photographs our engraving is drawn from.
- Berenice Okwuosa-Trumbull, Drilling engineer, thirty-one years, directional and deep-hole work. Given the 47 pages with the header block masked and asked what she was reading; paid $1,200; her note is published entire August 2026 Identified the 06:12 entry as a bit drop before she was told the date, the operator or the state.
- Orvel Danforth-Achebe, The Chapter 7 trustee, retired 2004. Traced through the docket; telephoned twice, then interviewed at home in Rio Rancho August 2026 Kept his own index of the exhibits and produced it. It lists an Exhibit 14-A that is not in the file.
- Ardith Vinson-Baptiste, Daughter of Ansel Vinson-Baptiste, the toolpusher named on the 6 August sheet. Wrote to us after an earlier story; supplied her father's 1979 pay stubs and his union book June–August 2026 The stubs match the shift sheets tour for tour, including the two blank days, which were paid.
Documents
- PX-1930 — The Bennewitz material — 340 pages given to a private citizen by persons unknown, 1979–82 contested
What we could not confirm
- Whether Phil Schneider stood on that floor on the night of 6 August 1979. His name is printed in the header block as engineer of record, which is a contract designation and appears identically on all 138 earlier sheets. The document that would settle it is the pad gate log, filed as Exhibit 22, which is the only exhibit in the case under a protective order. The order was entered in 1989, has never been challenged, and we have moved to have it lifted.
- What was in the void. The driller wrote ‘air foul’, which is a man describing what he could smell, not an instrument reading. The instrument reading would be the mud logger's gas chart for that tour. The trustee's own index lists it as Exhibit 14-A. Exhibit 14-A is not in the folder, is not on the docket, and the clerk's office has no record of it ever arriving.
- Who the client was. The demobilisation invoice is addressed to a prime contractor and carries a contract number in a series we have not been able to place. The prime was merged twice and its 1979 files sit in a corporate vault in Delaware. We have been refused access twice in writing and a freedom of information request against the contracting side has been pending for fourteen months.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Hollow PostTHEY DRILLED INTO THE BASE AND SEALED THE FILE
Ran the 06:12 line as proof of a cover-up and told readers the file had been suppressed.
Had that we did not
The line itself, quoted correctly, and the depth, which they got right.
Left out
That the file was never sealed. It has sat on an open shelf for thirty-eight years and the charge for a copy is fifty cents a page.
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Signal & LedgerLost Returns, Shut-Ins And Contract Cancellation: Reading A 1979 Tour Sheet
Trade piece for drilling readers on what shift-log vocabulary does and does not establish.
Had that we did not
The best explanation in print of why ‘struck void’ is not the phrase a driller reaches for when he loses circulation. Better than ours, and we have said so to their reporter.
Left out
The nine men who signed on for standby on the 9th, and the fact that none of them had worked the hole before.
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They Buriedthis newspaperExhibit 14 Costs $23.50. Schneider's Name Is On The Shift Sheet.
Paid for the photocopies, had the log read blind by a drilling engineer, and then asked the state what happened to the hole.
Had that we did not
All 47 pages, the demobilisation invoice, the engineer's note in full and the state's one index card.
Left out
Our headline puts a man's name next to a hole and lets the reader join them. The header is a printed contract designation; we did not establish that he stood on that floor, and we say so eleven paragraphs down instead of two. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Roland Petrossian-Whitby, deputy general counsel, Vandermeer Constructors Holdings Inc., successor by merger to the prime contractor named on Exhibit 15 in writing on 30 July 2026, with Exhibits 14 and 15 attached in full, the engineer's note attached, and nine numbered questions. Replied 18 August 2026. Printed entire and unedited, including the paragraphs about our reporting and the paragraph our lawyers asked us to consider cutting.
I have read your material twice and I am going to answer it properly, because the alternative is a two-line refusal that you would print and that would tell your readers more than I intend to tell them.
First, the plain corrections. My company is not the operator of that hole and never was. We are the surviving entity of a merger with a firm that held a construction management contract in the Four Corners in the relevant period. A demobilisation invoice addressed to a prime contractor establishes that a subcontractor billed a prime. It does not establish what the prime was building, for whom, or whether anyone at the prime read the tour sheets. In my experience nobody at a prime reads tour sheets.
Second, your engineer. I have no criticism of Ms Okwuosa-Trumbull's competence and I am not going to pretend her note says something it does not. She says the rate of penetration in the final twenty-seven minutes is inconsistent with formation drilling. That is a statement about rock. It is not a statement about architecture, and the distance between those two things is the entire distance between your evidence and your headline. Caves exist. Solution features in carbonate exist in enormous numbers throughout that region, they are frequently gas-charged, and a driller who drops a bit into one and smells sour gas will write down something short and get his men off the floor. I would.
Third, and this is the part I expect you to quote, so let me be precise rather than brief. You ask why no plugging record exists. I do not know, and I have looked. What I can tell you is what our own file shows, because I would rather you had it from me than from a docket. The instruction to cancel the balance of the footage did not originate with the subcontractor and did not originate with my predecessor. It came from the client, in a telephone call on 8 August 1979 that my predecessor's project manager recorded in a desk diary that is still in our vault, and it was confirmed the following week in a letter I am not able to produce to you because the letter is not ours to produce. The crew were paid a termination allowance rather than being demobilised for cause, which is unusual and which cost real money. Our insurers were instructed in September 1979 not to pursue subrogation against anybody in respect of the abandoned footage. I have found no explanation in the file for that instruction and I have stopped looking, because the people who could explain it are dead.
None of that means what your readers will want it to mean. A federal client can assume a plugging obligation for reasons that have nothing to do with what is at the bottom of a hole, and frequently does, and the reason is usually that the client intends to use the hole for something and does not want a contractor filling it with cement. That is the ordinary explanation. It is also, I recognise, an explanation that raises the question you are actually asking.
Fourth, Mr Schneider. His name is printed on a header. It is printed on every header in that binder, including the sheets for the fortnight he can be shown to have been in Colorado. Whatever a person believes about the rest of his account, your document does not put him on that pad, and I would ask you not to let a coincidence of typography do the work of evidence. You have been careful about this everywhere in your draft except the headline, which is where careful is needed.
Finally, a request rather than an objection. Exhibit 22 is under seal because a bankruptcy judge sealed it in 1989 on an application my predecessor did not make and did not oppose. We will not oppose your motion to unseal it either. If you succeed I would be glad to see it, which is a sentence I did not expect to write when I opened your letter.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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