God, I’m getting sick of this… re: MikeDB’s Post #5444 . I’m a Directional Driller. I’m one of those guys who steer oilwells for a living - same thing as John Wright. When the drillstring gets stuck - which happens more often than you would think - it causes delays. If the string cannot be freed, tools are run in hole to part the pipe - this is called a Freepoint & Back-Off operation. It is done to recover as much of the drillstring as possible above the stuck point. After this, the remainder of the string left in the hole - known as the ‘Fish’ (which is why stuck-pipe specialists are known as Fishermen) is cemented in place by creating a cement plug on top of it. A ‘new’ well is drilled from the top of the cement plug - NOT from surface. This is known as drilling a Sidetrack. Again, a VERY common occurance when drilling oilwells. Obviously, the objective is NOT to get stuck and have to do Fishing, Free-Point & Back-Off, Cementing and Sidetracking operations due to the time and cost involved. But -drilling a borehole being what it is - it happens… sometimes multiple times on the same well. As a matter of fact, we are currently stuck in hole on the well I am on. This crap quoted in post 5444 is trying to make what is a normal - albeit infrequent and costly - operation, into some sort of scandlous cover-up. Again, Give Me An F’ing Break - and let people who now NOTHING about drilling oilwells shut the hell up!