Oilfield Traffic and What It Does to Glass in Weld County

Weld County is the centre of oil and gas production in Colorado. The Wattenberg Field in the DJ Basin runs underneath a large part of the county, and the surface traffic that comes with it has reshaped how the roads here get used.

For glass, that traffic is a category of its own. It is not quite highway driving and not quite farm driving, and it breaks windshields in ways that are specific enough to be worth describing properly.

Lease roads are built for access, not for ride quality

The road into a pad is typically compacted road base, sometimes with a scoria or recycled asphalt surface. It is built to carry very heavy equipment in most weather, and that is the whole design brief. Nothing about it is intended to keep stones on the ground.

Those surfaces sit loose at the top. Every vehicle that uses one picks material up in the tread and carries it. Some comes off on the lease road. A good deal of it comes off once the vehicle is back on pavement and up to speed, which is why the damage often happens a few miles away from where the stone was collected.

Sand and proppant haulers are the worst of it

Hydraulic fracturing needs a lot of sand, and that sand moves by truck. Pneumatic tankers and belly dumps run in convoys to and from the pads during a completion, sometimes around the clock.

The trucks themselves are usually sheeted properly. The problem is not the load spilling, it is what accumulates on the vehicle. Sand settles on the frame rails, the fifth wheel, the mudflaps and the tyre tread on the lease road, and then comes off progressively once the truck is back on US 85 or a county road.

Following one of these for ten miles is a continuous low level sandblast with the occasional larger stone in it. The abrasion hazes the glass over time. The stones are what chip it.

Convoy spacing and shift change

Two patterns make this worse than the raw vehicle count suggests.

Trucks run in groups rather than spread out, so you do not meet one hauler, you meet six in three minutes. And crew changes put a lot of light trucks onto the same roads within the same half hour, typically early morning and early evening. In autumn and winter that overlaps with low sun, which is its own hazard when the glass is dusty or already pitted.

Why operators feel this more than commuters

If you drive to a pad every day, you are not exposed to this occasionally. You are exposed to it twice a day, every working day, in a vehicle that also spends time parked in the open on a dusty site.

The result is a fleet where glass damage is a running cost rather than an occasional event. Three things follow from that:

• Chips accumulate faster than anyone reports them, because a small chip does not stop a truck working and nobody wants to take a unit off the road for it.
• Those unreported chips then crack in the first cold snap, all at once, which turns a series of free repairs into a batch of paid replacements.
• Any vehicle with a camera behind the mirror also needs recalibration after replacement, so the downtime per unit is longer than people plan for.

The fix is unglamorous. A standing rule that any chip gets reported the day it appears, and a mobile repair visit to the yard every few weeks rather than one vehicle at a time. Chip repair is usually free under comprehensive coverage and takes under half an hour per unit. Replacement is neither.

Driving it with less damage

• Hang well back from sand haulers. Eight seconds is not excessive behind a loaded pneumatic tanker on a dusty road.
• Slow for oncoming traffic on narrow lease roads. Closing speed is what does the damage and you control half of it.
• Do not pass in a convoy unless you can complete it cleanly. Sitting alongside a hauler puts you in the spray for the whole pass.
• Wash the glass properly rather than running dry wipers through dust. Grit under a blade scratches the driver sweep area, and that cannot be polished out of laminated glass.
• Keep washer fluid topped up. On these roads you will use more than you expect.
• Check the glass at a low angle in daylight once a week. Highway chips are easy to miss from the driver seat.

Fleet and equipment work

Service trucks, crew cabs, water haulers, vac trucks and the heavier equipment on site all take glass damage, and taking each one into a shop separately is usually the most expensive way to handle it.

We do this as mobile work at the yard or the site. Multi-vehicle arrangements are covered on fleet and commercial glass, heavier machinery on heavy equipment and ag glass, and class 8 units on semi truck windshield replacement.

One practical point on mobile work in this setting. Adhesive cure time depends on temperature and humidity on the day, and a windy dusty pad is not always the right place to bond a windshield. We will say so when that is the case rather than doing it anyway. The trade-off is set out in mobile versus in-shop replacement.

Coverage across the field

We run mobile service across the producing parts of the county, including Kersey, La Salle, Platteville, Fort Lupton, Milliken and Greeley itself, plus the rest of Weld County. Call or text (970) 608-4888.

More guides

• Why US 85 is hard on windshields. A freight corridor with no median and permanent roadworks.
• Harvest season and why gravel damage spikes in September. Beet and silage trucks on loose county roads.
• The Greeley to Denver commute and why I-25 chips windshields. Construction zones at 75 mph, twice a day.

Fleet and single vehicle work both run out of Greeley. See Windshield Replacement Greeley.