August 2001 | Jeff Long

Were she of a different philosophical bent, Carrie Collins might bemoan the fact that she's one of the few women in the "good old boys" line of work. It would be easy to say, for instance, that her company, DRAGIN Drilling, has had a hard time getting its foot in the door on a lot of jobs because a female owner is still suspect.

Carrie Collins has many things to say about intellectual atrophy in the drilling industry, but her frustration is born not of feminism but of exasperation: It's not that it's tough being a woman in her field, but just try introducing a new drilling technique for a "tried and true" application.

"We're out of the '50s now," Collins says. "But in water wells, you've still got that old school."

DRAGIN Drilling, Collins' Wareham, Massachusetts-based firm, is not hurting for business-in fact, they are very busy. But there are a lot of contracts out there that Collins can't even get a shot at-specifically, municipal work. Collins' great hope would be for the ringing praise of
Provincetown, Massachusetts, for DRAGIN's work to just reach more ears.

Last year, DRAGIN brought its custom-designed 24-inch augers to the South Hollow Well Field, the chief
drinking water supply of Provincetown. DRAGIN had been contracted to replace one 1950s-era production
well, but as work got under way it became clear that all five of the production wells in the field were too
far gone to save. With the summer tourist season on Cape Cod approaching, time was a crucial factor.
This was exactly the kind of job the Collins and her partner David Quagliaroli, president and vice
president, respectively, had created DRAGIN for.

"We bid it using the auger drilling method rather than cable tool," Collins says. DRAGIN's monster rig, a
one-of-a-kind modified high-torque CME-95 with a 24-inch hollow stem auger, supplemented by DRAGIN's
all-terrain rig, drilled five 65-foot production wells and nine 300-foot salt water interface monitoring
wells in a short period of time.

"We installed five wells in the time a cable tool would have taken to do one," Collins says. Using the augers, each well could be constructed and gravel-packed prior to the removal of the augers from the borehole. "Essentially, we build them from the bottom up."

The folks in Provincetown were thrilled. "So far, from what we've heard, everything is working wonderfully."

"It's a different method," Collins says, and thus is suspect in the eyes of people who've spent their lives doing it another way. "Engineering firms for these towns typically set up the specs for cable tool. They're not even letting us bid on it."

Such is life on the cutting edge. It was Collins' belief that she could build a better drilling operation that led her to create DRAGIN (stands for Deep Remedial And Groundwater Investigation Needs) in the first place. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts with a civil engineering degree, Collins' first job was as an environmental engineer overseeing drilling operations on the old Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod.

It was there Collins met Quagliaroli, whose company was hired because it could drill deeper than any other, beyond 300 feet. "He learned drilling from his father, so it was in his blood," Collins says. Other drilling operations were less impressive. "I saw employees frustrated, clients frustrated. It was just little things, details that weren't being paid attention to." So Collins, with her engineering background, and Quagliaroli, with his drilling background, decided in 1996 they could do it better.

DRAGIN used its early revenues to build its rigs, custom designed by CME with ideas from Quagliaroli. "We wanted to create a niche of large-diameterdrilling," Collins says. "We knew that work was out there. Within four months, we had some very large jobs."

DRAGIN has continued to work at Otis, now called the Massachusetts Military Reservation, and has also worked on the "Big Dig," Boston's downtown underground traffic project that is one of the biggest construction projects anywhere, ever. Collins operated a rig herself, drilling dewatering wells for the central artery of the tunnel.

Collins' work is her life: DRAGIN's 13 employees include her father, mother, and brother. With 12-hour workdays the norm for Collins, they might not see her otherwise. One tangible reward: Collins was recently recognized by Working Woman magazine as a regional finalist for the Working Woman Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards.

Still, Collins would rather talk about the CME-95's high torque capacity than the challenges
for a woman running a drilling company.

"The equipment's the thing," Collins says. "If you don't know how to operate it,
you'll get yourself in trouble."