Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, hotshotters in Oklahoma and Texas had already been hit with a drop-off in work owed to sinking oil prices brought on by oil production battles between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Around the same time came the sudden economic shutdown, which cut prices even further, along with load demand, among oil companies and supporting businesses.
For Eagle Hot Shot owner Aaron Hammer, it’s all added up to a tough drop in dispatch calls to Texas.
“Texas took a really big hit with the price of oil when it started going down about a month ago,” said Hammer, whose business is based in Jenks, Okla. “As soon as oil gets below $40 or $50 a barrel, everybody quits pumping, which means that everyone working in the oil field is out of work and everybody who delivers to them is out of work and anyone who works in the area is out of work because there’s no other freight really. Texas’ biggest commodity is oil.
“We run a lot of stuff out of Oklahoma to Texas normally when oil is good because every time an oil rig goes down it costs them 50 grand a day that it’s not up, so they’ll pay anything to get a part rushed to Texas,” Hammer continued.
With oil field work all but dried up, dispatchers are now calling with loads related to pandemic relief.
“Almost all of the stuff we’re hauling right now is COVID disaster relief stuff,” Hammer said. “We hauled sanitation tanks for companies to make hand sanitizer. We’ve been running those back and forth to the northeast. We hauled a bunch of masks the other day. We hauled some tractor equipment for farms that are growing produce as they try to keep everything stocked.”
Though the work with disaster relief loads is appreciated, it’s a far cry from where the level of business is typically this time of year.
