Asked to name one of the most challenging horizontal directional-drilling jobs ever tackled by REM Directional, owner Joel Colgrove Jr. doesn’t hesitate for long: A 7,000-foot bore for a 42-inch-diameter natural gas pipeline, drilled 80 feet under the bottom of a roughly 65-foot-deep intercoastal waterway in 2008, outside of Lake Charles, Louisiana.“What made it tough was the length (about 1.3 miles), plus it had rained a lot,” Colgrove explains. “So we had to bring in all our equipment on barges.” Furthermore, the ground was so spongy that REM had to dig a flotation ditch to hold a 7,000-foot-long section of
