Tulsa Steel Building Up Job Force

Tulsa's not the oil capital anymore, but that doesn't mean black goldâ€™s not big business. Case in point, Tulsa Steel Services. <br/><br/>As News on 6 business reporter Steve Berg explains,

Wednesday, May 10th 2006, 10:24 am

By: News On 6

Tulsa's not the oil capital anymore, but that doesn't mean black goldâ€™s not big business. Case in point, Tulsa Steel Services.

As News on 6 business reporter Steve Berg explains, they say oil is still part of the Tulsa story.

David Smith used to be in the light steel business, until he kept getting calls from oil companies to make heavy steel structures.

"They were like, if you were, we've got all this work we'd like to give you and I was like, okay well, I'll get into that business then."

And so this month, he opened Tulsa Steel Services. With high oil prices, he says the oil and gas business is booming again and companies are looking to build again. The oil companies may have moved their headquarters from Tulsa to Houston, but they left behind a lot of big buildings, so they say Tulsa is still a big player in the manufacturing part of the oil industry.

"I've got 60-ton lifting capacity with 23-foot hook heights. And there's not one in Tulsa that can do that, very few in the state of Oklahoma that can do that. I get contacts from customers that are like, we know you've got this crane capacity and we know you've got this hook height. We've got a product that needs to be built y'know, it can't be built anywhere else but here."

Smith says his big challenge right now is not finding work, but finding workers. â€œI'm going to need a 100 in the next 6 months and by the end of the year, I'll need 200 with the dayshift and the nightshift and everything like that." He says many became leery after the oil bust in the 1980's, but now it's back in a big way.

Tulsa Steel Services will be holding a job fair this Saturday from 8 AM to 3 PM. The address is 6105 West 68th Street. You can call 592-3434 for more information.