September 11, 2008 06:32 PM UTC

Oil Boom Creating Unsafe Working Conditions

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• by: redstateblues

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

The Republican cry for the past few months has been “Drill now, drill here, pay less” and more recently “drill, baby, drill”. Meanwhile, in the real world, there has been a massive increase in the amount of drilling operations. The increase has been so massive, in fact, that the oil and gas industry can’t find enough qualified people to work in the field.

The Associated Press tells a fascinating story about the danger of expanding drilling, and the untold hazards that await those who seek to make a living digging for America’s energy–stories that make Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle seem like a Disney movie.

At least 598 workers died on the job between 2002 and 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. During that period, the number of deaths per year rose by around 70 percent, from 72 victims in 2002 to 125 in 2006 and a preliminary count of 120 in 2007.

Experts blame several factors for pushing the toll ever higher in an industry long considered one of the most dangerous in the nation. Among them:

• A dramatic increase in drilling, spurred by record-breaking oil and natural gas prices. The number of workers in oil and gas jobs shot up from 290,000 in 2002 to 428,000 in 2007. In July 2002, 740 land-based oil and gas rigs were operating in the United States; today, there are about 2,000.

• An influx of new workers hired to operate all those rigs. Many of the newcomers are young, inexperienced and speak little English.

• A high-pressure environment where workplace safety lapses are common. Government agencies responsible for enforcing the rules rarely dole out tough penalties. [rsb emphasis]

• Rampant drug and alcohol use among workers, some of whom turn to methamphetamine to get through 12-hour shifts and labor up to 14 days in a row.

When we hear about the need for more drilling from the Republicans–and more than a few Democrats–some of the argument against them seems to be an environmental one. If we drill, then we might damage the ecosystem of an area. That argument, however, does not seem to be one that average Americans take to heart; who can blame them when they’re emptying out their wallets to fill up their vehicles? But people dying due to a lack of training and oversight on the part of the oil companies might strike a little deeper than a few fishies or birdies dying.

“A lot of the rig crews are made up of people who were working at Wal-Mart yesterday. Literally,” [rsb emphasis] said Mark Altom of the Woodard, Okla.-based Energy Training Council, a nonprofit organization whose programs are recognized by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Here is one story of a young man who lost his life in a grisly accident–an accident that could have been prevented.

Less than two months into the job in the oilfields of West Texas, Brandon Garrett was sliced in half by a motorized spool of steel cable as he and other roughnecks struggled to get a drilling rig up and running.

Garrett, 23, came to the West Texas oilfields with hopes of landing a good-paying job to help provide for his 4-year-old daughter.

On Easter Sunday 2007, the day he died, he was helping four other crew members repair a plugged drill bit on a rig about 70 miles northeast of Lubbock in the Texas Panhandle. A supervisor split the men into two groups performing different procedures to get the rig back in operation more quickly, according to OSHA reports.

Garrett was standing on top of a spool when another crew member accidentally activated it. Garrett was pulled into the machine. The cable cut his torso in half.

“Instead of doing one job at a time, both jobs were done simultaneously, resulting in a fatal accident,” an OSHA inspector determined. He also noted that Garrett was doing a job he was not regularly assigned to do.

You’d think that this amount of workplace-related fatalities would cause oil companies to step in to try to change this atmosphere. But, because of a lack of oversight from the government organizations set up to protect workers, the oil and gas companies have done as little as possible to correct this problem; basically amounting to throwing money at it (OSHA does admit that the $1.5 Billion that Patterson-UTI spent on safety has helped curb workplace-related deaths from its all-time high of 36 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2006.)

A report issued in April by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee described Patterson-UTI as one of the nation’s worst violators of workplace safety laws. The report, titled “Discounting Death: OSHA’s Failure to Punish Safety Violations That Kill Workers,” concluded the agency’s enforcement actions amounted to a “slap on the wrist” for the company’s “unspeakable toll” on Texas workers.

Devoting an entire section to Patterson-UTI and 13 employees, including Garrett, who died in Texas rig accidents between November 2003 and April 2007, the report said the agency fined the company $432,000 for violations related to the deaths. But it later forgave all but $115,000 of the fines.



“OSHA’s attempts to stop Patterson from gambling with workers’ lives are a study in weakness,” the report said [rsb emphasis].

The bottom line is that in our mad search for more oil here, we might be taking for granted the lives of young men who want nothing more than to find a good life for themselves and their families. What is the cost in human life that we are willing to pay for expanding American energy exploration beyond the boom that already exists? And can the oil and gas industry step up to provide the safety that its workers deserve?