This is a re-post from the NY times, but is so aptly written and highlights one the growing concerns to all in Western North Dakota
Meg Roussos for The New York Times
Crystal Roth’s husband, Timothy, an oil field worker from West Virginia, was killed in a company truck that crashed in his home state last year when the driver fell asleep.
When they were just 10 minutes from home, the driver fell asleep at the wheel. The truck veered off the highway and slammed into a sign that sheared off part of the vehicle’s side, killing Mr. Roth.
After working 17 hours straight at a natural gas well in Ohio, Timothy Roth and three other crew members climbed into their company truck around 10 o’clock one night last July and began their four-hour drive back to their drilling service company’s shop in West Virginia.
About two months before the fatal crash, Mr. Roth nearly died in a similar accident when another co-worker with the same company fell asleep at the wheel after a long shift and ran the company’s truck into a pole. In 2009, Mr. Roth’s employer
was penalized in New York, Pennsylvania and Utah for violations like “requiring or permitting” its oil field truckers to drive after working for 14 hours, the legal limit.
Over the past decade, more than 300 oil and gas workers like Mr. Roth were killed in highway crashes, the largest cause of fatalities in the industry. Many of these deaths were due in part to oil field exemptions from highway safety rules that allow truckers to work longer hours than drivers in most other industries, according to safety and health experts.
Many oil field truckers say that while these exemptions help them earn more money, they are routinely used to pressure workers into driving after shifts that are 20 hours or longer.
“Just because you are on an oil field site does not make you any less vulnerable to the effects of fatigue!” Garr Farrell, an oil service driver in Ore City, Tex.,
wrote last year to federal highway safety regulators. In his letter, Mr. Farrell complained that his managers had used the oil field exemptions to force him to wait, without anywhere to sleep, for 36 hours at one well site before he could unload his drilling supplies and get back on the highway.
Last year, the National Transportation Safety Board
saidit “strongly opposed” the oil field exemptions because they raise the risk of crashes.
This threat will grow substantially in coming years, safety advocates warn. According to federal officials, more than 200,000 new oil and gas wells will be drilled nationwide over the next decade. And the drilling technique used at more than 90 percent of these wells, known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, leads to far more trucks on the road — roughly 500 to 1,500 truck trips per well — than traditional drilling, partly because fracking requires millions of gallons of water per well.
The new drilling has been an economic boon to the country, adding millions of dollars in local tax revenues and royalty payments and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of them providing high pay to unskilled laborers in areas with double-digit unemployment.
But the jobs are also hazardous, with fatality rates that are seven times the national average across all industries. Nearly a third of the 648 deaths of oil field workers from 2003 through 2008 were in highway crashes, according to the most recent data analyzed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By contrast, highway crashes caused roughly a fifth of workplace fatalities across all industries in 2010.
“The growth of this industry is a big concern because it’s adding so many more trucks on the roads and its drivers don’t have to follow the same rules as others,” said Henry Jasny, a lawyer for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
Bending the Rules
In 2005, as the drilling boom accelerated, federal labor officials noticed a worrisome trend: fatalities among oil and gas workers rose 15 percent from 2003 to 2004. After investigating, the C.D.C. found that with the growth of the industry, not only were more workers dying but, more surprising, the fatality rate was increasing, meaning the relative risk was rising. Shifts grew longer, more inexperienced workers were hired and older rigs were being pressed into service, the agency concluded.
“Unless changes are made to increase worker safety, the high fatality rates described in this report are likely to continue,”
the agency warned, citing the growth of the industry and its trucking exemptions.
Some worker safety experts point to other factors contributing to the industry’s fatality rate. Drug use is common among workers at some sites. Few workers are unionized, meaning they are less able to complain about safety problems without fear of being fired.
Some experts have called for increased oversight. An analysis by The New York Times of more than 50,000 inspection reports indicates that as the number of drilling rigs rose by more than 22 percent in 2011 from the prior year, the number of inspections at such work sites fell by 12 percent.
