Wolverine Gas Oil

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http://extras.denverpost.com/oil-gas-deaths/

Clling the vast oil and gas reserves in Colorado is a dangerous job. Oil and gas companies say they work hard to educate their employees about job hazards and promise to keep their workers safe.

“If there are areas where we need to improve, you can be damn sure we’re going to do it,” said Eric Wohlschlegel, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, a pro-industry trade organization.

“I’m pretty confident that the oil and gas industry probably does some of the best work on safety.”

But a year-long Denver Post investigation shows that there is little consequence when companies let that promise lapse.

A national legacy of encouraging oil and gas development — for energy security, for jobs, for the economy — has created a regulatory vacuum.There is an entire federal agency devoted to mining safety, for instance, but nothing comparable exists for oil and gas. While OSHA has created specific safety standards that companies in other industries must follow, oil and gas businesses successfully beat back such regulations for themselves.The standards — recommendations, really — that OSHA mostly uses to judge safety violations on oil and gas worksites were written by the American Petroleum Institute.

Debate about the industry in Colorado typically focuses on its environmental toll or its potential threat to public health.

Meanwhile, 1,333 workers died in the nation’s oil and gas fields between 2003 and 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The nationwide death toll in 2014 of 144 was the highest in more than a decade. By another measurement — the number of worker deaths per active drilling rig — 2014 was the second-most lethal year in Colorado in a decade, according to a Denver Post analysis. There was about one death per every 12 rigs that year.

Oil and gas worker fatalities by rig count

According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there were 51 deaths in Colorado related to the oil and gas industry from 2003 to 2014. Because of worker privacy issues, the BLS would not release years for all of those deaths. Nationally, 1,333 oil and gas workers were killed in the same 12-year time frame.

200320052007200920112013U.S. average annual rig count (bar)0200400600800100012001400160018002000U.S. oil and gas fatalities (line)708090100110120130140150U.S. average annual rig countU.S. oil and gas fatalities

200320052007200920112013Colorado average U.S. rig count (bar)0102030405060708090100110120Colorado oil and gas fatalities (line)01234567Colorado average annual rig countColorado oil and gas fatalities

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Baker Hughes Rig Count

OSHA rarely levies heavy fines against oil and gas companies. Only one time in the past 15 years has an oil and gas company paid a fine of more than $50,000 for a workplace safety inspection in Colorado. Three-quarters of the time, OSHA allows companies to settle their proposed fines for lower sums — shrinking them at a higher rate than the average for all businesses, The Post found. Since 2000, oil and gas companies have negotiated away more than $1 million in fines for safety violations, according to The Post analysis.

Regulation is so disjointed that no one can even agree on the number of workers killed on the job. The industry does not keep its own tallies. Totals kept by state health officials, the state workers’ compensation agency and OSHA all differ.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics abides by rigid privacy rules that mean its published state-level figures on oil and gas deaths are often incomplete, and, even when they aren’t, the bureau provides few precise details about the deaths.

For 2003 through 2014 — the longest and most recent time period for which comparable federal data is available — the agency says 51 workers died in jobs related to the oil and gas industry in Colorado. On average, that is one death every three months and is the seventh-highest total for any state in the country.

The Post, searching through OSHA reports, state records, court filings and news accounts, found documentation for 38 deaths in that time span related to oil and gas extraction. In two of those deaths, OSHA never investigated, even after the families of the deceased filed lawsuits accusing the companies involved of responsibility.

The only things that consistently have been able to slow the number of deaths in Colorado have been the prices of oil and natural gas — both near 15-year lows, resulting in a substantial drop in oil and gas activity and employment in the state.

But now, economists have begun looking toward a rebound in prices in a year or two. Historically, when activity surges anew, so do deaths.

Scott Nelson was killed in 2004, when the rig he was working high up on collapsed.

Joshua Arvidson drowned in fracking sand in 2006. Brian Wallace died in 2012 when a pressurized gas line he was handling exploded. He was thrown 45 feet through the air.

In the oil field, there is a kaleidoscope of ways workers can die.

At least two workers were electrocuted. Four others fell to their deaths. One burned alive.

Workers died when pipes fell on them or when trucks they were driving crashed or when forceful drilling equipment struck them. In 2006, four workers died in separate accidents within a 35-day span, the deadliest stretch of time in the industry’s recent history in Colorado.

There are few unions in the oil and gas industry, and although industry advocates, working closely with federal watchdogs, say they are placing more emphasis on safety than ever before, workers still face enormous risks in a field where company safety cultures can vary widely. The combination of powerful equipment, high pressures and flammable chemicals means few jobs in the country can turn as deadly as quickly.

Wolverine Drilling Rig No. 33 was trying to hoist 135 tons of drill pipe in August 2004 near Rifle when its uppermost component — the crown — failed and tumbled to the ground, killing Randall Taylor.

The rig’s owner said no one could have predicted it.

“This unforeseen accident,” Robert Blackford, the president of Wolverine Drilling, wrote in a letter to OSHA two months after the accident, “will serve notice that regardless of proper care of any machine, apparatus, a manmade article can fail without warning.”

But Taylor’s widow, Mary, later sued the engineer who inspected the rig before her husband’s death. The engineer said in a 2007 deposition that he was not told to inspect the crown, and, even if he did, there were no American industry standards at the time to guide his assessment.

“People were operating equipment without any kind of clear requirement for how it should have been inspected or run,” said the engineer, Francis Yuzyk.

In an interview, Blackford, now retired, said the rig’s failure was “spontaneous” and the result of poor manufacturing that inspectors failed to catch. He said the rig had a good safety record and described Taylor’s death as “one of the toughest days I ever had.”

But he said there was nothing he would do differently.

“It’s a tough thing to second-guess what you would do,” he said. “In hindsight, it’s easy to judge what took place. There weren’t any corrective measures that I could have done or looked into.”

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