Static
electricity during tank cleaning, lack of fire-retardant clothing to blame in
fatal gas field blast at EOG Resources Site in Wyoming
September 24,
2014. Smoke billows at the scene of a
gas storage tank explosion near La Barge. A maintenance crew was cleaning the
tank when it exploded. One of the people injured in the explosion died at a hospital
in Salt Lake City
The fatal flash fire on September 24, 2014 at a natural
gas processing site in western Wyoming appears to have been caused by static
electricity, according to a preliminary investigation by the Wyoming
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. One man was killed in the incident and three
others were injured. The site, which
included two storage tanks and a well, was being cleaned. The cleaning appears to have created the
static electricity that sparked the fire, said Hayley McKee, an OSHA
spokeswoman.
Some of the four men were not wearing fire-retardant clothing,
she said. The investigation into the
accident is ongoing. Jared Loftiss, 35,
died later that day at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake
City. Two other men remained at the hospital's burn unit Wednesday,
a hospital spokeswoman said. The fourth
individual was treated and released from a Wyoming clinic.
The fire took place on the La Barge Highway about 30 miles
north of Green River and near the Shute Creek Plant. The site is owned by
EOG Resources of Houston. One of the men
injured was an EOG employee. The remaining three, including Loftiss, were
contractors.
K Leonard, an EOG spokeswoman, said two of the people injured were
employees of the company. Two others were contractors.
The man who died was employed by the contract company, she
said.
She called the incident a flash fire and said it took place at
a natural gas production site, including two liquids storage tanks and a well.
An explosion in April shut down a Williams
Companies Inc natural gas-processing plant about 40 miles (65-km)
south of La Barge, in Opal, that churned out about 2 percent of the daily U.S.
gas supply. A nearby town was evacuated.
EOG Resources is among the top independent crude
oil and natural gas producers in the United States.
Four workers were caught in a storage tank “flash
fire” at a natural gas production facility in Lincoln County, Wyoming on
Tuesday. The incident, a spokeswoman for Salt Lake City’s University Hospital
told ThinkProgress, left one worker dead, and two critically injured. The
workers, who have not yet been named, were cleaning gas tanks when the fire
broke out. The exact cause is still unknown.
The fire happened at a natural gas plant owned by Houston-based
EOG Resources. Of the four workers who were caught in the fire, two
were direct employees of EOG while others were contractors. It’s not yet clear
if the worker who died was a direct employee or a contractor.
The incident is the latest fossil fuel-related workplace
fatality in Wyoming, which has historically had one of the highest
rates of oil worker injuries and deaths in the country. Worker death rates
there have fallen
— Wyoming oil workers are dying at half the rate they were five years ago — but
so have the number of oil and gas rigs in the state. The correlation suggests
that Wyoming may still be plagued with a problem
it’s been facing for years: a high rate of occupational fatalities due to a
lacking “culture of safety.”
The idea that Wyoming may have an endemic workplace safety
problem comes from a 2012 report
from state-hired epidemiologist Timothy Ryan, who analyzed occupational
fatalities in Wyoming and found numerous problems with the overall business
attitude toward safety. “Safety [in Wyoming] occurs as an afterthought,” he
wrote. He found that from 2001-2008, 20 percent of all Wyoming’s worker
fatalities came from the oil and gas industry, and that a whopping 96 percent
of those deaths occurred when safety procedures were not followed.
Since then, progress appears to be happening, with the current
state epidemiologist telling Wyoming’s local NPR affiliate last week that he’s optimistic
— there’s been an increase in worker safety training programs and safety
meetings, he said. But NPR’s report also pointed out that some aren’t convinced
that the culture is really changing at all. And that’s a problem, because
once-declining drilling activity is again starting
to expand in the state.
If Wyoming hasn’t in fact changed its “culture of safety,” it
will be even more susceptible to the dangers of what is widely known as an
industry that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says is unprecedentedly
dangerous to workers. Indeed, the fatality rate for onshore oil and gas workers
is seven
times higher than the national average, and injuries are even more common.
Between 2007 and 2012, a total of 663 workers were killed
in oil-related accidents nationwide.
Working with flammable substances and heavy machinery is one
reason for this increased rate, but another reasons the oil and gas industry
remains so dangerous could be the fact that oil worker deaths aren’t very
widely publicized. An in-depth report on worker fatalities released by Wyoming
Public Media last week pointed out that oil worker deaths rarely merit more
than a few sentences in local newspapers, an unfortunate phenomenon driven by the
nature of the deaths. Compared to a dramatic coal mine collapse — where dozens
of workers are trapped or killed underground — oil worker deaths generally
happen one-by-one, in small fires or explosions.
“They don’t get the same kind of attention as a disaster in a
coal mine, where you have multiple miners that may be killed,” Peg Seminario,
director of safety and health for the AFL-CIO, told Wyoming Public Media.
“Nonetheless, the worker who’s working in oil and gas is more likely to be
killed on the job than a coal miner. That’s a fact.”