By Arwa Gunja and Jillian Weinberger, June 15, 2015
A gas flare is seen at an oil well site on July 26, 2013 outside Williston, North Dakota. (Andrew Burton/Getty)
Over the last decade, the United States has undergone an economic transformation in energy production. As President Obama told Congress in his 2014 State of the Union address, “Today America is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades.”
The United States has surpassed even Saudi Arabia in oil and gas production, in part because of fracking technology, which allows energy companies to reach oil and gas deposits they could never access previously.
One of those deposits lies in the Bakken oil fields, which stretches 170 square miles from North Dakota to Montana and into Canada. An estimated 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered oil are sitting under the U.S. portion of the Bakken, and thanks to fracking, the industry now has the technology extract that oil.
Workers have flocked to the Bakken for jobs with six-figure salaries that don’t require advanced degrees. But a new investigation from Reveal, a public radio program from the Center for Investigative Reporting, finds that those high-paying jobs come with a high price.
In the first comprehensive analysis of its kind, Reveal found that, on average, a worker dies about every six weeks from an accident in the Bakken, with at least 74 deaths in the oil fields since 2006.
Jennifer Gollan, a reporter with Reveal, led the investigation. She says that the top energy firms may be championing speed over safety—something that was seen in September 2011 after a well owned by Oasis Petroleum exploded in North Dakota.
“The supervisor on this well was congratulated for working quickly and setting a new drilling record” months before the explosion, says Gollan. “She went on to call this record-holding well a ‘pace-setter.'”
Oasis offered workers daily bonuses of $150 for drilling quickly—those who drill slower and safer are only offered $40 a day.
“Safety is tantamount at Oasis,” spokesman Brian Kennedy told Gollan. “Bonuses should not have been paid, and we regret that they were.”
The day before the explosion in 2011, Gollan says that a crew of four men were brought on site to get the well to produce more oil.
According to documents from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a supervisor had pumped heavy salt water into the well to prevent volatile gases from escaping before the crew set to work the next day. But the well wound up erupting into a fireball.
View of three oil wells and flaring of natural gas on The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation near New Town, ND on August 13, 2014. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post/Getty)
Jebadiah “Jesse” Stanfill bared witness to the events of the day.
“He was working on an oil rig less than a mile away,” says Gollan. “He was near the top of the rig when he heard this boom. He spun around, grabbed a fire extinguisher and first aid kit, and jumped in this truck with two co-workers.”
But Stanfill and his friends were too late—two men had died and two others were injured.
“As Jesse was helping to pick up some of these men to load them into the bed of this pick up truck to bring them to the ambulance, some of the men’s skin came off in his hands,” says Gollan. “That is a feeling that, to this day, he just can’t shake.”
Gollan says that Stanfill has gear to protect himself from that horrific memory—he is usually wearing gloves, even when he’s playing with his children or cooking in the kitchen.
“How can a simple thing like looking at your hands or washing your hands send you completely enveloped back to that day,” Stanfill told Gollan. “The scenery changes. It’s as if I’m there. It rules my life.”
Brendan Wegner was one of the men who died in the well explosion.
“He was just 21. It was his first day on a rig,” says Gollan. “He was scrambling down the derrick ladder when the well exploded. It consumed him in this fiery tornado of oil and petroleum vapors. Rescuers later found his body pinned under this heap of twisted metal. His charred hands were recovered later still gripping the derrick ladder.”
Another man named Ray Hardy died the next day from his injuries. Michael Twinn had his lower legs amputated after the explosion. He committed suicide two years later.
“There was just one lone survivor who was burned over half of his body,” Gollan says of a man named Doug Hysjulien.
It appears that the victims of this explosion are the casualties of a flawed system.
“OSHA regulators will tell you that they often have to rely on a part of the law called the general duty clause,” says Gollan. “Basically, it makes it very difficult for them to hold top energy producers accountable because they typically don’t have direct employees on these well sites. As a result, in many of these cases, the top energy producers are not fined. It’s the subcontractor—typically the company that employs these workers—that get fined.”
Four of America’s largest energy-producing states—Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Wyoming—have adopted statutes that prevent or limit oil companies from shifting liability to smaller contractors.
Wyoming set up a task force to address worker safety back in 2008, a move that started the Wyoming Oil and Gas Industry Safety Alliance. Between 2008 and 2012, the state saw a 45 percent decrease in the number of worker deaths in the oil and gas industry.
Click on the audio player above to hear Jack Bedessem, the past president and advisor to the board of the Alliance, explain how Wyoming is working to improve worker safety, especially in the oil and gas industry.
Repost from Reveal, The Center for Investigative Reporting [Editor: This is an excellent and beautifully personalized report on conditions in the oil fields in North Dakota. Graphic images are best viewed on the original source page. This report is nicely summarized in a Takeaway report. – RS]
In North Dakota’s Bakken oil boom, there will be blood
By Jennifer Gollan / June 13, 2015
A North Dakota rig was still smoldering the day after a 2011 explosion, when federal investigators drove to the scene and began their work. Credit: Courtesy of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
In the early evening of Sept. 14, 2011, Jebadiah Stanfill was working near the top of an oil rig at a bend in the Missouri River in North Dakota. Jolted by a deafening boom in the distance, he swung around from his perch and saw a pillar of black smoke twisting into the sky.
Less than a mile away, another rig had exploded. “There’s men over there!” a worker below him shouted.
Stanfill, a compact and muscular man in his 30s, descended to the ground and hopped into the bed of a red pickup driven by a co-worker. Bruce Jorgenson, a manager overseeing the work of Stanfill and his crew, jumped into the passenger seat, and they raced to the explosion.
Jebadiah Stanfill was working on an oil rig in North Dakota in September 2011 when he was jolted by a deafening boom in the distance. Less than a mile away, another rig had exploded. Credit: Courtesy of Jebadiah Stanfill
A few minutes later, they reached the burning rig and pulled up next to Doug Hysjulien, who was wandering in a valley and clutching the front of his underwear. The rest of his clothes were gone.
“They’re over there,” Hysjulien shouted, pointing toward the fiery rig. “Go help the other boys. They’re worse.”
“They were beyond burned. Nothing but char. The smell of flesh burning. … It smelled of crude oil.” — Jebadiah Stanfill, oil worker
Stanfill sprinted until he spotted Ray Hardy, who had been hurled into a patch of gravel. His skin was charred black and peeling. His nails were bent back, exposing the stark white bones of his fingers.
“How many people were on the rig?” Stanfill asked Hardy.
“He’s over there,” Hardy responded, gazing toward a field near the rig. Stanfill scrambled over a berm and waded through knee-high wheat until he found Michael Twinn, lying on his back naked and seared. His hair was singed and his work boots had curled up in the heat. He cried out in agony.
“The derrick man’s dead! The derrick man’s dead!” Twinn screamed.
“They were beyond burned,” Stanfill recalled. “Nothing but char. The smell of flesh burning. … It smelled of crude oil.”
Brendan Wegner, shown at a friend’s wedding in July 2011, was 21 when he died in an explosion in September 2011. Credit: Rachel Waldmer
Brendan Wegner, 21, had been scrambling down a derrick ladder when the well exploded, consuming him in a fiery tornado of oil and petroleum vapors. Rescuers found his body pinned under a heap of twisted steel pipes melted by the inferno. His charred hands were recovered later, still gripping the derrick ladder. It was his first day on the rig.
Hardy died the next day of his burns. Twinn had his lower legs amputated. Dogged by post-traumatic stress disorder, he killed himself in October 2013. Each left behind three children. Hysjulien suffered debilitating third-degree burns over half of his body. He is the lone survivor.
To this day, the explosion – pieced together from interviews, court documents and federal and local reports – remains the worst accident in the expansive Bakken oil fields since the boom began in 2006.
Beyond the human toll from that day, which continues to haunt Stanfill and others, the 2011 explosion offers a striking illustration of how big oil companies have largely written the rules governing their own accountability for accidents.
“The Bakken is the most dangerous oil field to work in the U.S. The energy producers never pay for their mistakes.” — Justin Williams, Wegner attorney
Across the Bakken, deeply entrenched corporate practices and weak federal oversight inoculate energy producers against responsibility when workers are killed or injured, while shifting the blame to others. Oil companies also offer financial incentives to workers for speeding up production – potentially jeopardizing their safety – and shield themselves through a web of companies to avoid paying the full cost of settlements to workers and their families when something goes wrong.
An estimated 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered oil is sitting in the U.S. portion of the Bakken and Three Forks formations of the Williston Basin, a 170,000-square-mile area that stretches from southern Saskatchewan, Canada, to northern South Dakota. North Dakota now ranks just behind Texas with the second-largest oil reserve in the U.S. Both states now account for half of all the crude oil production in the country.
But the boom also has been a serial killer. On average, someone dies about every six weeks from an accident in the Bakken – at least 74 since 2006, according to an analysis by Reveal, the first comprehensive accounting of such deaths using data obtained from Canadian and U.S. regulators. The number of deaths is likely higher because federal regulators don’t have a systematic way to record oil- and gas-related deaths, and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t include certain fatalities, such as those of independent contractors.
Only one energy operator that leases or owns wells has been cited for worker deaths in North Dakota or Montana over the past five years, Reveal’s analysis has found. Slawson Exploration Co. Inc. paid a $7,000 penalty in 2013 after a contract worker died in an explosion.
OSHA officials say they are concerned that plummeting oil prices in the past year are prompting energy producers to shortchange safety even more. To others, the deaths and injuries would be preventable if not for a combination of greed, inadequate training and lack of government oversight.
“These workers are paying for cheap gas with their lives and their limbs,” said Peg Seminario, director of safety and health for the AFL-CIO.
Oil companies offer financial incentives to workers for speeding up production, potentially jeopardizing their safety. Credit: Adithya Sambamurthy/Reveal
‘All I saw was just a fireball’
On the day of the North Dakota explosion in 2011, the job of Brendan Wegner and the three other workers of Carlson Well Service was to get the well to produce more oil. Carlson was hired by the well’s owner, Oasis Petroleum North America LLC, which is part of Houston-based oil giant Oasis Petroleum Inc.
Michael Twinn, an experienced floorhand on the rig, had told his co-workers soon after they started work that day that he was worried about the well because it was “talking,” meaning it was showing signs of being under pressure. He had warned Loren Baltrusch, an independent contractor hired through Mitchell’s Oil Field Service who was supervising the site for Oasis, that there might have been a buildup of hydrocarbon gas, according to Justin Williams, a lawyer for Doug Hysjulien, the lone survivor, and Wegner’s parents, who spoke with Twinn about his ordeal before he died. Carlson Well Service officials later would testify that Wegner and his crew were not trained to work on wells under pressure.
Oasis declined an interview, but in a written statement, spokesman Brian Kennedy said: “Pressure gauge readings confirmed that the well was in fact static when operations began. Any suggestion that Mr. Baltrusch or Oasis Petroleum might have knowingly put workers in danger is patently false.”
The day before the accident, Baltrusch pumped heavy salt water into the well to prevent volatile gases from escaping before the crew set to work the next day, OSHA documents show. But on the day of the explosion, the well started to overflow with oil as the crew inserted more pipes into the well hole. That’s when the workers saw the oil rocketing 50 feet into the air. Then the inferno. Then their bodies burning.
“It shook my whole shack,” Bruce Jorgenson said in an interview. He was in a trailer less than a mile away working for Oasis, which had hired him through RPM Consulting Inc. to oversee another well site. “I went outside to investigate; that’s when all I saw was just a fireball.”
He called 911. His crew grabbed fire extinguishers and first-aid kits and sped toward the blast.
“We needed to try to help them in any way we could,” Jorgenson said. “Ray (Hardy) just seemed in shock … and Mike (Twinn) was in a lot of pain; he was screaming.”
When he saw Doug Hysjulien, Jorgenson recognized him immediately. They had both lived in Powers Lake, North Dakota, at one point. “His skin was very red. At first, I thought it was strings from his gloves hanging off of his hands, but it was his skin.”
“I said, ‘Doug, what happened?’ He said, ‘It fucking blew up.’ ”
Jebadiah Stanfill helped load Hardy and Twinn into the back of a pickup. When they placed Hardy in the bed of the truck, the coarse lining sheared skin off his scorched back. Stanfill cradled Twinn as they raced across the cratered dirt road to an ambulance on the main road. The flames had turned their skin to wax.
On the way, the men frantically begged Stanfill to call their wives on his cellphone to say goodbye.
“There’s been an accident at the rig, and your husband wants to talk to you,” Stanfill said urgently into the phone to Twinn’s wife before putting her on speaker.
“How bad was it?” she asked her husband.
“It ain’t nothing,” Twinn said. “I love you.”
Stanfill hurriedly dialed Hardy’s wife next and handed him the phone.
“Don’t worry about it, I’m OK,” Hardy told his wife hours before he died. “I love you. I’ll meet you at the hospital. Everything’s fine.”
Stanfill says he can still hear the women’s “painful, wretched screams.”
An estimated 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered oil is sitting in the U.S. portion of the Bakken and Three Forks formations. Credit: Adithya Sambamurthy/Reveal
Investigating the explosion
The rig was still smoldering when federal investigators drove to the scene the next day and began their work. Staff from the small OSHA office that serves the area interviewed witnesses and company officials in an attempt to re-create the blowout.
In 2011, the year of the deadly explosion, the agency’s office in Bismarck, North Dakota, had five field investigators – compared with eight this year – to handle tasks ranging from fielding complaints about butcher shops to triaging construction site hazards, along with far more technical cases involving oil and gas. The office covers roughly 148,000 square miles in North Dakota and South Dakota, including more than 12,000 producing wells in North Dakota alone.
From the start, the agency’s focus mainly fell on Carlson Well Service, the North Dakota-based company that employed Brendan Wegner and his three co-workers. The well itself was owned by Oasis Petroleum North America.
Investigators took dozens of photographs and several videos of the smoking nest of pipes and bent rig. They sifted through Carlson’s internal company documents such as work invoices and researched the company’s equipment. Over the course of six months, investigators interviewed about a dozen people and drafted reports totaling more than 200 pages.
Part of their investigation included researching the equipment they were inspecting – on Wikipedia. OSHA’s safety narrative report on the accident includes diagrams and information credited to the website’s entries for “blowout preventer” and “pumpjack.”
In the end, OSHA inspectors gave Oasis Petroleum cursory attention in their reports. A handwritten note from an OSHA investigator shows that Loren Baltrusch killed the well, or temporarily closed it, the day before the explosion, yet he was deemed an independent contractor. This was key because it is difficult for OSHA to cite energy producers that do not have direct employees on a worksite.
“No Oasis employee on site,” the investigator concluded. The company was not fined or penalized in any way by the government regulator.
Instead, OSHA penalized Carlson for failing to properly install and test the blowout preventer, a mechanism that can help control an oil and gas well, as well as failing to provide flame-resistant clothing and an emergency escape line for Wegner to abandon the rig.
None of these steps would have prevented the accident in the first place, said Williams, adding that Oasis bore ultimate responsibility for making the proper engineering decisions that would have prevented the dangerous pressure buildup.
“It’s a simple engineering calculation,” he said. “They should have people qualified to do so, but they didn’t do that to start with.” Williams added that an expert he consulted said it would have taken no more than three tanker trucks of heavy brine water, costing about $1,500 combined, to properly kill the well.
Oasis’ Brian Kennedy said it was Baltrusch who arranged and oversaw the salt water injections – both the day before and the morning of the explosion – which he maintained rendered the well “static when work began.”
“The release of gas and the subsequent fire was caused by a kick, or sudden and unexpected flow of gas into the wellbore,” Kennedy concluded.
In March 2012, Carlson was fined $84,000, in part for failing to provide required safety equipment. The company’s lawyers hit back, arguing that one of the violations was not “willful,” as OSHA investigators had claimed. After negotiations, federal officials reduced that fine to $63,000. A top Carlson official declined to comment on the accident or OSHA fines. Carlson sold its business last year.
Like Carlson, many smaller contractors in the Bakken often receive fines, rather than the energy producers that own and lease the wells. Even though large companies often exert the most control over safety on their well sites, there is no specific federal workplace safety standard that applies to the oil and gas industry, which allows producers to dodge severe penalties.
In 1983, OSHA proposed workplace safety requirements for the oil and gas industry, but the rules never were imposed, leaving a “bit of a hole,” said Eric Brooks, director of OSHA’s Bismarck Area Office. As a result, OSHA primarily relies on the so-called general duty clause, which requires all employers to provide a safe workplace.
By contrast, the mining and construction industries are subject to stringent federal workplace safety regulations that address specific hazards. In fact, the Mine Safety and Health Administration enforces specific health and safety rules for the nation’s mines to reduce deaths and injuries.
In the absence of comprehensive workplace safety regulations, OSHA frequently invokes standards written by the industry itself, including those from the American Petroleum Institute, to determine whether employees are being exposed to hazards.
For example, companies involved in drilling and well servicing activities such as hydraulic fracturing are exempt from federal workplace safety laws requiring machines and equipment that are undergoing maintenance or repairs to be locked and tagged to prevent injuries. The American Petroleum Institute recommends such practices but does not require them.
For some, this is a direct conflict of interest.
“This premise is counterintuitive to the intent of government oversight. The problem with this scenario is that API is the lobbying arm of the industry,” said Dennis Schmitz, a former oil worker who is the chairman of the MonDaks Safety Network, an organization in North Dakota that promotes safety in the oil fields.
Following the accident, OSHA investigators interviewed Oasis officials and scrutinized Baltrusch’s role to determine how much control Oasis exercised over Carlson’s crew, Brooks said. OSHA didn’t fine the company because “in the absence of federal laws directly covering work on oil and gas sites, we couldn’t support a citation against Oasis,” Brooks said.
Brooks said that given another chance, OSHA likely would reverse itself and penalize Oasis. “If I had to look back on it, do I think things would be done differently? Absolutely,” he said. “I think we might have taken our chances and issued citations on that.”
OSHA’s statute of limitations, which is six months from an accident, would prevent the agency from citing Oasis now, Brooks said.
Insulated from liability
After major accidents like the one that killed Ray Hardy and Brendan Wegner, big oil companies are insulated from financial costs. A spiderweb of corporate relationships allows big energy firms to shield themselves from collateral damage by forcing insurance companies for contractors at the bottom of the pecking order to pay.
Even though the government did not cite Oasis for responsibility for the accident, the company negotiated four separate settlements for undisclosed amounts with Wegner’s parents, Peggy and Kevin; Doug Hysjulien; Michael Twinn; and Hardy’s wife. During this process, disputes arose over who should pay the victims.
So the companies and their insurers took it to federal court. In the first lawsuit, Carlson Well Service argued that it should not have to defend or indemnify Oasis under their contract. The case ultimately was dismissed in June 2013 as part of a confidential settlement agreement.
In a second case, filed in the same court on the same day, Carlson’s insurance company argued that it did not have to pay damages to the injured workers on behalf of Oasis. In the end, Carlson’s insurance company agreed to share part of the settlement costs with Oasis’ insurance company, interviews show. The insurance company for Mitchell’s Oil Field Service, Loren Baltrusch’s employer, also contributed to the settlements.
“We found a way to protect Oasis,” said Kevin Cook, a Texas attorney who represented Carlson’s insurance company in the lawsuit against Oasis and its insurer in North Dakota federal court. “We resolved our differences with Oasis and their insurer by agreeing with them to divide these settlements.”
To Peggy Wegner, the shifting responsibility and finger-pointing means that Oasis “has never been held accountable” for the accident that killed her son. “It’s just another way to cover their ass,” she said. “It’s bizarre to me that a contract like this can even take place.”
“Indemnity provisions are contained in most commercial contracts in nearly every sector of the economy,” Oasis spokesman Brian Kennedy said.
In a more recent case, for example, Continental Resources Inc. won a favorable decision in February following a well blowout that injured three contract workers in July 2011 near Beach, North Dakota. The workers’ employer, Cyclone Drilling Inc., had signed a contract containing an indemnity provision in favor of Continental that was unlimited and without regard to the cause of the accident, according to the agreement.
In addition, Cyclone’s insurance policy included coverage for Continental protecting it from paying the cost of any suits brought by Cyclone’s workers who were injured or families of workers killed on the job. As a result, a federal judge allowed Continental and its contractors to shift up to $6 million for the workers’ injuries to Cyclone’s insurance company, court records show.
Continental officials declined to address questions about this case or the company’s agreements with contractors.
“As to the cause of the incident the public records show who was cited,” Eric Eissenstat, Continental’s senior vice president, general counsel, chief risk officer and secretary, said in an email.
Patrick Hladky, Cyclone’s president, did not respond to requests for comment.
If the top energy producers that control sites with fracked wells – in which oil and gas are extracted from shale with high-pressure mixtures of water, sand or gravel and chemicals – are permitted to offload the responsibility to smaller contractors, then there is little incentive to make worksites safer, said Paul Sanderson, a North Dakota attorney who frequently has encountered these agreements.
This phenomenon seems to be lost on the federal regulators who cover the Bakken. Asked whether these agreements could make energy producers indifferent to worker safety, Eric Brooks, OSHA’s Bismarck office director, said of the practice: “I’m not aware of that at all.”
To Justin Williams, the attorney for Wegner’s parents, as well as industry insiders, the agreements allow top companies to operate with impunity.
“The Bakken is the most dangerous oil field to work in the U.S.,” Williams said. “The energy producers never pay for their mistakes; the insurance company for the contractor pays. It doesn’t give them any incentive to change the procedures that are unsafe.”
Industry lobbyists fend off reforms
While Oasis contends that Carlson Well Service was largely at fault in the 2011 explosion, the contractor’s experience afterward is not uncommon. Smaller contractors have little choice but to agree to the terms in their contracts. Their insurance companies often end up shouldering part or all of the costs of settlements with workers and their families.
“This bill could have saved lives. When everyone is held responsible for their own conduct … it’s going to create a safer work environment.” — Paul Sanderson, North Dakota lawyer
“The big oil companies have you locked in,” said Connie Krinke, business manager for Diamond H Service LLC, an oil and gas service company based in Bowman, North Dakota.
“You really don’t have the ability to refuse to sign these agreements because most of these companies are billion-dollar companies, and we’re just a small pea in the big pod of people that work for them,” she added. “They have really good lawyers.”
When state lawmakers in North Dakota have tried to fix the problem, the oil and gas industry has used its considerable influence to kill any reform.
A bill proposed in the state Legislative Assembly in January 2011 sought to prevent companies from adding provisions to oil and gas production contracts that required smaller contractors to indemnify them when people are injured or die because of the action of the companies or their independent contractors.
“If you break it, you buy it,” said Paul Sanderson, a North Dakota lawyer who crafted the bill in response to growing concern among insurers following several oil field accidents. “When a person is not responsible for their actions, they disregard the consequences.”
The bill passed out of the House Judiciary Committee. But the effort was torpedoed nearly a week later after heavy lobbying from the oil industry, Sanderson said. The bill was unnecessary and interfered with contracting in the oil industry, a lobbyist for the North Dakota Petroleum Council argued at the time. The bill was defeated 63-27 on the House floor, state legislative records show.
Yet the dangerous nature of the oil and gas industry has prompted four of the largest energy-producing states – Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Wyoming – to adopt statutes that prevent or limit oil companies from shifting liability, including legal costs, jury awards and settlements for workers’ injuries or wrongful death suits, to smaller contractors.
Today in North Dakota, under some agreements, oil companies and smaller contractors indemnify each other, meaning each will shoulder the cost of claims for damages made by their own employees involved in accidents, regardless of who is at fault. But this works only if large companies dispatch direct employees to work on their well sites, which they often do not.
“This bill could have saved lives,” Sanderson said, adding: “When everyone is held responsible for their own conduct … it’s going to create a safer work environment. You have situations where the oil companies know they are not going to be held responsible.”
Bill or not, safety is the top priority for oil and gas companies in the Bakken, said Kari Cutting, vice president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, which represents 550 companies. “Any language written in a contract is not going to change where safety is in their priorities. A lot of these companies are very savvy and don’t want to be the headline in any news cycle.”
The role of the company man
Oasis’ company man the day of the 2011 explosion was Loren Baltrusch. Soon after the accident, he gave conflicting accounts to authorities and regulators of his precise role that day.
Just after the accident, Baltrusch told a McKenzie County sheriff’s deputy that he was “kind of supervising” when the rig exploded, a video shows.
Soon after the interview begins, an unidentified man interrupts: “Hey Loren, that’s the guys in Houston; they’re very concerned about you,” he says in an apparent reference to Oasis officials. “You need to get checked out.
“We need to get – I know you’re not in the right frame here,” he continued, referring to Baltrusch’s shaken state of mind following the explosion.
His interview with the sheriff’s deputy ends abruptly.
Baltrusch later told OSHA investigators that he was charged with consulting with Oasis on the engineering aspects and directing servicing activities on the well. But then he said he “really did not know what his authority was since it had never been explained to him,” OSHA records show. Baltrusch declined to comment.
Because Oasis did not have a direct employee on the site, federal regulators could not cite the company for the explosion.
This loophole has allowed Oasis and other energy producers to shift blame and protect their bottom lines from government fines when workers are injured or killed. They hire so-called company men to be their eyes and ears, executing orders and supervising drilling and other tasks.
“If you ask anyone who is in control at these well sites, they’ll tell you the company man,” said Eric Brooks, OSHA’s Bismarck office director. “They are dictating what you’re doing, how you’re doing it. They’re communicating every detail in real time to the companies about what’s happening with the drilling process.”
But because most of these managers are independent contractors, they are not covered under federal workplace safety laws. So company men generally allow energy producers to duck federal fines for accidents.
“Company men became independent contractors to protect the company,” said Tom Dickson, an attorney in Bismarck who has represented dozens of workers in personal injury and wrongful death suits. “They’re not accountable to anybody when something bad happens. It protects the top dog from accountability.”
That’s what happened after an explosion at the Zacher oil well in Mountrail County, North Dakota, in 2007. EOG Resources Inc., formerly known as Enron Oil and Gas Co., was using an open-top tank to reclaim wastewater from a fracking well to save money, according to court records.
When EOG’s company man, Paul Berger, decided to jump-start a defective light tower late one evening, gas vapors wafting from the experimental tank ignited, scorching the crew. Berger said he was under pressure from EOG to get the well flowing, according to a deposition.
“You know, every – all the oil companies are in a hurry to get oil in the tanks to sell,” Berger said. “That’s the cash register.”
After the explosion, EOG prevailed in a lawsuit in federal court in North Dakota, arguing that a provision of its contract required its contractors to indemnify the company, the well’s owner and operator, against other lawsuits that three injured workers had brought against EOG. While EOG ultimately controlled the well site, OSHA did not cite or fine the company.
A spokeswoman for EOG declined to comment.
Few suffered the consequences of that thirst for cash more than Ted Seidler, one of the workers injured at the EOG site, who underwent a series of operations after he was burned on his hands, legs, face and backside.
“It was hell,” Seidler said in a phone interview from his home in North Dakota. “It was a whole year that I never worked because of the burns. My wife quit her job to take care of me.”
Seidler, 66, tried to return to his old job. But the confluence of North Dakota’s extreme temperatures and his tender skin forced him to quit the oil fields. In 2009, Seidler settled with EOG and several of its contractors for an undisclosed amount after filing a lawsuit in state court.
“Everybody was passing the buck,” Seidler said. “They shouldn’t be allowed to do that. EOG should be the one who should be held accountable for the whole deal because they are the owners of the well.”
There have been at least 74 deaths in Bakken accidents since 2006, according to a Reveal analysis using data from Canadian and U.S. regulators. Credit: Adithya Sambamurthy/Reveal
Incentives for speed
Oasis provides workers with financial incentives to drill quickly and has lavished them with praise for setting records when they reach target well depths.
Four months before Brendan Wegner died, Joseph Kronberg, a 52-year-old father of three, was electrocuted and died at another North Dakota well owned by Oasis Petroleum North America.
Oasis paid bonuses worth a combined $33,000 to 23 of Kronberg’s co-workers in part for working quickly – even after Kronberg died, internal company records show. At a well on the same site where Kronberg died and another nearby well, Oasis paid workers performance bonuses of $150 per day for drilling quickly, compared with $40 a day for drilling safely, records show.
“Safety is tantamount at Oasis,” spokesman Brian Kennedy said, but when pressed, he acknowledged that in the case of Kronberg’s co-workers, “bonuses should not have been paid, and we regret that they were.”
Internal Oasis documents show that company officials also have actively encouraged company men to set records.
“Nabors 149 just set a new record for Oasis on the Kline with Stoneham 18 following close behind on the Lynn. Congrats guys, keep it up!!” Laura Strong, an Oasis drilling engineer, wrote in a May 27, 2011, email to top company officials and company men.
Strong went on to call the record-holding well, Kline 5300 11-18H, the “Pace setter.”
“If you have a bonus that is simply based on getting it done faster… you’ve got a recipe for disaster.” — Eric Brooks, OSHA’s Bismarck Area Office director
It was the same well that exploded less than four months later, killing Wegner and his co-worker.
In a lawsuit filed in January 2013 in federal court in North Dakota, lawyers for Kronberg’s widow, Margo, asserted that the company fosters a culture of recklessness in which there is one imperative: speed.
In court papers, lawyers for Oasis said Nabors Drilling USA LP, a contractor, would be required to cover the cost of any judgment in the case under its drilling contract. A federal judge concluded that Oasis was not responsible for Joseph Kronberg’s death, concluding that Oasis didn’t exercise a sufficient degree of control over the company man or any of the smaller contractors on site.
In the case, the judge reviewed a string of emails between Oasis and its company men, but ruled that they “merely constitute evidence as to Oasis’ end goal for the Ross well.” In addition, the judge ruled, Oasis did not owe a duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent this kind of accident.
In 2014, Nabors Drilling USA was ordered to pay a $12,000 fine to OSHA for two electrical violations related to Kronberg’s death.
Margo Kronberg was prevented from suing Nabors under North Dakota law, which generally prohibits employees who are injured on the job and their families from suing their employers.
She appealed the decision to a federal appeals court at the end of March and declined to comment. The case is still pending.
“Safety is tantamount at Oasis. Bonuses should not have been paid, and we regret that they were.” — Brian Kennedy, Oasis Petroleum spokesman
Insiders overseeing drilling in the Bakken oil fields say Oasis is not the only company that pays bonuses for increasing production and profit. They say top companies such as EOG, Whiting Petroleum Corp. and many others also dole out incentives.
On EOG sites, for example, some workers earn $1,600 to $3,000 for “beating the curve,” or rapidly drilling their wells, according to two workers who declined to be identified for fear it would jeopardize their jobs.
EOG declined to comment. Whiting did not respond to a request for comment.
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“Over the past five or six years, there’s been a culture that’s been primarily focused on the production side,” said Dennis Schmitz of the MonDaks Safety Network. “There’s been a culture of gettin’ it done.”
Among the most common oil field injuries are amputations, broken bones and burns, which can severely disfigure workers and diminish their career prospects, OSHA’s Eric Brooks said. Despite the dangers, workers are drawn to the Bakken for hefty salaries, some in the six figures.
Drilling and well servicing in the Bakken is high stakes, at an average cost of about $9 million per well, according to the North Dakota Industrial Commission’s Department of Mineral Resources. The faster the oil gushes, the faster it gets to market to turn a profit, which averages $27 million per well.
That was true when oil was $100 a barrel. And now that oil has slipped to about $60 a barrel, that pressure has intensified, Schmitz said. In addition, with slimmer margins, Schmitz said several companies have fired their safety managers.
On their websites, many energy producers promote a “stop work” culture, in which workers are encouraged to speak out and stop the job if they deem something unsafe. But dozens of workers interviewed in the Bakken said that when they’re drilling, time is money.
“You’ve seen that in a lot of the accidents that happen out here, guys saying yes and meaning no,” said Matthew Danks, vice president and partner of Oilfield Support Services, a New Town, North Dakota-based company that builds facilities after wells are drilled to separate oil, gas and water.
Asked about speed bonuses, Brooks said that while he has not seen any specific examples, he would consider asking his investigators to scrutinize the practice.
“If you have a bonus that is simply based on getting it done faster,” Brooks said, “ … you’ve got a recipe for disaster.”
Jebadiah Stanfill, who helped the men in the 2011 explosion, says he will never return to the oil fields.
For his efforts in trying to save his brethren, Stanfill says he was fired from his job at Xtreme Drilling and Coil Services Corp. Stanfill said he was told by managers at Xtreme and Oasis that he’d gone beyond his “scope of employment.” He should have remained on his own rig instead of rushing to the scene.
Oasis spokesman Brian Kennedy said: “As Mr. Stanfill was an employee of Xtreme Drilling and not Oasis Petroleum, we were not party to or responsible for any decisions regarding his employment.”
Benjamin Smith, Xtreme’s vice president of human resources, said Stanfill’s claim is “bogus.” Instead, Smith said Stanfill was fired for turning off a valve that cut power to a drilling rig, which he said endangered other employees – a claim that Stanfill dismissed as “a bald-faced lie.”
“Why would I put my life on the line for those men on the burning rig and then turn off the power on a rig so that my own co-workers will die?” Stanfill said. “That makes no sense. I don’t even know how to turn off a rig.”
Now a handyman living in Alabama, he said he still struggles with PTSD, often wearing black work gloves to prevent the sight of his hands from triggering memories of skin sliding off in his palms.
“I always seem to think I still have those men’s skin on my hands,” he said.
When Bruce Jorgenson returned to the site this past March to start drilling the new well, “the anxiety came back. I relived every minute of it. I’ve been involved in other bad things in the oil field, and this one was the only one that gave me nightmares.”
Even so, Jorgenson said he hasn’t discussed the explosion with his current crew. “I didn’t want them freaked out by it in any way. I wanted their mind on what we were doing.”
On a recent visit, the lone reminder of that day was a modest wooden cross bearing Wegner’s name near the well site. Trucks thundered past.
Repost from The Center for Investigative Reporting and KUOW.org [Editor: This is an important report. State regulators can’t get accurate oil train data from the federally regulated railroads, so Washington officials are turning to the refineries: “Washington state lawmakers passed a law recently that requires oil refineries, which are state regulated, to give weekly notice of the train schedule to first responders.” (See previous report.) The story of Dean Smith’s Train Watch is inspiring – we should set up annual counts in all of our frontline refinery communities. – RS]
Growing oil train traffic is shrouded in secrecy
By Ashley Ahearn / June 13, 2015
Dean Smith was frustrated with the lack of public information about oil train traffic so he organized 30 volunteers to count the trains coming through his community north of Seattle. Credit: Ashley Ahearn/EarthFix/KUOW
EVERETT, Wash. – Dean Smith, 72, sits in his car by the train tracks here north of Seattle.
It’s a dark, rainy Tuesday night, and Smith waits for an oil train to come through town. These trains are distinctive: A mile long, they haul 100 or so black, pill-shaped cars that each carry 30,000 gallons of crude oil.
Smith has been counting the trains for about a year, noting each one on a website he built. The former National Security Agency employee does it because the railroads share little information about oil train traffic with Washington state. They don’t have to because they’re federally regulated.
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What is known: The railroads are moving 40 times more oil now than in 2008 due to an oil boom in the Bakken formation of North Dakota. Bakken crude oil contains high concentrations of volatile gas, with a flashpoint as low as 74 degrees Fahrenheit.
Derailments and explosions have occurred around North America since the oil boom began, including a 2013 catastrophe that killed 47 people in rural Quebec.
This has prompted emergency responders to call for more information from railroad companies about oil train traffic patterns and volumes. The railroads mostly have refused; they say that releasing that information could put them at a competitive disadvantage.
Which is why Smith decided to find out for himself. “It’s pretty hard to hide an oil train,” he said with a chuckle.
Last year, Smith launched the first Snohomish County Train Watch. He organized 30 volunteers to take shifts counting trains around the clock for a week.
In their first week of watching oil trains, the group collected more information about oil train traffic than the railroads had given Washington in the three years the trains have come here.
State officials say Smith’s data is helpful but insufficient. They say they shouldn’t have to rely on citizen volunteers to get critical information in case of disaster.
Dave Byers, the head of spill response for the state’s Department of Ecology, said his team needs the information to plan area-specific response plans to protect the public and keep oil from getting into the environment.
“It gives us an idea of what the risk is, the routes that are taken,” Byers said. “The frequency and volume of oil really gives us an idea of what level of preparedness we need to be ready for in Washington state.”
Oil train traffic shows no signs of slowing, which adds to the state’s sense of urgency. The oil industry wants to build five new terminals in Washington to move crude oil off trains and onto ships.
Meanwhile, Congress is considering legislation to lift a federal ban on exporting crude oil that’s been in place since 1975 – allowing American crude to be shipped around the world.
Close call in Seattle
Anyone who has attended a Mariners baseball game in downtown Seattle likely has seen or heard oil trains passing the ballpark. The trains continue north through the city to refineries on Puget Sound.
Seattle had a close call last year when an oil train derailed near downtown.
Byers and his team weren’t notified for one and a half hours and initially were not told there was oil in the derailed train cars.
No oil was spilled, but Byers is critical of how BNSF Railway, the company that moves most of the oil out of the Bakken oil fields, handled the situation.
BNSF did not tell the state there was highly flammable Bakken crude oil in the derailed train cars – that information came five hours later from the oil refinery waiting for the train. Additionally, Byers said that when his team arrived on the scene, no BNSF representative was present, but welders were working on the derailed cars. The welders said they did not know what was inside.
“We became concerned because people were wandering off the street and taking selfies of themselves next to the rail cars,” Byers said. “There was no preparing for the potential that one of those cars could actually start leaking.”
BNSF spokeswoman Courtney Wallace said in an emailed statement that BNSF Railway had its hazardous materials team quickly in place to evaluate the situation. “This derailment did not cause a release at any point, nor was there a threat of a release,” she said.
The state and BNSF Railway have sparred over the railroad company’s reports of hazardous materials spills. Earlier this year, state regulators released an investigation and recommended that BNSF be fined up to $700,000 for not quickly reporting these spills. The company has disputed the state’s findings. A final decision is expected next year.
Concern in Anacortes
This spring, several hundred people packed into the Anacortes City Hall for information from oil companies and BNSF Railway about the oil trains moving through their community. Just that morning, a BNSF oil train had derailed and caught fire in North Dakota.
In northern Puget Sound, Anacortes is home to two refineries that receive oil by rail from North Dakota. Its residents, like others in small communities along the tracks in Washington state, have voiced concern about oil trains. Congestion woes are among their complaints; unlike Seattle, where the trains mostly pass through tunnels and over bridges, trains here disrupt traffic.
Audience members were allowed to submit written questions only. Oil refineries’ representatives told them about safety precautions at their facilities to prevent and respond to spills. They also talked about their commitment to getting newer oil train cars.
Wallace, the BNSF spokeswoman, gave a presentation about the company’s commitment to safety. She said BNSF believes that every accident is preventable.
When pressed by a reporter about how much information BNSF shares with local emergency responders, Wallace said BNSF has “always provided information to first responders, emergency managers about what historically has moved through their towns.”
She cautioned that sharing regular updates or notifications of oil train movements could put the public at risk.
“We’re always cognizant of what information is shared, because we don’t want to see an incident that involves terrorism or anyone else who might have that kind of frame of mind,” Wallace said.
Fight for information
A federal emergency order demands that railroads share limited information with states – but state officials want more.
Washington state lawmakers passed a law recently that requires oil refineries, which are state regulated, to give weekly notice of the train schedule to first responders.
State Rep. Jessyn Farrell, a Seattle Democrat who sponsored the bill, said BNSF and the oil industry opposed the legislation from the beginning.
“We’re going to get the information,” she said. “I don’t really care who gives it to us as long as it’s good information and it stands in court, because we need that information now.”
BNSF Railway spent more than $300,000 on lobbyists and political contributions in Washington state in 2014.
“I think they’re absolutely on the wrong side of this,” Farrell said. “In the public mind, and morally, they are absolutely wrong.”
BNSF’s Wallace said the company still is reviewing the law to see how federal regulatory authority will interact with state authority.
Back in Everett, Dean Smith said he isn’t waiting for politicians or lawyers to duke this one out.
Instead, he’ll wait for trains, he said, and he’ll continue gathering information about them.
Four hours into a recent train-watching shift, Smith perked up.
“There’s something coming,” he said. He opened the door of his Chevy Volt and stepped into the rain. An orange BNSF engine emerged from the tunnel. Behind it were oil cars – about 100 of them, black as night.
The streetlight reflected off Smith’s glasses and shadows gathered in the furrow of his brow as he stood by the tracks, shoulders hunched.
“Sometimes I wonder, why fight it? Why not just move? That’d be the easiest thing to do,” he said. “But I think we have to fight. And I would like to see citizens groups acting like this all over the country. That’s the form of checks and balances we can create. All it takes is a few people.”
Oil Trains Don’t Have to Derail or Explode to Be Hazardous, Doctors Warn
By Dahr Jamail, Tuesday, 09 June 2015 00:00
There are no existing rail cars that could truly be considered safe for shipping crude oil. (Image: Oil by rail via Shutterstock)
In May, hundreds of doctors, nurses and health-care professionals from Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) called on Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown to take a stronger position against proposed oil-by-rail shipping terminals in their respective states, in order to insure the health and physical security of families and communities there.
Washington PSR describes itself as a group that promotes “peace and health for the human community and the global ecosystem by empowering members, citizens and policy makers to develop and model for the rest of the nation socially just and life-enhancing policies regarding nuclear issues, climate change, environmental toxins, vulnerable populations and other risks to human health.”
The group has sounded the alarm over what it sees as a direct health threat to the country stemming from the oil-by-rail system.
“We are dealing with a product [oil] that is harmful to human health at every single step along the process of extracting, transporting, storing and using it,” said Dr. Mark Vossler, a cardiologist and chairman of the Department of Medicine at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, Washington.
Vossler, who is also one of the lead authors of the Washington PSR/Oregon PSR position statement on crude oil transport and storage, and volunteers his time with WPSR’s climate change task force, added, “The health risks of water fouled by fracking, of exploding trains and storage tanks, of oil spills at sea and the dispersants used in the clean up, and of the everyday relentless actual use of the product in terms of a continuing rising carbon dioxide content in our atmosphere should be completely unacceptable.”
Oil companies have proposed dramatic increases in oil-by-rail transport and storage in Washington and Oregon, with the aim of increasing ocean shipments from regional ports there.
PSR says that although just three years ago there was no oil-by-rail movement in Washington, dramatic increases in oil extraction from the Bakken fields in North Dakota and Montana, as well as from the Canadian tar sands, have generated significant increases in oil-by-rail traffic. In a recently released position paper, PSR warns of a number of health impacts, including increased rates in cancer, asthma and cardiovascular disease, among dozens of others.
“If current proposals are allowed to proceed, the volume of oil-by-rail coming into Washington would increase from the current 19 trains per week to as many as 137 trains per week, each about 1.5 miles long,” PSR’s position statement reads. “Each would carry approximately 2.9 million gallons of volatile crude to be stored, in some cases refined, and then exported to other states. This is a larger daily volume than would flow through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.”
PSR has conducted a thorough review of health data published in peer-reviewed medical journals, and its warning is stark.
“The known risks associated with oil-by-rail transport, oil tank storage, and oil export by vessel pose an unacceptable threat to human health and safety,” the group said.
It is not just the Pacific Northwest that is being impacted. In the last two decades, millions of gallons of oil have been spilled across the United States by train derailments. This stunning interactive map, generated by McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington Bureau, illustrates the massive scope of this issue.
And the problem is worsening dramatically. There was more oil spilled from trains in 2013 than in the previous 40 years combined, according to federal data.
Truthout spoke with several key PSR doctors and personnel about this issue, and found that the human health dangers posed by oil-by-rail, even when they don’t detonate into train-propelled firebombs that burn people alive and force evacuations of entire towns and cities, are shocking.
“Inherently a Public Health and Safety Issue”
“We’re talking about trains of over 100 cars shipped through Northwestern communities – right through them – including highly populated areas,” said Laura Skelton, WPSR’s executive director. “Plus, the Bakken crude most of them are hauling is more combustible than almost any other crude oil transported by train in the US.”
Skelton warned that the prospect of a rapidly expanding fossil fuel industry and its growing infrastructure throughout the Pacific Northwest “is not just an environmental issue … it is inherently a public health and safety issue. It is also a justice issue, as our states’ most vulnerable citizens are likely to be the most impacted.”
In Washington State alone, Skelton said that more than 3 million residents live within the US Department of Transportation-defined evacuation zone, if there were to be an oil trail derailment and explosion. Vulnerable citizens include pregnant women, babies and young children, the elderly and all those with pre-existing medical conditions.
“In addition, massive storage tank farms of millions of gallons of crude oil are proposed within population centers,” she added. “This is a new and totally unacceptable level of risk to humans, and it is not acceptable from a public policy perspective.
Vossler agreed, and took it a step further by pointing out some of the specific health impacts from the trains themselves.
“While derailments and explosions are serious, life threatening and quite dramatic, the insidious effects of increased train traffic are equally important,” he told Truthout. “Locomotives, being powered by diesel fuel, emit a large amount of particulate pollution in their exhaust. Given the known health risks of particulate inhalation, any increase in train traffic increases the odds of illness in people living in close proximity to the rail lines.”
Vossler explained that diesel particulates are tiny particles that can be breathed in and are carried deep into the lungs, creating local injury and causing toxins to be transported into the bloodstream.
Diesel particulate exposure leads to a host of diseases including cancer, particularly of the lung and breast; asthma and obstructive lung disease; heart attack and stroke.
“Seventy-eight percent of the risk of cancer due to airborne causes in the Puget Sound area are due to particulate pollution,” Vossler said. “In Washington State alone, more than a half million adults and 120,000 children have asthma. According to the state Department of Health, more than 5,000 people with asthma are hospitalized and nearly 100 die from asthma each year.”
He said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already identified Washington State’s asthma prevalence as being among the highest in the country, and that prevalence is steadily increasing along with the increase in oil-by-rail traffic.
“A dramatic increase in oil train traffic would only add to that trend,” Vossler said. “In children, diesel pollution is linked to higher rates of neuro-developmental disorders, impaired lung development and increased development of asthma. Exposure as an infant leads to lifelong disease and disability.”
Thus, the developmental effects of exposure to diesel particulate are cumulative, and the acute effects have no threshold upper limit where further exposure becomes inconsequential. Any rise in rail traffic will put people’s health in further danger, according to Vossler.
Given that the number of people living in proximity to oil-by-rail shipments across North America is currently in the tens of millions and growing, the importance of oil-by-rail as a national health issue is clear.
A Pulmonologist’s Nightmare
Don Storey is a pulmonologist who founded the PSR chapter in Spokane, Washington, in 1982. His motivation? He saw the threat of an oil-by-rail train exploding as it passed through that city as being “similar to a small nuclear weapon explosion over Spokane.”
Speaking to the proposed increase in oil-by-rail traffic through the region, Storey told Truthout, “To me, as a pulmonologist, this is just an amazing possibility that has almost certain negative impact on the respiratory health of our region. The conditions listed in our paper, from increased respiratory system cancers, to increased asthma, heart disease and cerebrovascular disease, are very real and certain to occur.”
Storey believes the particulate exposure generated by the trains is an even greater threat than derailments.
Citing the fact that the increase in trains would mean one per hour traveling through population centers, Storey sees them posing “unacceptable particulate exposure” to people, and that is why he sees the trains as a major health risk.
Even if it were possible to make the trains 100 percent safe from derailment and subsequent explosions, Storey says, it would never be possible to significantly decrease the risk of particulate exposure, given the nearly 700 percent increase in the number of trains traveling through Washington communities in any given period of time.
As a pulmonologist, Storey’s predictions regarding the health impacts of an oil train explosion are equally dire. His equation of the detonation of an oil train with that of a small nuclear weapon is no exaggeration.
“The blast damage may be less, but the potential respiratory injuries may be quite similar, from burning of the upper airways [nose and trachea] to destruction of alveoli, not to mention the very real potential of asphyxiation for those close to the burning from depletion of oxygen in the atmosphere from the intense fires,” he said.
In 1982, Storey treated a patient who survived an airplane crash, and had sustained significant skin wounds from the burning airline fuel. “From my perspective, the really significant damage was that to his lungs from inhalation of burning fuel and smoke,” he said. “I had never to that time, nor since, seen damage as severe as this patient had to his bronchial epithelium [lining]. This tissue sloughed off in big, black chunks for several days, and I had to bronchoscope him two to three times daily to remove necrotic [dead] material from his lungs so that healing could occur.”
With a month of intensive therapy from Storey, along with the full resources of a major intensive care unit, the patient survived. However, the experience clearly demonstrated to the doctor that – given the intensity of the care required – Spokane wouldn’t be able to accommodate a large number of patients dealing with these types of injuries (for instance, in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion).
“This was the primary reason I became so convinced that preventative medicine for nuclear war injuries was much more practical and efficient than curative or restorative medicine, and that the potential for nuclear war had to be abolished,” Storey said. “I think this same conclusion holds for the potential of an oil train derailment and fire [or] explosion. This potential scenario needs to be eliminated, whatever the cost.”
Seeking Environmental Sanity
Skelton believes health-care professionals should research the localized impacts of the fossil fuel industry in every region of the country, and said that efforts along those lines are already in progress in many areas.
“With the release of [the PSR position paper] to the public, we’re providing a model that can be built on,” she said. “Local public health advocates can use this peer-reviewed science and address common threats, like exposure to cancer-causing diesel pollution, plus threats specific to their communities, like the number of at-grade crossings and related delays in emergency response times.”
She also pointed out that, while most media focus and public concerns are related to the detonation of oil trains, the issue of oil terminals, like those proposed for Grays Harbor and Vancouver in Washington State, have garnered far less concern and public scrutiny.
“We have researched horrific accidents at terminals elsewhere, such as an explosion and resulting fire at a petroleum depot in England that took days to squelch, but they have usually occurred in places far from any population centers,” she explained. “That is one thing that makes the new terminals in Washington and Oregon so dangerous; many are sited within population areas and extremely close to large numbers of homes and businesses.”
Skelton hopes that the PSR report will make an impact on public agencies performing the safety reviews of the proposed plans for more oil trains and oil storage terminals, as well as on decision makers who will make the call about whether to move forward with these very high-risk projects.
When asked whether the use of oil-by-rail is a necessary evil given our fossil-fuel-based economy, Skelton said that this type of thinking is trumped by an overriding public interest of “safety and environmental sanity.”
Skelton said she believed the common good of the people cannot be sacrificed to the business needs of the companies or the overall need for oil.
According to the PSR report, oil trains are already moving through 93 cities and towns (including 38 that are heavily populated) in Washington, and in Oregon, the trains are traveling through 88 communities.
The consequences are already clear, according to Skelton.
“We have seen air pollution from diesel exhaust from train engines,” she explained. “That is correlated with negative health outcomes already experienced in our region, from cancer to asthma. For example, the US [Environmental Protection Agency] placed the Puget Sound area in the top 5 percent nationally for potential cancer risk from air toxics.”
Skelton warned that if the proposals for more oil train and oil terminal permits in the Northwest are successful, we should expect what she referred to as “direct threats to health and safety.” Beyond that, she noted, the increase in permits would mean an increase in carbon pollution, which contributes to climate change and the associated health risks.
In response to the propaganda the oil industry uses to entice communities with jobs and other “benefits,” Skelton had this to say: “Rarely is the economic analogy shared of what it would cost to human health, industry and natural ecosystems if an oil spill were to take place on land or in the water, or from a tank farm explosion. The town of Cordova, Alaska, is still experiencing impacts from the Exxon Valdez spill 26 years ago. Almost every month it seems we learn about the ongoing environmental impacts of the BP Gulf spill in 2010. These are not compromises we want to have to make in the Puget Sound.”
Solutions
PSR’s position on what should be done to address the oil-by-rail proposals is that the railroads should not ship crude oil via rail in cars that are not designed to withstand accidents of the kind that are occurring.
That said, currently, there are no existing rail cars that could truly be considered safe for shipping crude oil, and the railroads have already shown that they cannot safely handle the massive weight loads of the individual cars as well as the aggregate weight of the train without frequent derailments.
“An average national derailment every three to four days suggests we cannot safely allow this industry to haul explosive cargo through population centers,” Skelton said. “Responsibility is not necessarily the raison d’être for most businesses; profit is. It is unlikely that most companies would become dramatically more responsible for preventing accidents without pressure in the form of rule-making or other top-down requirements.”
Skelton said that both oil and transport companies need to begin being as transparent as possible with the public about the existing and projected safety risks to the public and environment of oil train transport, storage and vessel export.
“These big companies could even drive solutions to climate change,” she added. “After all, they have the resources to envision, plan for and invest in a future of clean energy.”
However, at least for now, the oil industry is going in the opposite direction. In May, the oil industry challenged new federal rules aimed at improving the safety of the oil-by-rail system, and asked a court to block the rail transport safety rules.
In the Pacific Northwest, however, pressure remains on the governors of Oregon and Washington to safeguard their respective state populations from the health and safety threats posed by the oil trains and terminals.
“Both governors are taking steps to increase safety of trains now barreling through our state,” Skelton said. “That’s good, but we need more. They must also focus on prevention of this onslaught of additional oil trains that will come if new terminals are approved.”
Mark Vossler, the cardiologist and co-author of the PSR statement, pointed out how the general public remains largely unaware of the risks of using fossil fuels.
“The medical community has known about the respiratory and cardiovascular risks of air pollution for a long time but there has been little public outrage and little change in behavior,” he said. “The crucial difference is that they are transporting a substance that can explode and kill, can be spilled and foul the water, and no matter what measures are taken to make the tankers thicker and the rails more reliable will never, ever be completely safe.”
Skelton issued a broader perspective warning. “Fossil fuels, and the carbon pollution they contribute to, connect directly to climate change, the biggest health threat facing humanity this century,” she said.
Vossler also connected the oil trains to the larger issue of climate disruption. He pointed out the medical risks that come with that disruption: weather disasters, famine, drought, rampant disease and wars related to shrinking resources. Vossler emphasized the responsibility of the medical community to, as H.L. Mencken put it, “save man from the consequences of his vices.” However, he said, nothing the medical community can do, in an isolated way, is a replacement for moving beyond fossil fuels.
“We do have alternatives to our outdated dirty, harmful, unhealthy fossil fuel economy,” Vossler said. “We have the technology to build a modern, clean energy economy. We just need to gather the will to make it so.”
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