Toxic Workplace: Fracking Hazards on the Job
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Published by Food and Water Watch
Oil and gas workers are being injured and even killed from accidents, and are being exposed to harmful toxins while on the job. The oil and gas industry has promoted the rapid expansion of drilling and fracking across the country as fostering economic development, job creation and energy independence; however, less attention has been given to the serious health and safety risks that burden the industry's workforce.
Oil and gas workers are being injured and even killed from accidents, and are being exposed to harmful toxins while on the job. The oil and gas industry has promoted the rapid expansion of drilling and fracking across the country as fostering economic development, job creation and energy independence; however, less attention has been given to the serious health and safety risks that burden the industry's workforce.
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Fracking sites, where many laborers work, operate 24 hours a day and are densely packed with personnel, equipment and machinery.
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Many of the most common jobs are dangerous: excavating, drilling, commercial truck driving and operating di
ff
erent types of heavy machinery and diesel-powered equip-ment.
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While on the job, workers can be exposed to countless hazardous materials, radioactive toxins, temperature extremes, and airborne pollutants and respiratory irritants such as diesel particulate ma
t
er and silica.
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Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, is a method used to extract natural gas and oil from shale and other rock forma-tions buried deep within the Earth.
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Approximately three to five acres of land need to be cleared to prepare a “drill pad,”
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a
f
er which heavy machinery is put in place to begin drill-ing. As described in an
Oil & Gas Monitor
article, “Equipment includes up to 20 diesel-engine-driven compressors, 30 frac tanks for water storage, high pressure pumps and hoses, a crane, a wireline rig, truck-mounted hoppers and delivery sys-tems for sand or ceramic proppants, numerous chemical ad-ditive containers, storage tanks for the recovered natural gas and recovered water, and support trailers for site personnel.”
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A
f
er drilling down to a rock formation that holds oil or natu-ral gas, typically drilling sideways through the targeted layer of rock, millions of gallons of water mixed with chemicals and a proppant are injected under extreme pressure to fracture (or “frack”) the rock.
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New technology allows for a multi-well
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Fracking Hazards on the Job
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pad with as many as 4 to 18 gas or oil wells at a single site.
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The proppant, most commonly sand, keeps the fractures ajar, enabling oil or natural gas to flow up the well.
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It takes approximately one year to prepare, drill and frack a new onshore oil or gas well, and, according to a study of the Marcellus Shale, about 98 percent of the employment associ-ated with each well occurs during this pre-production phase.
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Many common fracking jobs are physically demanding and dangerous.
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A 2013 article in the
New York Times
described fracking workplace injuries and the great need to treat them: “The patients come with burns from hot water, with hands and fingers crushed by steel tongs, with injuries from chains that have whipsawed them o
ff
their feet. Ambulances carry mangled bloodied bodies from accidents on roads packed with trucks and heavy-footed drivers.”
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In North Dakota, one coun-ty hospital in the midst of the drilling and fracking boom saw the number of emergency room visits quadruple from 2010 to 2012, and the state health department reported that trauma cases in the region tripled between 2007 and 2012. Many of the new patients were uninsured oil workers.
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Vehicle accidents are the leading and most deadly occupa-tional risk to oil and gas workers. Being struck by or caught in machinery; exposure to chemicals, explosions and fires; and falls to lower levels are among the other most common fatal accidents in the oil and gas extraction sector.
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Workers can experience fatigue from irregular and long work hours,
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which increases risk of injury or death. For example, a
f
er a 17-hour shi
f
at a natural gas well two years ago, Timothy Roth and three coworkers hopped in a truck for their four-hour drive from Ohio back to their company in West Virginia; the driver fell asleep at the wheel, and Roth was killed.
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Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 2003 to 2012, 26 out of every 100,000 workers in the oil and gas sector died on the job. That is 6.5 times the fatality rate of all U.S. work-ers. Drilling oil and gas wells was especially dangerous. During that decade, oil and gas drilling jobs were nearly 12 times as deadly as the average job in the United States.
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(See Figure 1.)An analysis of the oil and gas extraction industry by the Na-tional Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) identified that when drilling activity (i.e., the number of rotary rigs) increased, occupational death rates in the oil and gas extraction sector also increased.
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Nonfatal workplace injuries are more di
ff
icult to track than fatal injuries because nonfatal injuries are not always report-ed. Many oil and gas companies o
ff
er incentives to encourage laborers not to file workers’ compensation claims. “There be-came a huge push to not report so people can get their stupid jean jackets,” according to a Wyoming a
t
orney whose firm represents injured oil workers. “Those are ways of manipulat-ing injury rates in a way that’s really disingenuous.”
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An industry worker, for example, told
Mother Jones
magazine
that a
f
er he crushed two vertebrae while working at a gas plant, his employer opted to cover his salary for a year rather than having him apply for workers’ compensation. “When you report something up here to workman’s comp, there’s a lot of companies that look at your accident record,” he said, “and if you have X amount of accidents they’re not gonna let your company work for them.”
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According to a safety chief for the AFL-CIO, underreporting occupational injuries distorts the industry’s national safety figures.
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Even with many injuries going unreported, injury rates on fracking jobs are notable. The National Council on Compensa-tion Insurance, Inc. (NCCI) found that in 2011, the frequency of workers’ compensation claims was “substantially higher” for hydraulic fracturing jobs than for the oil and gas industry as a whole.
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(See Figure 2.)
More than 1,000 doctors and other healthcare profession-als have called on President Barack Obama to protect public health from the harms of fracking.
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Without a doubt, oil and gas industry workers can be exposed to toxic pollutants at the worksite.
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The fracking process itself involves chemicals that could cause cancer, disrupt the endocrine system, a
ff
ect the nervous, immune and cardiovascular systems, or a
ff
ect sensory organs and the respiratory system.
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On site, workers can be exposed to volatile organic com-pounds, including benzene and toluene, as well as fugitive methane, which are o
f
en released during fracking and can mix with nitrogen oxide emissions from diesel-fueled ve-hicles and stationary equipment to form ground-level ozone.
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Chronic exposure to ground-level ozone can cause asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. When combined with particulate ma
t
er of a certain size (less than 2.5 micrometers), ozone can form smog, a harmful form of air pollution.
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