The Houston Chronicle recently published two investigative stories looking at the rising death toll of the oil and gas industry in Texas.
Reporter Lise Olsen spent a year combing through workers' compensation claims and accident reports filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
She found out that the past few years have been particularly deadly for workers in the industry, and there's a whole host of accidents in the state's oil fields and gas patches that regularly go unreported.
We spoke with Olsen about her reporting. In one of the stories, she outlines some of her findings:
- The federal government has failed for 22 years to implement safety standards and procedures for onshore oil and gas drilling, even as offshore accidents such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico prompted officials to improve already stringent regulations governing offshore drilling.
- At onshore oil and gas drilling sites, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is required to investigate only those accidents that kill workers or that cause three or more to be hospitalized. That translated to only about 150 of 18,000 work-related injuries and illnesses in the last six years in Texas.
- When OSHA did investigate, it found safety violations in 78 percent of Texas accidents, finding that many could have been prevented with safer procedures or equipment.
Another report from this investigation will be published in this Sunday's (March 2) edition of the Houston Chronicle.
