http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/workers-disposable-assets-in-the-fracking-industry
Workers: Disposable Assets in the Fracking Industry
Monday, 10 March 2014 06:53
WALTER BRASCH FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
The oil and gas industry, the nation's chambers of commerce, and
politicians who are dependent upon campaign contributions from the
industry and the chambers, claim fracking is safe.
First, close your mind to the myriad scientific studies that show the
health effects from fracking.
Close your mind to the well-documented evidence of the environmental impact.
Focus just upon the effects upon the workers.
The oil and gas industry has a fatality rate seven times higher than for
all other workers, according to data released by the Centers for Disease
Control. (CDC). According to the CDC, the death rate in the oil and gas
industry is 27.1; the U.S. collective death rate is 3.8.
"Job gains in oil and gas construction have come with more fatalities,
and that is unacceptable," said John E. Perez, secretary of labor.
Not included in the data, because it doesn't include the past three
years, when the oil/gas industry significantly increased fracking in the
Marcellus and other shales, is a 27-year-old worker who was cremated in
a gas well explosion in late February in Greene County, Pa. One other
worker was injured. Because of extensive heat and fire, emergency
management officials couldn't get closer than 1,500 feet of the wells.
Pennsylvania's Act 13, largely written by the oil and gas industry,
allows only a 300 foot set-back from wells to homes. In Greene County,
it took more than a week to cap three wells on the pad where the
explosion occurred.
The gas drilling industry, for the most part, is non-union or dependent
upon independent contractors who often provide little or no benefits to
their workers. The billion dollar corporations like it that way. That
means there are no worker safety committees and no workplace regulations
monitored by workers. The workers have no bargaining or grievance
rights; health and workplace benefits for workers who aren't executives
or professionals are often minimal or non-existent.
It may be months or years before most workers learn the extent of
possible injury or diseases caused by industry neglect.
"Almost every one of the injuries and deaths you will happen upon, it
will have something to do with cutting a corner, to save time, to save
money," attorney Tim Bailey told EnergyWire.
"Multiple pressures weigh on the people who work in this high-risk,
high-reward industry, including the need to produce on schedule and keep
the costs down," reports Gayathri Vaidyanathan of EnergyWire.
Tom Bean, a former gas field worker from Williamsport, Pa., says he
doesn't know what he and his co-workers were exposed to. He does know it
affected his health:
"You'd constantly have cracked hands, red hands, sore throat,
sneezing. All kinds of stuff. Headaches. My biggest one was a nauseating
dizzy headache . . . People were sick all the time . . . and then they'd
get into trouble for calling off sick. You're in muck and dirt and mud
and oil and grease and diesel and chemicals. And you have no idea [what
they are] . . . It can be anything. You have no idea, but they
[Management] don't care . . . It's like, 'Get the job done.' . . . You'd
be asked to work 15, 18 hour days and you could be so tired that you
couldn't keep your eyes open anymore, but it was 'Keep working. Keep
working. Keep working.'"
Workers are exposed to more than 1,000 chemicals, most of them known
carcinogens. They are exposed to radioactive waste, brought up from more
than a mile in the earth. They are exposed to the effects from inhaling
silica sand; they are exposed to protective casings that fail, and to
explosions that are a part of building and maintaining a fossil fuel
system that has explosive methane as its primary ingredient.
In July, two storage tanks exploded in New Milton, W.Va., injuring five
persons. One of the injured, Charlie Arbogast, a rigger and trucker,
suffered third degree burns on his hands and face. "You come to the
rigs, you do what you do and you don't ask questions," Diana Arbogast,
his wife, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
"In Pennsylvania, workers have reported contact with chemicals without
appropriate protective equipment, inhalation of sand without masks, and
repeated emergency visits for heat stroke, heat exhaustion, yet many of
the medical encounters go unreported," says Dr. Pouné Saberi, a public
health physician and clinical assistant professor at the University of
Pennsylvania.
The oil/gas industry, the Chambers of Commerce, politicians, and some in
the media, even against significant and substantial health and
environmental evidence, erroneously claim there are economic benefits to
fracking. Disregard the evidence that the 100-year claim for natural gas
is exaggerated by 10 times, or that the number of jobs created by the
boom in the Marcellus Shale is inflated by another 10 times. Focus on
Greene County, Pa.
Apparently, included in the "economic boom" is a small pizza shop that
was contracted by Chevron to provide large pizzas and sodas to about 100
families living near the gas well explosion that cost one man his life.
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