Wyoming worker-death rate high - 14 work related fatalities so far this year

Oct. 8th
Participants at Wyoming’s 4th Annual Safety Summit in Casper last week were told the state’s worker death rate is three to four times the national average, with one worker dying every ten days.

“Historically, in the last 10 years, (there have been) about 20 to 48 fatal events per year. The Wyoming rate is about three or four times the national rate, when we had experienced a fatal event, work-related event, about once every 10 days,” State Epidemiologist Mack Sewell told the audience. “For the time period from 1992 to 2009, there were 622 fatalities.”

“About almost half…were transportation. About 20 percent of the individuals were crushed by an object, 8 percent falls, with 98 percent without any fall protection,” Sewell said in his presentation. “The oil and gas profile accounted for about 20 percent of the total, where in 96 percent, safety procedures were not followed. Of those in the oil and gas area, about half occurred on a drilling rig, about 40 percent were transportation related, and 8 percent related to distribution and offsite repair.”

“I got a file from the Wyoming Department of Health, a spreadsheet, I was scrolling through it and I…had to stop and take a break. You stop and think these are real people, and you just have a summary of the event, you're pretty distant from the event, but it really makes an impact on you.”

Sewell said, however, that 2009 was an exception, with just one fatality.

“The most notable thing here was a huge drop in 2009,” Sewell noted. “We had a huge economic crisis in 2008; I guess the drilling pretty much came to a standstill. Knocking people out of work, they are not getting injured and killed on the job.“

Meanwhile, there have been 14 work related deaths so far this year.

“In a quick nutshell form, four agricultural related, four transportation related, one was obviously intoxicated, and at least two were unrestrained,” Sewell cited. “Three were oil and gas related, they were not out on drilling rig production sites…they were related to transportation or something else in the support industry, two in construction, and one in general industry.”

Sewell said tracking non-fatal workplace injuries was much more difficult because of the challenge in finding accurate reporting. He noted, however, they have averaged about 700 hospitalizations a year, apparently based on Workers Compensation claims.

“Worker's Comp was about $163 million, not chump change, it's significant,” Sewell said. “It's increased approximately $56 million in the last 10 years, even if healthcare costs and rate rises go down, it would still continue to go up.”

Sewell noted that there is no single data gathering system in the state for injuries (or fatalities), which is compounded because of the number of out-of-state contractors who report to their home states.

“I think the next big project for me is to start working with Worker's Comp claims,” Sewell stated. “There's some real advantages that Wyoming has with its monopolistic system, but there are challenges because I can see there are a lot of out-of-state contractors who come and work, and those claims go back to the state of residency. So, again, there's no one place you can go to get a complete picture of the situation. I think it's kind of like trying to describe an elephant two square inches at a time, you’re going to have to start putting the pieces together before you can see the whole picture.”

Source: Casper Journal