Perils afoot (2/5)

By Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe and Lowell Brown
Denton Record-Chronicle
December 29, 2008

EDITOR’S NOTE: Behind the Shale is a five-part series exploring urban gas drilling and one Argyle-area neighborhood’s struggle against it.

Gas boom brings potential dangers closer to homes

Natural gas bubbled from the frostbitten ground around the well for several hours before the earth erupted about 1:45 a.m. on a December morning in 2005, tossing truck-sized boulders into the air. John Ritchie’s land erupted in a grassfire so large that a neighbor thought the sun was coming up over the scrub and cedar trees. A worker sitting in a vehicle nearby watched in horror as flames engulfed him.

Emergency workers scrambled to control the blaze near Brad, in Palo Pinto County, but soon discovered more gas leaking out of fissures in the ground on the other side of U.S. Highway 180. While the worst-case scenario never materialized — more explosions on both sides of a major thoroughfare and a much larger conflagration — the gas-fed fire burned uncontrollably for several days within a 750-foot-wide crater that ranged from 30 to 60 feet deep.

While blowouts and well control problems are uncommon, records with the Texas Railroad Commission show that they have occurred, and continue to occur, in the Barnett Shale.

Most have been in Palo Pinto County and, except for the Brad explosion, no one reported a gas blowout that also resulted in fire or injuries. Stoval Operating lost control of a well on June 18, 2002. Two other operators lost control just before the explosion in Brad. On Sept. 29, Jilpetco had drilling mud blow out and into the reserve pit.

A Devon Energy worker fell about 90 feet from the top of this drilling platform off Hamilton Drive in Argyle in February 2007. He survived with broken bones. (DRC file photo/Gary Payne)

A month later, McCown Engineering had a blowout during drilling. Palo Pinto County operators didn’t report any more problems to the commission until April 25, 2007, when Upham Oil & Gas lost control of a well while its employees were adding pipe.

Until December 2005, any problems operators had in this sparsely populated area of the Barnett Shale escaped the attention of city dwellers who still thought of natural gas drilling as a rural enterprise. Telesis Operating Co.’s loss of control in Brad injured only one worker, the man who was sitting in his vehicle at the time of the blast. He suffered only minor flash burns and returned to work that day.

The events coincided with energy companies trying to convince thousands of property owners in the Barnett Shale to sign on to their plans for urban drilling.

Jennifer Cole turned on her television and learned of the destruction in Brad, 100 miles away from her well kept home near Argyle. She gasped. The devastation confirmed her worst fears about urban drilling

For weeks, Cole and her next-door neighbor, Jana DeGrand, had been fighting a gas company’s plan to erect a rig less than 300 feet from their back doors. A bulldozer appeared in the empty lot behind them and started building a pad site, a scant few feet away from their back fences. Worried all the dirt moving would alter runoff in their flood-prone subdivision — an additional concern for the Britt Drive neighborhood — they called and wrote their elected officials but found little help. Government agencies lacked the power or the will to investigate their concerns.

Maybe the explosion in Brad would make a difference, DeGrand recalled thinking. Maybe now people would take her concerns seriously. After all, if the same explosion happened at the pad site behind her, creating the same 750-foot crater, she and her neighbors could be dead.

The effort was becoming a full-time job for DeGrand and Cole, leaving little time for leisure. Cole, a stay-at-home mom, and DeGrand, an event marketer, spent hours online and at the county courthouse, researching deeds, contracts, laws — anything that might help their cause. They also scanned the media for industry news, with each report of lax regulation, explosions or environmental harm hardening their opposition to urban drilling. They wondered if an industry that was accustomed to drilling in pastures should really be trusted in areas with no room for error.

“No one wants to live in fear that when the rig comes in, what if an explosion happens?” Cole said. “What if there is a gas leak? What if there is a blowout? It should not be put in the middle of a neighborhood where the homeowners have these issues to deal with.”

Four months after the Brad explosion, one Fort Worth neighborhood dealt with those very issues. An explosion at a Forest Hill wellhead on April 22, 2006, killed XTO employee Robert Gayan, 49, and forced nearby residents to evacuate their homes.

That incident, as with most other fires and explosions at drilling and disposal sites, tank batteries, pipelines and compression stations, was not the result of a blowout. But the problem underscored the difficult and dangerous work of prying the volatile matter from Earth’s grip and harnessing it into usable energy.

When compared with workers in other industries, oil and gas workers are hurt and killed on the job with disproportionate frequency. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2003 to 2006, the most recent data available, occupational fatalities occurred at a rate of 4 per 100,000 workers for all workers. Not only are oil and gas workers getting killed on the job at nearly eight times that rate, but the fatality rate has increased since the uptick in exploration and production nationwide: from 30.5 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2003 to 31.9 per 100,000 in 2006 (I). On July 2, 2003, employees of Felderhoff Brothers Drilling were setting up a rig west of Fort Worth when Terry Bressler, 43, was pinned between a housing section and the floor of the drilling rig. The others could only watch as he was crushed and killed (II).

On April 19, 2005, as a Patterson Drilling crew prepared to drill a new horizontal well near Decatur, Tab Stewart Dotson, 46, backed his forklift into the old well. The tire knocked off the well cap, igniting the gas into a flash fire that trapped him inside the cab. Fellow employees of Patterson Drilling extinguished the fire only to watch Dotson die (III).

On July 14, 2006, Charles Mannon, 38, died after falling 90 feet from the top of a Cheyenne Drilling Co. rig in Saginaw. As when Gayan was killed 14 months before in Forest Hill, local media reported that XTO Energy blamed the employee for the accident, claiming that the industry has strict safety procedures (IV).

In addition to a higher risk of dying on the job, oil and gas workers face risk of serious injury or illness at work. From 2003 to 2006, the nationwide incident rates for on-the-job injuries in the mining sector were worst for those involved in drilling, at a rate of 5.3 per 10,000 full-time employees. Those in well-servicing jobs face comparatively less risk, at 3.1 per 10,000, with 2 per 10,000 injured in extraction jobs. However, because of differences in reporting among different labor sectors, comparing oil and gas occupational injury and illness rates with rates in non-mining jobs is meaningless, according to a September 2008 report by the Colorado School of Public Health.

On Feb. 12, 2007, a Devon Energy employee working on a rig between Denton and Argyle fell 90 feet from the top of a drilling rig, a fall that is usually fatal. The employee, who was wearing a hard hat, managed to land on his feet on the metal platform below and survived with broken bones (V).

Argyle Fire Chief Mac Hohenberger noted that whenever paramedics are dispatched to help with injuries at a gas well site, “it’s always pretty bad.”

This physically risky work, born in a fiscally risky environment, foments a rough-and-tumble culture that frequently doesn’t play well to outsiders.

At the beginning of the boom, two employees killed a fellow worker Nov. 25, 2003, in an initiation prank at a rig near Argyle. Teddy Garland and Louis Goodman intended to string Shawn Davis up with a line used to move heavy pipe. Instead, the line became entangled in the machinery, dragging Davis headfirst through a door and slamming him around and around. The men unhooked the line from Davis’ belt, washed off the blood and concocted a story to cover their ill-fated prank. It was all a fluke, they’d told authorities; Davis entangled himself in the chain accidentally.

The next day, a co-worker went to the sheriff’s office and revealed the truth of what happened. At trial, Goodman testified that initiations and horseplay were simply part of the roughneck’s life. Davis “more or less played along with it,” Goodman testified. “He was laughing.”

A jury found Goodman guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to 18 years behind bars. Four months later, Garland pleaded guilty to the same charge and accepted a five-year prison sentence.

The brutal episode so close to her home haunted the thoughts of Jennifer Cole. She tried not to picture the trailers and drilling equipment arriving just beyond her back fence. Trailers that would fill up with workers. Workers who would know when her husband left for work, when she was alone with her boys. She tried to bat the thoughts away, to believe that she was worrying too much. But they came anyway. What kind of people would do such a thing, she recalled wondering, replaying the details of Davis’ death in her mind. Is that what she should expect from them? These would-be neighbors?

LOWELL BROWN can be reached at 940-566-6882. His e-mail address is lmbrown@dentonrc.com.

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com.

FOR REFERENCE

I. Witter, Roxana, et al. “Potential Exposure-Related Human Health Effects of Oil and Gas Development: A Literature Review (2003-2008),” Denver: Colorado School of Public Health, August 2008.

II. Compiled from Tarrant County Medical Examiner and Occupational Safety and Health Administration records.

III. Compiled from court documents, Dotson vs. Encana Oil & Gas, Cause No. 06-05-357.

IV. Mosier, Jeff. “Gas firm blames worker for blast in Fort Worth,” in The Dallas Morning News, April 26, 2006.

V. Board, Jay. “Man injured in fall from rig in Argyle,” in the Argyle Messenger, Feb. 12, 2007.

RISKY WORK

A Colorado School of Public Health review found that the fatality rate among oil and gas workers was 31.9 per 100,000 workers in 2006. According to another report, differences in reporting among different labor sectors make it meaningless to compare oil and gas occupational injury rates with rates in non-mining jobs.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released a preliminary analysis of on-the-job fatalities for 2007 in October. The agency will release final numbers for 2007 in April 2009. Listed are fatality rates per 100,000 workers.

TOP 10 MOST DANGEROUS JOBS

1. Fishers and related fishing workers, 111.8

2. Logging workers, 86.4

3. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers, 66.7

4. Structural iron and steel workers, 45.5

5. Farmers and ranchers, 38.4

6. Roofers, 29.4

7. Electrical power line installers and repairers, 29.1

8. Drivers/sales workers and truck drivers, 26.2

9. Refuse and recyclable material collectors, 22.8

10. Police and sheriff’s patrol officers, 21.4

Chapter 1: Neighbors along Britt Drive are approached by land men eager to drill in the Barnett Shale. Some are wary of the impact on their quality of life and question whether the amount of money offered is worth it.

Chapter 2: Urban drilling means these rough-and-tumble workplaces are closer to homes than ever. But its boom-or-bust nature creates a psychosocial environment for the Britt Drive neighborhood that fosters distrust of both sides.

Chapter 3: Cities are trying to preserve their authority to make rules for health, safety and welfare, but the industry is pushing back. Britt Drive neighbors watch one such battle unfold in their backyard.

Chapter 4: A doctrine of exemption allows the industry to develop oil and gas resources without having to study the environmental or health impacts of their work. Britt Drive neighbors worry about how drilling would affect their environment.

Chapter 5: Industry insiders sometimes marginalize gas drilling opponents, but the conversation about where to draw the line in urban drilling persists. The Britt Drive neighbors’ quest to keep drillers away grows increasingly desperate.