Jennifer Gollan is a reporter for Reveal, covering worker safety, mistreatment and corporate malfeasance. This story was produced and originally published by Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonprofit newsroom based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Listen to Reveal’s related episode, Power Struggle, here. Learn more at revealnews.org.

The Bakken oil boom has been a serial killer. Big oil companies have largely written the rules governing their own accountability for accidents, potentially putting workers at risk.

In the early evening of Sept. 14, 2011, at a bend in the Missouri River in North Dakota, Brendan Wegner, 21, was scrambling down a derrick ladder when the oil well he was working on exploded. Rescuers found his body pinned under a heap of melted steel pipes. His charred hands were recovered later, still gripping the derrick ladder. It was his first day on the rig.


Wegner’s co-workers—Ray Hardy, Michael Twinn and Doug Hysjulien—survived the initial blast. But Hardy, whose nails were bent back by the explosion, exposing the stark white bones of his fingers, died the next day of his burns. Twinn would have his lower legs amputated, and dogged by post-traumatic stress disorder, he killed himself in October 2013. Hysjulien, who suffered debilitating third-degree burns over half of his body, is the lone survivor.

To this day, the explosion—pieced together from interviews, court documents and federal and local reports—remains the worst accident in the expansive Bakken oil fields since the boom began in 2006.

On average, someone dies about every six weeks from an accident in the Bakken—at least 74 since 2006, according to an exclusive analysis by Politico Magazine partner Reveal, part of The Center for Investigative Reporting. This is the first comprehensive accounting of such deaths using data obtained from Canadian and U.S. regulators. The number of deaths is likely even higher because federal regulators don’t have a systematic way to record oil- and gas-related deaths, and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t include certain fatalities, such as those of independent contractors.

Across the Bakken, deeply entrenched corporate practices and weak federal oversight inoculate energy producers against responsibility when workers are killed or injured, while shifting the risk to others. Oil companies also offer financial incentives to workers for speeding up production—potentially jeopardizing their safety—and avoid paying the full cost of settlements to workers and their families when something goes wrong by shielding themselves behind a web of companies.

Jebadiah Stanfill was working on an oil rig in North Dakota in September 2011 when he was jolted by a deafening boom in the distance. Less than a mile away, another rig had exploded. Credit: Courtesy of Jebadiah Stanfill

An estimated 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered oil is sitting in the U.S. portion of the Bakken and Three Forks formations of the Williston Basin, a 170,000-square-mile area that stretches from southern Saskatchewan, Canada, to northern South Dakota. North Dakota now ranks just behind Texas with the second-largest oil reserve in the U.S. Both states now account for half of all the crude oil production in the country.

OSHA officials say they are concerned that plummeting oil prices in the past year are prompting energy producers to shortchange safety even more. To others, the deaths and injuries would be preventable if not for a combination of greed, inadequate training and lack of government oversight.

“These workers are paying for cheap gas with their lives and their limbs,” said Peg Seminario, director of safety and health for the AFL-CIO.

***

Big oil companies use a network of corporate relationships and protections such as indemnification agreements to insulate themselves from collateral damage after accidents like the one that killed Hardy and Wegner by forcing insurance companies for contractors at the bottom of the pecking order to pay.

If the top energy producers that control sites with fracked wells—in which oil and gas are extracted from shale with high-pressure mixtures of water, sand or gravel and chemicals—are permitted to offload the responsibility to smaller contractors, then there is little incentive to make worksites safer, said Paul Sanderson, a North Dakota attorney who frequently has encountered these agreements.

Oasis Petroleum North America LLC, which is part of Houston-based oil giant Oasis Petroleum Inc., hired contractor Carlson Well Service, which employed Hardy, Wegner, Twinn and Hysjulien, to get its well to produce more oil.

Even though the government did not cite Oasis for responsibility for the accident, the company negotiated four separate settlements for undisclosed amounts with Wegner’s parents, Peggy and Kevin; Hysjulien; Twinn; and Hardy’s wife.

- Brendan Wegner, shown at a friend’s wedding in July 2011, was 21 when he died in an explosion in September 2011. Credit: Rachel Waldmer

Justin Williams, a lawyer for Hysjulien and Wegner’s parents, contends that Oasis failed to properly “kill” the well, or temporarily close it. He added that Oasis bore ultimate responsibility for making the proper engineering decisions that would have prevented the dangerous pressure buildup.

“It’s a simple engineering calculation,” he said. “They should have people qualified to do so, but they didn’t do that to start with.” Williams added that an expert he consulted said it would have taken no more than three tanker trucks of heavy brine water, costing about $1,500 combined, to properly kill the well.

“The Bakken is the most dangerous oil field to work in the U.S.,” he said. “The energy producers never pay for their mistakes; the insurance company for the contractor pays. It doesn’t give them any incentive to change the procedures that are unsafe.”

Oasis declined an interview, but in a written statement, spokesman Brian Kennedy said the supervisor arranged and oversaw the salt water injections—both the day before and the morning of the explosion—which he maintained rendered the well “static when work began.” He blamed the explosion on “a kick, or sudden and unexpected flow of gas into the wellbore.”

“Indemnity provisions are contained in most commercial contracts in nearly every sector of the economy,” he added.

But, in the Bakken, smaller contractors have little choice but to agree to the terms in their contracts. Their insurance companies often end up shouldering part or all of the costs of settlements with workers and their families.

“The big oil companies have you locked in,” said Connie Krinke, business manager for Diamond H Service LLC, an oil and gas service company based in Bowman, North Dakota.

“You really don’t have the ability to refuse to sign these agreements because most of these companies are billion-dollar companies, and we’re just a small pea in the big pod of people that work for them,” she added.

***

When state lawmakers in North Dakota have tried to fix the problem, the oil and gas industry used its considerable influence to kill any reform.

A bill proposed in the state Legislative Assembly in January 2011 sought to prevent companies from adding provisions to oil and gas production contracts that required smaller contractors to indemnify them when people are injured or die because of the action of the companies or their independent contractors.

“If you break it, you buy it,” said Paul Sanderson, a North Dakota lawyer who crafted the bill in response to growing concern among insurers following several oil field accidents. “When a person is not responsible for their actions, they disregard the consequences.”

Michael Twinn (right) had his lower legs amputated after the explosion. Dogged by post-traumatic stress disorder, he killed himself in October 2013. Credit: Courtesy of Jebadiah Stanfill

The bill passed out of the House Judiciary Committee. But the effort was torpedoed nearly a week later after heavy lobbying from the oil industry, he said. The bill was unnecessary and interfered with contracting in the oil industry, a lobbyist for the North Dakota Petroleum Council argued at the time. The bill was defeated 63-27 on the House floor, state legislative records show.

Yet the dangerous nature of the oil and gas industry has prompted four of the largest energy-producing states— Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Wyoming—to adopt statutes that prevent or limit oil companies from shifting liability, including legal costs, jury awards and settlements for workers’ injuries or wrongful death suits, to smaller contractors.

“This bill could have saved lives,” Sanderson said, adding: “When everyone is held responsible for their own conduct … it’s going to create a safer work environment. You have situations where the oil companies know they are not going to be held responsible.”

While large companies often exert the most control over safety on their well sites, there is no specific federal workplace safety standard that applies to the oil and gas industry, which allows producers to dodge severe penalties.

Major oil companies hire so-called company men, who are mostly independent contractors, to supervise drilling and other tasks. But it is difficult for OSHA to cite energy producers that do not have direct employees on their worksites.

“No Oasis employee on site,” an OSHA investigator wrote of the 2011 explosion, after noting that Oasis’ company man was an independent contractor. The company was not fined by the government regulator.

Only one energy operator that leases or owns wells has been cited by OSHA for worker deaths in North Dakota or Montana over the past five years, Reveal’s analysis found.

Bill or not, safety is the top priority for oil and gas companies in the Bakken, said Kari Cutting, vice president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, which represents 550 companies. “Any language written in a contract is not going to change where safety is in their priorities. A lot of these companies are very savvy and don’t want to be the headline in any news cycle.”

However, in the absence of comprehensive workplace safety regulations for oil and gas, OSHA frequently invokes standards written by the industry itself, including those from the American Petroleum Institute, to determine whether employees are being exposed to hazards.

For example, companies involved in drilling and well servicing activities such as hydraulic fracturing are exempt from federal workplace safety laws requiring machines and equipment that are undergoing maintenance or repairs to be locked and tagged to prevent injuries. The American Petroleum Institute recommends such practices but does not require them.

For some, this is a direct conflict of interest.

“This premise is counterintuitive to the intent of government oversight. The problem with this scenario is that API is the lobbying arm of the industry,” said Dennis Schmitz, a former oil worker who is the chairman of the MonDaks Safety Network, an organization in North Dakota that promotes safety in the oil fields.

“Over the past five or six years, there’s been a culture that’s been primarily focused on the production side,” Schmitz said. “There’s been a culture of gettin’ it done.”

***

Four months before Wegner died, Joseph Kronberg, a 52-year-old father of three, was electrocuted and died at another North Dakota well owned by Oasis Petroleum North America.

Oasis paid bonuses worth a combined $33,000 to 23 of Kronberg’s co-workers in part for working quickly—even after Kronberg died, internal company records show. At a well on the same site where Kronberg died and another nearby well, Oasis paid workers performance bonuses of $150 per day for drilling quickly, compared with $40 a day for drilling safely, records show.

“Safety is tantamount at Oasis,” company spokesman Kennedy said, but when pressed, he acknowledged that in the case of Kronberg’s co-workers, “bonuses should not have been paid, and we regret that they were.”

Internal Oasis documents show that company officials also have actively encouraged company men to set records.

“Nabors 149 just set a new record for Oasis on the Kline with Stoneham 18 following close behind on the Lynn. Congrats guys, keep it up!!” Laura Strong, an Oasis drilling engineer, wrote in a May 27, 2011, email to top company officials and company men.

Strong went on to call the record-holding well, Kline 5300 11-18H, the “Pace setter.”

It was the same well that exploded less than four months later, killing Wegner and Hardy.

In a lawsuit filed in January 2013 in federal court in North Dakota, lawyers for Kronberg’s widow, Margo, asserted that the company fosters a culture of recklessness in which the top imperative is speed.

Drilling and well servicing in the Bakken is high stakes, at an average cost of about $9 million per well, according the North Dakota Industrial Commission’s Department of Mineral Resources. The faster the oil gushes, the faster it gets to market to turn a profit, which averages $27 million per well.

That was true when oil was $100 a barrel. But now that oil has slipped to about $60 a barrel, that pressure has intensified, Schmitz said. In addition, with slimmer margins, he said several companies have fired their safety managers.

On their websites, many energy producers promote a “stop work” culture, in which workers are encouraged to speak out and stop the job if they deem something unsafe. But dozens of workers interviewed in the Bakken said that when they’re drilling, time is money.

Among the most common oil field injuries are amputations, broken bones and burns, which can severely disfigure workers and diminish their career prospects, said Eric Brooks, director of OSHA’s Bismarck Area Office in North Dakota. Despite the dangers, workers are drawn to the Bakken for hefty salaries, some in the six figures.

Jebadiah Stanfill says he will never return to the oil fields. “I always seem to think I still have those men’s skin on my hands,” he says. Credit: Adithya Sambamurthy/Reveal

Jebadiah Stanfill, an oil worker who was among the first to the scene of the 2011 explosion that killed Wegner and Hardy, says he will never return to the oil fields. Now a handyman living in Alabama, he said he still struggles with PTSD, often wearing black work gloves to prevent the sight of his hands from triggering memories of skin sliding off in his palms.

“I always seem to think I still have those men’s skin on my hands,” he said.

Bruce Jorgenson, a supervisor who raced over with Stanfill to aid the men hurt in the 2011 blowout, said he felt rattled when he returned to the site this past March to start drilling a new well.

“The anxiety came back. I relived every minute of it. I’ve been involved in other bad things in the oil field, and this one was the only one that gave me nightmares,” he said.

Even so, Jorgenson said he hadn’t discussed the explosion with his current crew. “I didn’t want them freaked out by it in any way. I wanted their mind on what we were doing.”

On a recent visit, the lone reminder of that day was a modest wooden cross bearing Wegner’s name near the well site. Trucks thundered past.

Data reporter Emmanuel Martinez contributed data research. This story was edited by Fernando Diaz and copy edited by Sheela Kamath and Nikki Frick.