Industry officials say the cost of automatic tank gauging is often prohibitive, especially for smaller companies. Installing off-site gauging equipment could cost about $2,000 per tank, said Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs for Western Energy Alliance.

But the system infrastructure — which includes wiring, cables, monitors and probes to capture the data accurately — could drive the cost of switching to an automated system to $50,000 to $60,000 per tank, Sgamma said.

“It could easily put a producer out of business,” she said.

The industry’s opposition to automatic tank gauging is “insane,” said Gary Wilson, general manager of TankLogix of Odessa, Texas.

Wilson’s company makes automatic oil measurement equipment, and he says the push to make such equipment uniform across the oil industry has been maddening.

“It’s just painful to get any kind of movement on this, and we have been beating this to death for years,” Wilson said. “If they all went to tank level sensors, it would eliminate truck drivers having to do this and a whole lot of deaths.”

Wilson would not provide a cost breakdown of TankLogix’s equipment.

A BLM report estimates it would cost the oil and gas industry “about $558,000 annually” to allow the new form of tank gauging on federal land, a figure the industry claims is way too low.

“These costs include expenses associated with upgrading or replacing equipment, increased sampling and inspection, restrapping thousands of tanks, modifying thousands of tanks to make them vapor-tight and developing safety protocols for gauging now-vapor-filled tanks,” according to an industry analysis.

Officials concede remote sensors can be costly, especially to smaller companies, and complicated to install, said Eric Esswein, senior industrial hygienist with the CDC and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

“Engineering controls can be very expensive to purchase, install, operate and maintain, but they are first in the hierarchy of controls for a very good reason,” Esswein said. “They can limit or even eliminate exposures.”

Freemyer’s case shows the changing perception of the dangers of tank gauging. His bosses claimed he died because of his health. He suffered from poorly controlled Type II diabetes, high blood pressure and “dangerously elevated” triglycerides.

The autopsy also found a 90 percent blockage in his right coronary artery and blamed his death on his health problems.

Those health woes were considered culprits in an incident three weeks before his death. He was found by a co-worker with his gas monitor beeping, leaning over a hatch with his hands empty, but looking like he was trying to reel in his gauge.

Now or Never’s operations manager, Lee Mulkey, took Freemyer to a hospital — and he was cleared to work the next day. Mulkey later testified in a court hearing that he figured Freemyer became disoriented because of a diabetic episode and that he should have eaten something.

But Freemyer’s family refused to believe his health was at fault for his death — a finding that disqualified them from receiving workers’ compensation — and took Now or Never and its insurer to administrative court at a cost of $25,000.

Wilkerson, who performed the original autopsy, later re-examined Freemyer’s gas monitoring data and toxicology results and amended his findings.

“At first, I didn’t understand what the data meant,” Wilkerson said.

He later concluded Freemyer died from a combination of toxic fumes and low oxygen.

“The device he was wearing indicated he was in a low-oxygen environment,” Wilkerson said. “That, coupled with hydrocarbon gases, all made sure he wouldn’t survive what he was doing.”

After a lengthy fight, a Colorado administrative court judge ruled last year that Freemyer’s widow would get $530 per week for life. The judge agreed with medical experts that her husband breathed in a toxic cloud of hydrocarbon vapors that killed him.

In his July 2015 ruling, Judge Peter Cannici said Freemyer’s job duties and work environment “aggravated, accelerated or combined with his pre-existing coronary artery disease to cause his death.”

Brett Busch, Freemyer’s lawyer, is convinced the ruling will alter attitudes among oil companies.

“This case will be forcing a lot of oil companies to change what they have been doing as far safeguarding their employees,” Busch said. ”Really, about the only thing they told my client to do was to stand upwind.”