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Oil Rig Blast Renews USW Call for Tougher Safety Regs
The United Steelworkers (USW) again called for an overhaul of health and safety within the oil industry following the explosion yesterday on an oil drilling rig about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the fourth oil industry incident in a little more than two weeks that has killed or seriously injured workers.
The blast occurred just a week before Workers Memorial Day, which honors workers killed or injured on the job and also highlights the need for tough and effective workplace safety laws.
According to the latest reports, 11 oil rig workers remain missing, 17 were injured and air-lifted to hospitals and four remain in critical condition. The other 126 workers who were onboard the Transocean Ltd. oil platform escaped safely. The rig, about twice the size of a football field, sank this afternoon.
USW Vice President Gary Beevers, who heads the union’s oil sector, says, “While this is a dangerous industry,”
there are too many workers losing their lives. How many more workers have to pay the price for the industry’s lack of a safety culture? The industry is long overdue for a complete overhaul of its health and safety provisions.
On April 2, six workers were killed, including five USW members, in an explosion and fire at Tesoro’s Anacortes, Wash., refinery. On April 14, three workers were injured, two seriously, in a fire at ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge, La., refinery. One worker was killed April 19 in a crane incident on the Motiva Enterprises expansion project in Port Arthur, Texas.
In a recent blog post, USW President Leo W. Gerard called for stronger workplace health and safety laws with tougher enforcement. Gerard wrote that both the Tesoro refinery and the Massey Energy Co.’s Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, where 29 coal miners were killed in an April 5 explosion, had long and troubling records of safety violations.
America must introduce new factors into that computation to protect the lives and limbs of workers who produce the energy on which this country depends. One factor is larger safety violation penalties—fines and shutdowns costly enough to outstrip profitability.
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For additional details and perspectives, this article from the World Socialist Web Site can be linked here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/oilr-a22.shtml
Eleven workers missing after Louisiana oil rig explosion
By Tom Eley
22 April 2010
Eleven workers were still missing in the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday night, 24 hours after an explosion on a British Petroleum (BP) oil rig 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Seventeen workers were seriously injured, and three remained in critical condition at the time of writing. The remaining 98 of the rig’s 116-person workforce were being transported by boat to safety.
…
In his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised to usher in “transparency” and stiffen regulatory penalties for corporate abuse of safety and environmental rules. As the Upper Big Branch mine disaster reveals, however, there has in fact been no change in the enforcement of safety violations under Obama.
Obama has also promoted a vast expansion of offshore drilling as a cornerstone of his energy policy, including ending a moratorium on drilling off the Atlantic coast shelf stretching from Delaware to southern Florida, and extending drilling to sensitive areas in Alaskan waters.
This profit-driven pursuit of deep-sea oil is a notoriously dangerous. Since 2001 there have been 69 deaths, 1,349 injuries and 858 fires or explosions on oil rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico alone, according to the International Association of Drilling Contractors. These are extremely high injury and death rates when one considers that there are only 35,000 oil workers in the Gulf at any given time.
As is the case in West Virginia, residents of the poverty-stricken Gulf Coast have little choice but to take work on the oil rigs. This is the same region that was abandoned by the Bush administration when Hurricane Katrina hit with devastating consequences in 2005. In spite of campaign promises, Obama has done nothing to alleviate conditions of dire poverty and destroyed infrastructure.