The oil industry is inherently dangerous — and those dangers are vividly illustrated in the many newsworthy accidents that have been reported across the globe. From a blowout, explosion and fire on a Brazilian platform in 1984 that killed 42 workers to a 1988 oil rig blast in the North Sea that claimed 167 lives to the 2010 explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that resulted in the deaths of 11 workers1, oil industry incidents are often spectacular in nature, deserving of the description, “disaster.”
While the media coverage that these events attract is understandable, it tends to deflect attention from the fact that the greatest cause of fatalities in the oil and gas extraction industry in the U.S. is something far more commonplace: traffic accidents.