They have called it the worst oil drilling accident in nearly a decade, and the experts say it was preventable:
The 2018 explosion and fire outside Quinton, Okla., killed five people, making it the deadliest accident in the drilling industry since 2010, when a BP oil rig exploded and killed 11 workers in the Gulf of Mexico. The investigation marks the first time the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which is an advisory agency similar to the National Transportation Safety Board, has gotten involved with an onshore drilling accident.
Tougher oversight could have prevented a series of lapses leading up to the rig explosion, the safety board said, although the companies involved dispute some of the board's conclusions. Alarms that could have warned the crew about the impending blowout were turned off, and the rig's crew overlooked signs that large amounts of gas were pushing into the well.
The blowout was "completely preventable," and the safety board plans to monitor the drilling industry, Kristen Kalinowski, CSB's interim executive director, said at a press conference in Oklahoma City.
"We're concerned about future accidents," Kalinowski said. "This is a very serious incident — five people lost their lives. That's a threshold we cannot ignore."
The United States has been in a drilling boom for more than a decade, and the numbers of injuries and death among oil-field workers has remained stubbornly high. There were 948 land-based drilling rigs working in the United States as of June 7, according to industry data.
This is all too common in the oilfields, as companies can skate by with substandard safety practices for a long time until the effects of that actually play out in an accident and a verdict against the company for negligent practices after long hard work in a jury trial by attorneys.
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