A report by a labor group said oil and gas workers in North Dakota are six times more likely to be killed in workplace accidents than their peers in other states.
In North Dakota, where inexperienced workers are flooding in, 104 out of every 100,000 oil, gas and mining workers died of job-related injuries in 2012, a report from the AFL-CIO labor federation said.
North Dakota had the highest fatality rate at 17.7 per 100,000 workers across all sectors, the AFL-CIO said.
The report cited data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
North Dakota’s petroleum industry employed 40,856 people in 2011, up from 5,051 in 2005, a year before the oilfield expansion began with techniques such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, Bloomberg said.
“To support the surge, inexperienced workers have entered the industry, in some cases without proper training, said Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO director of safety and health.”
Carlton Carroll, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, told Bloomberg the oil and gas industry stresses the need for safe workplaces.
In 2012, 4,628 workers died on the job while about 50,000 died from occupational diseases, the AFL-CIO report said.
“The fatality rate has been mostly flat since 2008,” according to Bloomberg.
