At 2:30 a.m., Michael Glenn “Tuby” Tramell, 39, of Electra had been called out to repair a blown 440-volt fuse on a pump jack unit in an open field.
He and two other workers were in the field.
“It was pouring rain,” she said, and Tramell said his co-workers were afraid of the lightning.
“As anybody knows, you don’t change a fuse in the rain,” she said.
It was only a little later that his co-workers found Tramell lying beside the pump unit, she said.
His employer, W.G. Operating Inc. in Electra, and investigators for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are trying to determine what happened. OSHA is still investigating, according to an agency spokesman. W.G. Operating didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
A death certificate says Tramell died of “low-voltage electrocution.” Vargas said she expects an OSHA report on the accident in early October.
Tramell’s story is all too common in Texas.
Workplace deaths have declined across the country, but they remain stubbornly high in Texas and the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Texas led the nation with 461 total worker deaths in 2010, the most recent year for which complete data is available. Eighty-two of those were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The Texas total was about 10 percent of the national count of 4,547 and far ahead of No. 2 California, which reported 302 deaths, according to figures from the U.S.
Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Highway deaths are the No. 1 cause of workplace fatalities nationally, and Texas’ vast highway system could be a contributing factor.
The state’s healthier construction and drilling industries — two sectors with high injury rates — also play into the numbers.
But many blame the state’s lax workplace rules. A case in point: the deaths of two men dismantling a crane in July at the University of Texas at Dallas. An inquiry into that incident found that Texas has minimal training requirements and proficiency standards for crane operators.
State experts hesitate to characterize the tally here as high.
“Workplace deaths in Texas are a sawtooth pattern,” said Karen Puckett, director of outreach and workplace safety for the workers’ compensation division of the Texas Department of Insurance. “It’s hard to detect any trend.”
Puckett’s agency is the state body charged with promoting worker safety. She says it’s unfair to cast Texas as a dangerous state without looking at per-capita injury rates in individual industries.
Puckett said that comparing Texas, which has booming construction, oil field and logging operations, to, say, Connecticut, where the insurance industry is a major employer and with only moderate construction and virtually no logging or oil field industries, creates a distortion.
“When you only look at the numbers in Texas, you aren’t getting the entire picture,” she said.
U.S. deaths down
Nationwide, workplace fatalities declined 16 percent from 2003 to 2010, from 5,575 to 4,690. During most of the 1990s, that figure was more than 6,000 per year.
The Texas workplace death toll hit a high of 528 in 2007, when construction was at a peak.
OSHA, the federal agency responsible for workplace safety, has increased construction workplace inspections 60 percent since 2003 and has focused on fall hazards, cave-in dangers, traffic control, distracted driving and heat-related injuries.
Ken Nibarger is a safety specialist with the United Steel Workers Union who investigated the aftermath of the BP Texas City refinery explosion. He says the rise of the temporary worker is a contributing factor to worker injuries and deaths. Those workers aren’t on site long enough to become familiar with the dangers of a certain plant or job.
“Texas is a great example of the boom-and-bust economy," a lawyer said.
Companies learn to hustle while business is good. “It breeds that culture that says ‘We’ll deal with safety later.’”
“Maintenance is a cost. Training is a cost.”
Making work safer
In construction and manufacturing, OSHA seems to have made inroads in reducing deaths.
It has also targeted the oil and gas industry and health care.
All those industries have seen positive trends in recent years, though the declining number of construction deaths could also be related to less activity overall.
Construction-site deaths in North Texas averaged 27.2 a year from 2003 through 2007, according to BLS data. From 2006 through 2010, they declined to 20.6.
“Last year, we had the fewest ever,” John Hermanson, OSHA’s regional administrator in Dallas, said of the 15 construction deaths in North Texas.
“We started enhanced construction inspections in 2009, which seemed to have a positive impact on awareness and in the numbers,” Hermanson said.
Industry efforts
Local efforts have paid off in some industries.
The Cargill Inc. plant in Waco, which processes more than 3 million pounds of turkey a week, has decreased its workplace incidents and injuries from 60 reportable incidents per 100 workers per year to fewer than 3. The industry average for poultry processing is 5.9, down from 8.1 in 2003.
The plant trained safety observers to spend time on the processing floor.
“Each month we observe 350 to 400 workers,” said plant manager Wesley Carter. “That sharpens us.”
Those kinds of efforts pay off, said Puckett at the Department of Insurance.
“There are several hidden costs to injuries,” Puckett said. “There’s loss of production time, loss of equipment oftentimes, the retraining of new employees and lower morale.” At Cargill, annual worker turnover has decreased by half, down from as much as 25 percent seven years ago to about 15 percent now.
“It’s much more desirable to prevent incidents than it is to deal with them,” said Mike Martin, Cargill’s director of communications in Wichita, Kan.
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Source: Dallas News (Bowen, 9/15)
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