I thought “Death in the Energy
Fields” was fair, thorough and careful (HCN, 4/2/07). Through
it, the many complex sides of what is going on were made clear to
the reader. All the same, I came away thinking that we have to do
better than this.
In most industrial settings, the kind
of safety shortfalls that were described here, and the lack of
meaningful penalties for carelessness were simply astounding. This
was like reading about the meatpacking industry in the early 20th
century that was exposed to a horrified public by Upton
Sinclair’s The Jungle.
I am a retiree from Los
Alamos National Laboratory. A series of injuries there, while
serious, were relatively minor in comparison to the horror stories
described in the HCN article on the oil and gas industry in the
intermountain West.
Nevertheless, Los Alamos National
Laboratory was essentially shut down for months, at a cost of
hundreds of millions of dollars to the U.S. taxpayer. The
University of California, which has operated Los Alamos for more
than 60 years as sole source contractor, was replaced by a new
management team, with transition costs and impacts on the workforce
of truly Herculean proportions.
How can we, then, as a
nation, tolerate such lack of oversight and accountability in one
major industry when we no longer accept it in almost all others?
(Perhaps hardrock mining and ocean fishing are other exceptions,
but I do not have access to quality safety data.) Even while making
it clear that there are serious problems of worker abuse of drugs
and alcohol which play a role in the injuries and fatalities that
occur, nevertheless, I cannot believe that we can or should accept
this situation.
Kenneth Alan Collins
Santa Fe, New Mexico
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline “The Jungle” of the West.
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