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Inside Energy: Dark Side of the Boom part 4

INTRO: If you’re a fan of the reality TV show Deadliest Catch, you’ve probably witnessed a scene like this sometime in the last ten seasons:

(:06s) “ Man overboard! Man overboard dammit!”

As the show’s name suggests, crab fishing in the Bering Sea is extremely dangerous. But in the last 15 years, it’s become much safer, in large part thanks to collaboration between industry, scientists and regulators. In part four of our series Dark Side of the Boom, Wyoming Public Radio’s Stephanie Joyce examines whether there are lessons that the oil and gas industry could learn from the crab industry’s safety gains…

Skipper Rip Carlton has had plenty of close calls during his nearly 40 years as a crab fisherman. One of the more memorable was the time he watched a man almost drown.

“He was on the side of the stack, probably 25 feet up and the wave came up and took him right off. And I could not believe what I had just seen.”

The crew managed to get the man back onto the boat -- and then almost killed him again.

“He’d been in the water I don’t know, two or three minutes. He was definitely hypothermic. First thing we did is take his clothes off, throw him in a hot shower, and give him a shot of whiskey. That’s exact opposite of what you should do!”

But Carlton says in the 80s and 90s, safety wasn’t so much an afterthought as an absent thought for the crab fleet.

“Back then we had no safety training, we didn’t have life raft drills, some boats didn’t even have survival suits that can help you stay alive if you go into the water.”

“The fisheries were experiencing a fatality rate of seven hundred and seventy fatalities per 100,000 full-time fishermen, which is… astronomical.”

That’s Mary O’Connor, the deputy director of the Alaska Pacific division of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health or NIOSH. By comparison, the worst oil and gas fatality rate in the nation right now, in North Dakota, is 10 times lower. O’Connor says it was clear something had to done. So, NIOSH tried what’s called the public health approach. The first step: getting information. For commercial fishing, NIOSH asked the Coast Guard to share detailed reports about vessel accidents.

“They found that at least eight of the twelve vessels that were lost were en route from crab grounds were loaded.”

Overloaded, to be precise -- with too many crab pots. In freezing spray conditions, that was causing the vessels to capsize and sink. So, then came step two: intervention. NIOSH shared the information with the Coast Guard, which started mandating dockside safety inspections.

“If they were compliant, that was all good and well. If they weren’t compliant, then they weren’t allowed to leave the dock.”

The results were dramatic. While 73 Bering sea crab fishermen died in the decade prior to the safety checks, 12 have died since then. There are other factors that also played a role, but Rip Carlton, the skipper, says having more information and more people looking over the industry’s shoulder changed the culture of safety aboard vessels.

“You’re at the dinner table and you talk about the danger -- what’s out there, what you guys should be looking at. ….So the guys keep being reminded about safe practices and things to do and not to do.”

But can the public health approach - information followed by a crackdown - be successfully applied to oil and gas? Kyla Retzer is the head of NIOSH’s oil and gas safety program. NIOSH can’t force intervention, but it can give regulators information. The problem -- there’s no Coast Guard gathering oil and gas fatality information, no Mine Safety and Health Administration.

“Sometimes there’s very, very little information about the event. So, in order to use data and use this public health approach, we have to figure out a way to get more information about the circumstances.”

And Retzer says not only is data limited -- so is access.

“It is a little bit ….more challenging to get onto oil field worksites …. you know …. anyone could walk onto a harbor and talk to commercial fishermen.”

Still, Retzer and her colleagues are working on developing an approach for oil and gas that follows the Alaska model -- and she’s hopeful that it will work.

“People in this industry work really hard in dangerous environments with heavy equipment. And they deserve the right to have every step taken to keep them safe.”

TAG: Inside Energy is a public media collaboration focusing on America’s energy issues.

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