Dustin Bergsing was young and fit, a bull rider from Montana. On a cold night in January 2012, he climbed to the catwalk atop a 20-foot tall crude oil storage tank on a well pad in North Dakota’s Bakken field. His job was to pop open the hatch and drop a rope inside to measure the oil level.
Just after midnight, a co-worker found him dead, slumped on the catwalk.
People suspected Dustin had died from inhaling hydrogen sulfide, a known oilfield killer that can be deadly after just a few minutes. But an autopsy showed none of that in his system.
Instead, his blood contained hydrocarbons such as benzene, ethane and butane – compounds that are in natural gas. Few people had heard of oil workers dying out in the open from inhaling petroleum gases. But because Dustin’s case caught the eye of an investigative reporter who teamed with a doctor, four years later oilfield hydrocarbon vapor poisoning is a known occupational hazard.
Despite this, thousands of workers are exposed daily as a routine part of their jobs because of outdated federal regulations that make it difficult to use technology to get workers off of tanks.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigated Dustin’s death and closed the case because Dustin didn’t have any hydrogen sulfide in his body. “A citation could not be supported for work-related exposure,” the agency reported, declining to fine Dustin’s employer.
Later that year, Mike Soraghan, a reporter who covers oil and gas for EnergyWire, an online business publication, came across Dustin’s case while working on a story about oilfield fatalities.
“I just remember reading through (the OSHA report) and thinking, ‘That’s it? A 21-year old kid just sort of dies out in the middle of nowhere and sort of nothing happens?’”
In 2012, the year Dustin died, oilfields were seven times more dangerous than the average U.S. industry. Still, it is unusual for a healthy 21-year-old to drop dead on a well pad.
Soraghan and a doctor helped solve the deaths of eight other oilfield workers, including three in Colorado. That doctor, Bob Harrison, is a clinical professor at University of California San Francisco who specializes in occupational and environmental medicine.
Soraghan pulled Harrison aside at an oil and gas safety conference in 2013 and told him about Dustin’s case.
First, petroleum gases had been found in Dustin’s blood, which suggested to Harrison that Dustin’s death was work-related.
Second, he had never heard of an oil worker dying that way.
And third, he didn’t believe the rumors that Dustin was trying to deliberately get high off the petroleum gases.
“Frankly, there are a lot easier ways to get high than going out in your long johns at 1:30 in the morning, in North Dakota, to gauge an oil tank,” Harrison said.
Harrison was convinced that, similar to hydrogen sulfide, you could die after just a few minutes of breathing high concentrations of petroleum gases. He suspected Dustin had passed out when he opened the hatch and was engulfed by a cloud of petroleum gas, which displaced the oxygen in the air and caused him to stop breathing.
More cases discovered
Meanwhile, Soraghan was digging through OSHA databases and media reports. He came across a 30-year-old man who died in 2010 in Montana in nearly identical circumstances – alone, collapsed on the catwalk on top of a crude oil storage tank on an oil pad.
Harrison contacted the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and told them he suspected a pattern. Their epidemiologists searched OSHA databases for death cases they may have missed, and they began to closely monitor new fatalities.
“It’s not very common that you identify a new occupational health issue that’s potentially fatal,” said Kyla Retzer, an epidemiologist with NIOSH.
When NIOSH identified four deaths related to petroleum gases by May of 2014, it issued an alert asking the public for help. By the end of 2014, NIOSH identified nine workers who had died working around crude oil tanks, including the Colorado three and three in North Dakota. In 2015, the agency updated its alert, partnered with the oil industry to warn workers directly, completed a peer-reviewed study and, in February 2016, along with OSHA, issued a more forceful warning.
As for Dustin Bergsing, his company was not fined; his family settled a wrongful death lawsuit for a “substantial” sum.
Regulations increase risks
One reason workers are exposed is that, under federal oil and gas regulations, oil companies are effectively required to manually measure crude oil.
Ryan Ehlis is one of those workers. He is a truck driver who hauls crude oil around the Bakken oilfield in North Dakota. Before he fills his truck, he must climb the oil storage tanks and open the hatch. He must measure the height of the oil in the tank before and after he fills his truck – that’s how he knows how much oil he’s pumped.
He tries to avoid exposure by standing upwind of the gas, or opening the hatch and letting the tank vent before he takes his measurements – workarounds he learned on the job. But sometimes it doesn’t work.
“If there’s gas in your face, you kind of hold your breath,” and step in toward the tank hatch to take measurements, before stepping back into fresh air and repeating the process. “But you can’t avoid it entirely.”
‘Senseless exposures’
Dennis Schmitz calls these “senseless exposures.” The oil and gas safety trainer knows from personal experience that workers do not have to be put in danger to measure the height of crude oil in a tank or take a few oil samples. In Canada and in the U.S. offshore oil and gas industry, it is common to use automatic tank gauging technology or other types of remote measurement.
Schmitz knows because he used to work as a marine cargo inspector measuring crude oil tanks both onshore and offshore. “I have felt that buckling of the knees, and the lightheadedness, literally puking off the side of the tank,” he said. “And here’s the odd thing. That’s when we were onshore. When I was offshore, I wasn’t exposed … I never even questioned, why is it that I don’t breathe the vapors (offshore) and I do breathe them (onshore)?”
Two government agencies regulate oil measurement on federal land onshore and offshore (state regulators are in charge on private and state lands) – the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (formerly known as Minerals Management Service – MMS), an agency created in 2010 in the reorganization that followed the BP oil spill and Deepwater Horizon disaster.
BLM rules outdated
Of the two agencies, the BLM is widely known as having the more outdated rules. According to a 2010 Government Accountability Office report (one of many reports that condemned BLM’s antiquated oil measurement rules), the former MMS updated its regulations yearly, so they reflected current technology.
“In contrast,” the report notes, “BLM last revised its oil and gas measurement regulations in 1989. As a result, BLM’s regulations do not reflect current industry … technologies and standards.”
For Gary Wilson, general manager of TankLogix, a company that makes automatic oil measurement equipment, “It’s maddening.”
“We have a solution that could be ubiquitously deployed, and getting a change has proven to be extremely difficult,” he said. TankLogix’s systems eliminate the need for workers to climb on top of oil tanks, but the BLM hasn’t OK’d it.
Emily Guerin covers North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield for Inside Energy, a public media collaborative including Rocky Mountain PBS News. Formerly, she was a correspondent at High Country News, a magazine that reports on energy and environmental issues in the American West. The Durango Herald brings you this report in partnership with Rocky Mountain PBS News. Learn more at rmpbs.org/news.
