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While trying to get a drilling rig running in Snyder, Texas Brandon Garrett was sliced in half by a motorized spool of steel cable, adding yet another fatality to an already dangerous profession. Garrett, who worked for Patterson-UTI Energy, was a rig-crew floor hand working on Easter Sunday, helping four other crew members repair a plugged drill bit on a rig about 70 miles northeast of Lubbock in the Texas Panhandle. A supervisor split the men into two groups performing…

A huge explosion in rural Johnson County, about an hour southwest of Dallas, TX, killed one worker and injured seven others last month, reports say. The blast, which involved a massive explosion and enormous fireball that went several hundred feet into the air, occurred when a utility worker accidentally hit a large natural gas line near Cleburne, reports say. The identity of the deceased worker was not released. The worker, who was reportedly riding in a truck, was drilling holes…

An Ohio grand jury has indicted a southwest Ohio company, United Oil Recovery Services Inc. and its environmental health and safety manager, with involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, criminal endangering and environmental violations in the 2008 death of a treatment plant worker who authorities say was overcome by toxic gas. The company president and plant manager and three officials are also charged with endangering worker safety, report say.. Reports say sodium hydrosulfide, used to speed up a wastewater treatment process at…

A Texas jury awarded $82.5 million in damages to the family of a man who died in a 2007 explosion at Houston-based Hanover Compressions L.P., a natural gas processing plant in Hood County. The company, which has since been renamed Exterran Energy Solutions L.P., constructed, engineered and installed the natural gas processing plant that the jury said was grossly negligent in the death of 27-year-old Joshua Wade Petrie, an employee of Fort Worth, Texas-based Quicksilver. Gas workers have enough risks…

Pablo Garcia, a 53-year-old longshoreman from Lakewood, CA, was struck and killed as he worked at Terminal Island in Long Beach, California last month. This marks the third such fatality in local ports since April of 2008. The Saturday evening death at the Evergreen facility again broaches the issues of safety and on local docks. Local Long Beach officials reportedly are pressing for vehicular manslaughter charges against another longshoreman who plowed his yard tractor – allegedly drunk – into trucker…