Here in Oklahoma, we depend on construction workers. We depend on them to build our homes, our shopping centers, office buildings, and medical centers. It's a physically demanding job and, as a result, the number of on-the-job accidents tends to be higher than other industries. Recent OSHA data reveals that 21.4% of all on-the-job fatalities in 2016 were [...]
One of the most serious injuries a person can sustain is a spinal cord injury. This type of physical trauma can result in paraplegia, an inability to move the lower part of the body, or quadriplegia, which is the inability to move the body at all. With any spinal cord injury, even if the patient recovers some movement [...]
Injured oil-field workers can sue well operators for injuries suffered on a drilling rig, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous decision on March 13, 2018. In December 2013, an oil field worker was hurt on a rig near El Reno and filed suit. That lawsuit led to a State Supreme Court ruling that recently led to [...]
Truck rollover accidents can be some of the most deadly crashes on the highway. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) states that an average of four cargo tank truck rollovers happen every day in the United States. And, many of these incidents are preventable, as they occur due to driver negligence or poor truck maintenance. In a [...]
On Monday January 22, 2018, five workers died in an explosion on an oil drilling rig in Oklahoma, which is being considered the deadliest oil and gas accident since the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 which claimed 11 lives. The oil rig that exploded is owned by Patterson-UTI, a Houston-bases drilling and hydraulic fracturing company with an abysmal [...]
As spring starts in earnest and more families take to the highways for vacations and road trips, the risk of car accidents goes up. You may not be aware that, currently in Oklahoma, children between the ages of eight and 13 can ride in the backs of vehicles without having to wear a seatbelt. A bill recently passed [...]
When truck drivers are exhausted, yet continue to drive an 80,000-lb. machine along highways, everyone is put at risk – even the truckers themselves. The mission of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is to oversee the safety of our highways by governing commercial vehicles like trucks that transport good and busses that transport people. Because fatigued [...]
Every workplace carries with it some degree of risk of injury for workers, but some industries, such as oil and gas extraction, are more dangerous than others. PBS News reports that, on average, one oil field worker dies about very six weeks on the job in the Bakken fields, which tend to get a lot of press. But [...]
Struck-by injuries are one of the most common injuries for construction workers. Throughout the United States at roughly 252,000 constructions sites, nearly 6.5 million people work on an average day. The fatal injury rate for the construction industry is one of the highest of all industries, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) of the U.S. [...]
A CBS News story reports that prescriptions for OxyContin (oxycodone), Vicoprofen (hydrocodone) and morphine have quadrupled from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 300 million in 2014. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that opioids killed more than 33,000 people in 2015, which is more than any year on record. One of the side-effects of [...]
