Jose Gonzalez* wore no mask, despite the toxic chemicals he worked with in the oil field.
“One leak, and no one will hear from you again,” he said.
He shrugged. At 31, with three children at home, he faced constant risks in his job as a truck driver in the Permian Basin, both from the chemicals and the relentless pace of the roads where he and other drivers pull 24-hour shifts driving the ingredients and products of fracking — sand, cement, fracking fluid, produced water, oil — from wellhead to storage depot and back again.
It didn’t pay, he said, “to think too deeply about the danger.”
The Permian Basin, a region spanning west Texas and eastern New Mexico, is the once and future heart of the greatest oil and gas boom in American history, a frenzy of production triggered by the introduction of new technologies like fracking.
The boom has marked a return to prominence — and prosperity — for a region whose resources once helped the Allies win World War II but that was abandoned by major oil companies decades later amid the great bust of the 1980s.
For President Trump and Texas’s Republican leadership, that outflow offers a prospect of American “energy dominance.”
But the region’s prospering oil industry is all too frequently shadowed by injury and death: About 30 Texas workers per year, more than two per month, die of poison gas, explosions, blunt force trauma or vehicle crashes. In October, a Permian Basin worker was engulfed in flames. In December, another was killed by flying debris after a pressure valve explosion.
* The drivers’ names have been changed for the purpose of anonymity.
Read more of this part one in a four-part series from my colleague Saul Elbein at TheHill.com.
