Eagle Ford Shale, economic boom, and fatigue-driven truck accidents

South Texas truck accident lawyers: The oil and gas industry has been booming the last few years in the 19 counties of the Eagle Ford Shale development in South Texas. Since about 2008, while most industries and economic segments have declines in the state and nationwide, Eagle Ford Shale developers have added thousands of trucking jobs to their payrolls and still more trucking jobs remain to be filled.

And the truck driving jobs pay well. A starting salary can be around $50,000. But the truck drivers earn their money and sometimes pay with their lives. The oil field trucks are exempt from many of the safety regulations that govern other truckers on U.S. roads.

Companies commonly ask their drivers to drive after long shifts that might last around 20 hours. The truck drivers pilot huge, heavy commercial trucks often on narrow, rural roads never designed for extensive heavy truck traffic. Several fatal truck crashes have occurred when these truck drivers were driving themselves and their fellow employees home from the field after long shifts of 20 hours or more. Our South Texas truck accident lawyers point out that in some cases, fatigue got the better of the drivers and they suddenly veered from the roads and crashed.

The Eagle Ford Shale region contains about 270 operating oil and gas rigs. The primary extraction activity involves fracking. And fracking requires huge infusions of water and sand, which must be trucked in. Then there are the heavy trucks that haul drilling equipment. And other trucks that haul away the oil and gas. The endless stream of truck traffic, with drivers often in a hurry and/or fatigued, has some residents fearful.

Until recent years, the 19 counties of the Eagle Ford Shale region were somewhat sleepy and the narrow roads carried only occasional traffic. But the local population has boomed along with the oil and gas development. The industry has added huge numbers of jobs and tax dollars to the Texas economy. Our South Texas truck accident lawyers note that the local infrastructures haven’t caught up yet with the economic boom. And the number of fatal truck crashes is growing at an alarming rate.

McMullen County, one of the dominant locations for Eagle Ford Shale extraction activity, has seen a 1,050% increase in the number of fatal traffic accidents since 2008. The majority of these accidents involve commercial trucks related to the local oil and gas activity. And a substantial number of the fatal truck crashes can be linked to truck driver fatigue.

Our South Texas truck accident lawyers emphasize that chances are that even with a huge expenditure on local roads and infrastructure, those alarming numbers will continue to rise. A boom in the domestic oil and gas industry means that hundreds of thousands new wells are expected to be drilled nationwide over coming years. And the Eagle Ford Shale development stands as the most productive, all things considered. So the region will probably see more than its share of hose new rigs and the large numbers of additional trucks required to service them. An average well generates between 500 and 1,500 additional commercial truck trips.

The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention calls insufficient amounts of sleep a public health epidemic increasingly linked to fatal truck crashes and work accidents generally. The U.S. NHTSA has issued a report called Drowsy Driving and Automobile Crashes. The report links insufficient sleep to impairment of drivers’ ability to adequately perform the complex tasks associated with driving. The NHTSA report specifically links driver fatigue with impaired reaction times, attention to the road, vigilance, and information processing, as well to vastly heightened risks for falling asleep at the wheel and veering off course into a crash.

For a variety of reasons, professional truck drivers also tend to experience sleep apnea more than the general population. Sleep apnea only adds to the potential for driver fatigue and fatal truck crashes. For more information, read our South Texas truck accident lawyers’ in-depth article on the problem of sleep apnea in truck drivers. It’s linked to this page.