Safety in natural resources extraction: industry trends in occupational fatalities.

• Author: McKay, Brian
• Position: SAFETY

Natural resources play an important role in the economy of Alaska. According to Scott Goldsmith, professor emeritus of economics at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) of the University of Alaska Anchorage, the extraction of natural resources accounts for approximately 66 percent of Alaska's economy. Professor Goldsmith describes the Alaska economy as a three legged stool: one leg representing the oil and gas sector contributing about 31 percent; another leg representing government, which contributes approximately 35 percent to the economy; and the final leg representing all other resources, which includes the fishing, logging, mining, transportation, and tourism industries, approximately 34 percent.

The 49th state is home to a non-seasonally adjusted workforce of about 340,000, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development; as many as 127,000 of these jobs are related to the oil industry and its associated services, according to the Resource Development Council for Alaska. Similarly, fishing and its associated activities have historically provided about 60,000 seasonal jobs in Alaska (or approximately 8,061 monthly full-time equivalent jobs), mining has provided approximately 4,600 jobs, while logging supplies a modest 300 or more additional jobs in Alaska, down from approximately 4,600 jobs in the early 1990s.

With well over half of the state's employment coming from the extractive resources industry, and much more coming from the support of these industries, these jobs are here to stay and are the lifeblood of this state. In other words, Alaskans make money the old fashioned way; they work for it, digging, drilling, cutting, processing, and transporting in some of the harshest of conditions ever dreamt of in a reality TV show. As a matter of fact, many Alaska industries provide occupational injury voyeurism for many in the "safe states" through television shows including The Deadliest Catch (fishing), Ice Road Truckers (transportation), Bering Sea Gold (mining), and a few others, all with a common theme: working in Alaska is hard and it is dangerous.

So dangerous, in fact, that there are trends in occupational fatalities in Alaska and there are key occupations contributing to the most risk at work.

Trends

Using data from 2011 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), the overall occupationally-related fatality rate in the United States was 3.5 deaths per...