Wyoming

By staff - Center for Western Priorities, July 7, 2016

The 2016 armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon provided the American public with a ringside seat to a disturbing trend on U.S. public lands: extremist and militia groups using America’s national forests, parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges to advance their anti-government beliefs.

But these far right-wing organizations are not operating in a vacuum. To the contrary, the armed insurrection in Oregon and Nevada before—led by Ammon Bundy and the Bundy family—share the same foundations as land transfer schemes promoted by some elected leaders in states throughout the West. Both rely upon a philosophy based in vehement anti-government ideologies, both have connections to organizations that espouse armed resistance, both employ pseudo-legal theories to justify their actions, and both use scholarly support from conspiracy theorists and discredited academics.

Our nation’s parks and network of public lands are one of our finest democratic achievements. Americans see management of public lands as one of the things our government does best. But over the last four years, politicians and special interest groups in 11 Western states and in Congress have tried to seize many of these places and turn them over to state and private control.

The elected officials supporting state seizure of U.S. public lands couch their arguments carefully, but our research shows their close associations to extreme individuals, groups, and ideology characterized by antigovernment paranoia and a pseudo-legal approach to the Constitution.

Since the beginning of 2015, 54 land seizure bills have been introduced into Western states, including Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. At least 22 state legislators with direct connections to anti-government ideologies or extremist groups were the primary sponsors on 29 of those bills.

Sitting at the hub of the movement and functioning as the bridge between extremism and the mainstream political debate are Utah Rep. Ken Ivory, Montana Sen. Jennifer Fielder, and their non-profit, the American Lands Council. A close analysis of Rep. Ivory and Sen. Fielder’s activities, and those of other active land seizure proponents at the state level, shows how these efforts are a functional part of an aggressive anti-government movement that will grow more potent if reasonable Americans don’t take action.

Read the report (PDF).

By Dustin Bleizeffer - Wyofile, October 4, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Web editor's note: This story bears an uncomfortabvle resemblance to the death of Louisiana-Pacific mill worker, R Fortunado Reyes, on September 14, 1989, detailed here.

Brett Samuel Collins, 20, was working his last few days at a construction job near Sheridan before heading back to college classes when a trackhoe bucket struck him in the head. He died Aug. 20, 2012.

“He was finally settling down and thinking school was the answer,” said his grandmother, Mary Jane Collins, of Sheridan. Up to that point, Brett Collins had worked several seasons for the U.S. Forest Service, requiring him to miss fall semesters. He’d attended two spring semesters at Sheridan College. “The construction company job was so he could go to school for the whole year,” Mary Jane Collins said.

The employer, COP Wyoming LLC, initially received five citations related to the accident that caused Brett Collins’ death. Two citations were dismissed, and the Wyoming Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed $13,860 in fines for the remaining three. About a year later, the company and Wyoming OSHA settled on a much smaller fine; $6,773.

For the Collins family, the fine was an insult. They began to ask how a $6,773 fine was supposed to motivate companies to avoid violating critical workplace safety regulations.

By Emily Atkin - Think Progress, September 24, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Four workers were caught in a storage tank “flash fire” at a natural gas production facility in Lincoln County, Wyoming on Tuesday. The incident, a spokeswoman for Salt Lake City’s University Hospital told ThinkProgress, left one worker dead, and two critically injured. The workers, who have not yet been named, were cleaning gas tanks when the fire broke out. The exact cause is still unknown.

The fire happened at a natural gas plant owned by Houston-based EOG Resources. Of the four workers who were caught in the fire, two were direct employees of EOG while others were contractors. It’s not yet clear if the worker who died was a direct employee or a contractor.

The incident is the latest fossil fuel-related workplace fatality in Wyoming, which has historically had one of the highest rates of oil worker injuries and deaths in the country. Worker death rates there have fallen — Wyoming oil workers are dying at half the rate they were five years ago — but so have the number of oil and gas rigs in the state. The correlation suggests that Wyoming may still be plagued with a problem it’s been facing for years: a high rate of occupational fatalities due to a lacking “culture of safety.”

The idea that Wyoming may have an endemic workplace safety problem comes from a 2012 report from state-hired epidemiologist Timothy Ryan, who analyzed occupational fatalities in Wyoming and found numerous problems with the overall business attitude toward safety. “Safety [in Wyoming] occurs as an afterthought,” he wrote. He found that from 2001-2008, 20 percent of all Wyoming’s worker fatalities came from the oil and gas industry, and that a whopping 96 percent of those deaths occurred when safety procedures were not followed.

Since then, progress appears to be happening, with the current state epidemiologist telling Wyoming’s local NPR affiliate last week that he’s optimistic — there’s been an increase in worker safety training programs and safety meetings, he said. But NPR’s report also pointed out that some aren’t convinced that the culture is really changing at all. And that’s a problem, because once-declining drilling activity is again starting to expand in the state.

If Wyoming hasn’t in fact changed its “culture of safety,” it will be even more susceptible to the dangers of what is widely known as an industry that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says is unprecedentedly dangerous to workers. Indeed, the fatality rate for onshore oil and gas workers is seven times higher than the national average, and injuries are even more common. Between 2007 and 2012, a total of 663 workers were killed in oil-related accidents nationwide.

Working with flammable substances and heavy machinery is one reason for this increased rate, but another reasons the oil and gas industry remains so dangerous could be the fact that oil worker deaths aren’t very widely publicized. An in-depth report on worker fatalities released by Wyoming Public Media last week pointed out that oil worker deaths rarely merit more than a few sentences in local newspapers, an unfortunate phenomenon driven by the nature of the deaths. Compared to a dramatic coal mine collapse — where dozens of workers are trapped or killed underground — oil worker deaths generally happen one-by-one, in small fires or explosions.

“They don’t get the same kind of attention as a disaster in a coal mine, where you have multiple miners that may be killed,” Peg Seminario, director of safety and health for the AFL-CIO, told Wyoming Public Media. “Nonetheless, the worker who’s working in oil and gas is more likely to be killed on the job than a coal miner. That’s a fact.”