Texas workers face mounting dangers in the heart of America's greatest oil boom

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. It is part one of a four-part series.

Jose Gonzalez* wore no mask, despite the toxic chemicals he worked with in the oilfield.

"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 and horizontal drilling in the 2010s.

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.

Once-moribund Permian oil production approximately tripled between 2010 and 2024, making the region the source of 47 percent of U.S. output, or just under half. Meanwhile, gas production, which largely fuels electric power plants and is used to make plastics and chemicals, has nearly doubled.

For President Trump and Texas's Republican leadership, that outflow offers a prospect of American “energy dominance.” State and federal officials are seeking to amplify the boom even further with promises to “unleash American energy” by cutting climate regulations, speeding up permits of new wells and pipelines, and greenlighting facilities to ship U.S. natural gas overseas.

“President Trump will treat oil and natural gas as an asset, not a liability, and domestic energy production and jobs will be prioritized,” Todd Staples, head of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, told reporters in January.

But the push to bolster fossil fuel production is heightening concerns among oilfield workers and first responders about the mounting dangers facing workers and Permian residents. The region's prospering oil industry is all too frequently shadowed by injury and death: About 30 Texas workers per year (or 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 death toll is higher still on the region’s roads, where drivers like Gonzalez race their oilfield cargo back and forth on long shifts. Crashes accounted for two-thirds of oil worker deaths in 2023, according to federal data. But it’s not only truckers who are at risk: The roads have also become more dangerous for the populations of the towns they race through.

In 2023, according to the state Department of Transportation, someone died every day on the Permian’s highways — the result of a staggering 73 crashes per day, which left more than two people seriously injured for every one killed.

That year, more than 1,000 people died on the highways of all of Texas’s oil-producing regions — making the roads among the most dangerous in the country and exceeding the death toll faced by the U.S. military in its bloodiest year in Iraq. Permian crashes were twice as likely to be fatal as those in the rest of Texas.

Out in the Permian — where everyone is up too early, in bed too late, and working under constant stress — Gonzalez told The Hill “accidents are our daily bread.” Between 2010 and 2023, the number of deaths on the region’s roads more than doubled.

The rise in fatalities has come alongside a steep increase in oil production that has brought a flood of new fossil fuel workers to the Permian and revitalized its economy. Before the boom, the region had been in decades-long decline following the 1980s bust, when oil majors like Exxon and Shell departed the landscape that had once been the heartland of American oil seemingly never to return and leaving behind empty office buildings and shuttered stores and restaurants.

“This part of Texas was dying," said Kirk Edwards, CEO of Latigo Petroleum and a Midland-Odessa business leader.

Now the majors are back, and the region is "thriving," revived by high-tech methods like fracking and horizontal drilling that turned oil extraction into “a cookbook, almost a manufacturing process,” Edwards said.

He gestured out the window of his office in Odessa, Texas, toward a new row of apartments — a sign, he said, of Midland’s long-term growth, as wages earned by workers who occupy such housing fed a whole ecosystem of banks, real estate and construction agencies willing to bet on the long-term future of the twin capitals of the Permian boom.

Since 2010, Midland and Odessa have grown at several times the U.S. average, adding 50,000 new residents, virtually all Latinos and many recent immigrants.

The presence of those tens of thousands of new residents and temporary workers racing 80,000-pound trucks down the region’s two-lane roads poses risks, Sheriff Mark Griffis, the head of law enforcement for the county that includes Odessa, told The Hill.

“Nobody was prepared for it,” he said. The boom had outstripped the ability of local highways — and highway patrols — to manage it, he explained, while bringing new levels of crime and disorder. His department now has a specialized oilfield theft unit, focused on crime rings stealing pipe, scrap metal and even crude from unattended drilling sites.

There has been progress, Griffis acknowledged. Over the past year, efforts by government and civil society groups have brought the death rate to its lowest level on record — at least, in the sense of deaths per total miles driven.

But the boom — and the shift from more traditional forms of drilling toward fracking, as well as contractions elsewhere that have sent more new drivers spilling into the labor pool — have meant a long-term trend of more drivers on the roads, driving more miles, which still means more deaths in absolute terms.

In a world dependent on petroleum, West Odessa volunteer fire chief Austin Harden told The Hill, an increase in production made sense. But it was going to come at a cost. “With more drilling comes incidents in the oilfield, which then we have to respond to — whether it be an oil rig exploded, or a tank battery is on fire, or there's an accident somewhere.”

Harden told The Hill the men who donate their time as volunteer firefighters in the vast unincorporated sprawl of West Odessa often work “deadly accidents two or three in a day.”

Many of these resemble dominos played at high speed with twisted metal, he said. Drivers get rear-ended and slalom through barricades or into other cars; blowouts on overloaded trucks speeding down superheated asphalt send flying rubber into oncoming cars, which slam into others — until, Harden said, suddenly there’s “a four car major accident on the interstate.”

His eyes wet beneath his white cowboy hat, Odessa Sheriff Griffis recalled three teens, children of a deputy, who died in a head-on collision with an energy company truck.

After thousands of crashes, Griffis said, "you get used to it" — at least until it's kids you know, “deceased and on fire.”

Some trade groups have estimated that hundreds of thousands of new workers will need to move to the region in coming decades to support continued oil production.

That anticipated ramping up of production is expected to help drive the global oil supply far beyond demand levels in the years ahead: A 2024 report by the International Energy Agency projected the world will have an “unprecedented” glut of oil and gas by 2030 partly as a result of rising U.S. output.

Fossil fuel companies are also leery of increased production depressing prices for their products, as Trump has vowed it will. For that reason, oil and gas leaders in the Permian suggest that dramatic local increases in production won’t happen at all.

Edwards, the petroleum company chief executive, said the same high-tech methods that fueled the Permian's revitalization promised the region a new era of stable prosperity, free from the boom-and-bust cycles of the past. He believed the increased drilling Trump promised — and volunteer fire chief Harden feared — would never come, because the oil majors would seek to maintain that market stability by holding down production to avoid crashing the price of oil or triggering a price war with Saudi Arabia that, he said, Texas could not win.

But whether production increases or not, personal injury attorney Kent Buckingham, who was representing the family of the teens killed in the head-on collision, contended the deregulation Trump and the Texas GOP have promised would mean more deaths.

“I expect there to be basically this free rein in the oil patch in terms of very little regulation and drilling and fracking,” he told The Hill. “The result of that is just going to be a horrendous amount of vehicular activity. It scares me to death. I mean, I see enough as it is right now, carnage on the freeways and highways.

“If it gets much worse than it is now it would really be bad,” he said, due to a combination of more trucks on the roads, heightened demand leading to more hiring of unqualified drivers and less scrutiny of oilfield traffic.

First responders attribute the deaths on the region's roads to a combination of speed and distraction. Griffis spoke with great frustration about the failure of oil companies to make sure their employees weren’t texting and driving. Harden, the fire chief and former oilfield worker, said that in a town “saturated” with small contractor companies offering interchangeable services to the oil companies, the only way for companies to stand out is speed.

“It’s, ‘if you can’t get here quickly, we’ll go with another company,’” he said. “So people get in a hurry to do things, and they don’t end up making it at all.”

The energy industry, for its part, has acknowledged that road deaths are a significant problem. Major oil companies have focused their attention on expanding the region’s road infrastructure, a web of two-lane county roads now clogged with fast-moving traffic they weren’t designed for. The Permian Strategic Partnership, a coalition of 30 leading oil companies, is among those advocating for around $4 billion in state funding for expanding the region’s highways.

“These critical investments will improve safety and relieve congestion for Permian Basin residents and industry traffic,” the group’s chair, Donald Evans, wrote to the state Department of Transportation last year.

“These critical investments will improve safety and relieve congestion for Permian Basin residents and industry traffic,” the group’s chairman, Donald Evans, wrote the state Department of Transportation last year.

In addition to lobbying for better roads, the industry has focused its attention on public awareness campaigns and education, like a 2023 social media campaign that, per the Partnership, was “designed to remind drivers to follow speed limits, drive sober, buckle up, and watch for pedestrians.”

Todd Staples, presidents of the Texas Oil and Gas Association (TXOGA), attributed the death to "infrastructure challenges and distracted, reckless, and sleep-deprived driving."

"Our message is clear," Staples added. "Every driver—whether behind the wheel of a commercial truck, work vehicle, or personal car — has a role in making our roads safer to ensure that everyone goes home, and nobody gets hurt.”

But Gonzalez, the fracking truck driver, hasn’t seen any of the social media ads, and he doubts they would make much difference to people in his position. Fracking sand drivers are near the bottom of the industry pecking order, he said. And the relentless pressure on contractors like him, he argued, is a major reason why the roads have become so dangerous for everyone.

Gonzalez, the fracking truck driver, hasn’t seen any of the social media ads, and he doubts they would make much difference to people in his position. Fracking sand drivers are near the bottom of the industry pecking order, he said. And the relentless pressure on contractors like him, he argued, are a major reason why the roads have become so dangerous for everyone.

Gonzalez, a native of Chihuahua, Mexico, turned to trucking after a back injury forced him off wellpads, signing up with 5F-Superhighway Platform, an Uber-like company that connected frac sand mines with wells that needed sand and found drivers to deliver the loads. Gonzalez hoped it would offer a more stable future for his growing family.

And at first, it was good money. In the early 2020s, Wall Street started investing less in fossil fuels — and particularly shale oil and gas companies, well-known for pushing their profits back into new rounds of drilling. That drop in investment prompted those companies to cut back on expensive drilling operations in favor of repeatedly fracking the same well to squeeze out ever more oil.

This in turn shifted the Permian’s fossil fuel business into more and more of a trucking business, as shale oil and gas companies grew increasingly reliant on pumping in fracking fluid to force open underground cracks for oil and gas off of existing wells.

Production relied on a one-two punch, both heavily dependent on drivers like Gonzalez. Each well required potentially thousands of truckloads of fracking fluid to pulverize the rock and release oil — as well as hundreds of loads of frac sand, which wedged into the resulting fractures like millions of tiny doorstops, keeping them open so the oil and gas could rush out.

This shift meant good money, at least at first. Companies like the one Gonzalez worked for offered $10,000 a week to contract drivers who brought sand from the new mines spreading across old ranches to the wellheads.

While initially lucrative, this work was hard and relentless. Gonzalez said the system, in which drivers were paid by the load, not the hour, pushed them to cut corners. Texas law only allows drivers to drive 12 hours in a stretch, after which they have to take 8 hours off; interstate laws, highly relevant in an oil producing region that straddles the New Mexico-Texas state line, are even stricter. But drivers widely flout these laws. "It’s no secret," one driver-influencer said in a video posted to his YouTube channel, that drivers “ride a little dirty,” exceeding the hours they are legally allowed to be on the road and sometimes driving around the clock.

Drivers sped in part to make up lost time, they said. With hundreds of truckloads of fracking fluid and sand needed per well — and with wells often down for maintenance — long lines of trucks, their drivers waiting hours in the desert without food, water, or restrooms, are characteristic of the new oilfield. When drivers needed a bathroom, Gonzalez said, "you went out on the land or busted a gut." The wait times weren't paid.

In Midland-Odessa, people often criticize the frac sand drivers for being uniquely responsible for the danger on the roads. But Buckingham, the personal injury lawyers, said that they are just the face of a "a more general problem."

"All the drivers are under pressure to get there, get the load done and get on to the next site," he said. But, he added, the sheer volume of sand demanded by the oilfield makes them particularly visible. "There may be at this disproportionate number of wrecks attributed to them, just because of the sheer number [of sand trucks] involved."

By 2023, frac sand drivers said, conditions had gotten even less safe, as wait times had grown, fares had collapsed, and costs had risen. One driver, Lucia*, recalled that a load that used to run $600 might then yield only $350; meanwhile, 5F-Superhighway Platform, the Uber-like platform that set up their loads, increased the fines for rejecting a run. The drivers described feeling squeezed: unable to afford to care for their trucks or get enough sleep to drive safely.

The pressures reached a breaking point for a number of them by July that year. Gonzalez and 50 other drivers staged a rally in Kermit, Texas, demanding overtime pay and basic amenities — including access to bathrooms.

Instead, drivers said, they were thrown off of 5F's platform the next day. “They fired us for pursuing our rights,” one driver, Ellison*, a Cuban immigrant, told The Hill. “That’s not why the Founding Fathers made this country.”

The Hill has reached out to 5F-Superhighway Platform for comment.

Lucia, Ellison and Gonzalez all described losing their trucks — and their hopes for a middle-class future. All three ultimately took wage jobs they said were slightly better than frac sand driving.

But only slightly. While she likes her new company, Lucia, a single mother, spends three weeks a month away from her children; Ellison, with a 3-year-old at home, hauls construction equipment six days a week, midnight to 3 p.m.; Gonzalez spends 12 hours a day, plus commute, hauling fracking fluid, which he fears is giving him cancer.

The leading oil and gas industry trade group says there is no evidence linking the fluid to cancer. “The best available science shows that hydraulic fracturing does not have an impact on cancer rates,” the American Petroleum Institute says in a blurb on its website about cancer risk, pointing to data from 2012 and 2013, when the shale boom was in its infancy.

But since then, repeated studies have found that the thousand-plus chemicals in fracking fluid include dozens of known or suspected carcinogens. A comprehensive 2023 review by New York public health groups found 2,500 papers with evidence that fracking had negative impacts on human health.

Back at the frac tanks, where Gonzalez offloaded spent fracking fluid that had come back out of the well so that it could be reused, he was finishing pumping. His family, he said, did OK — but just barely. Without health insurance, one injury could ruin them. Their apartment in Hobbs, N.M., came with a warning not to drink the water. There was no money for a house, no savings and not even, recently, a vacation.

"You don’t have much here," Gonzalez said, half-smiling. Except one thing, he added. "There’s always work — if you want to work 24-7.”

But that work, he said, was “killing, tiring, stressful — y no ganas, no ganas.” The Spanish word held multiple meanings: earning, winning, getting ahead.

All, Gonzalez felt, equally out of reach.

* The drivers’ names have been changed for the purpose of anonymity.

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