Eagle Ford Shale Injuries: A County-by-County Look at Where Workers Get Hurt

Drive south out of San Antonio on Highway 16 or Highway 281 and you’ll pass through it without a sign telling you so. The Eagle Ford doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the truck traffic, the flare stacks burning at night, the new motels in towns that didn’t used to need them, and in the data, if you know where to look.

This is the part of Texas that pays for a lot of the country’s oil. It runs under counties most people only see through a windshield on the way to the coast: Karnes, DeWitt, La Salle, Dimmit, Webb, and a dozen more. The boom brought real money and real jobs to small towns out here. It also brought funerals.

This page goes county by county. It uses public records on drilling, on worker deaths, and on road crashes, so you can see where the danger sits and why. It’s not about any one accident, and it can’t tell you what your case is worth. What it can do is show you the pattern, in the government’s own numbers, and explain why where you got hurt is part of your story, not just a detail.

What the Eagle Ford is, and the towns it changed

The Eagle Ford is a “shale play,” and that phrase is worth slowing down on, because the whole region runs on it.

The Eagle Ford formation runs across South Texas in a long band, roughly 50 miles wide and 400 miles long, sitting somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000 feet down. The Railroad Commission of Texas, the state agency that regulates oil and gas, lists 26 affected counties. It’s one of the biggest oil-producing regions in the country.

The scale shows up in the government’s own numbers. In 2025, the Eagle Ford produced about 1.2 million barrels of crude oil a day, which the U.S. Energy Information Administration counted as 9 percent of all the crude oil produced in the entire United States. Only the Permian Basin in West Texas produces more. Roughly 18 percent of all the oil pumped in Texas comes out of the Eagle Ford formation, by the Railroad Commission’s own production records. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas counts close to 399,000 jobs in the Eagle Ford counties.

That money is real, and the people earning it are real. So is the cost. The boom filled up the motels in Kenedy and Cotulla, put new trucks on the road in Cuero and Pleasanton, and brought paychecks to towns that had been losing young people for a generation. It also filled cemeteries. The same boom that pays the bills out here is the one that puts a family in a funeral home, and both of those things are true at the same time.

How to read this page: the data and where it comes from

Most law firm websites tell you the oilfield is dangerous and stop there. This page shows you the receipts, county by county, from the agencies that actually count.

Six public sources do most of the work here:

• The Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) tracks drilling permits and oil and gas production.
• The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) tracks how much the region produces.
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counts workers who are killed on the job.
• The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the CDC, studies how and why oilfield workers die.
• The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) records every reported crash in the state.
• The U.S. Census Bureau measures who lives in each county, and what they earn.

The data has limits, and you should know them up front. Government numbers run a year or two behind. Some of these counties are so small that a single bad year can swing the percentages. And the state does not publish a clean, county-by-county table of oilfield injuries, so for production rankings I lean on the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which compiles the county figures from RRC and EIA data, and for crashes and population I use the TxDOT and Census county tables directly.

There’s one more thing the count misses, and it matters out here. A lot of the workforce doesn’t live in these counties at all. They drive in from Houston, the Valley, or across the border, work a hitch, and sleep in a “man-camp” (temporary worker housing, often RVs or modular units thrown up near the drilling). The Census counts permanent residents, so it undercounts the people actually on these roads and lease sites every day. Keep that in mind when a county’s population looks small. The danger doesn’t care whether you’re counted.

The core counties, one by one

Start with the compilation. The table below pulls together what each core county is, how many people the Census counts there, what a typical household earns, and what the roads did to people in a single recent year. Everything in it is from a government source, and the back matter lists each one.

Population: U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts (2025 estimate). Income: American Community Survey 2020–2024. Crashes: TxDOT 2024 crash records. "Commercial truck" follows TxDOT's commercial-motor-vehicle category.

A second table tells you where the oil and gas actually come from. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, using EIA and RRC data, ranked the top producers at the end of 2024.

Karnes, DeWitt, and La Salle together produced about 46 percent of the Eagle Ford's oil. Webb is by far the region's biggest gas producer. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, "Energy in the Eleventh District: Eagle Ford Shale," 2024 figures.

Now the counties themselves.

Karnes County

Karnes is the heart of Eagle Ford oil. Around Karnes City and Kenedy, this one county pumps more crude than any other in the play, and together with DeWitt and La Salle it accounts for nearly half of all the Eagle Ford’s oil. But the Census counts only about 15,000 people in Karnes County, and that number has barely moved since 2010. That’s what a boom really looks like up close. The money came through, but most of the workers didn’t stay, so the boom shows up as truck traffic and production instead of families putting down roots. In 2024, eight people died on Karnes County roads.

DeWitt County

DeWitt, around Cuero and Yorktown, is the number two oil county and one of the steadier ones, with about 20,000 residents and a median household income just over $63,000. Its 2024 road numbers were the quietest in this group, with two traffic deaths and no fatal truck crashes. That’s a single year, and a single year can flip. It does not mean DeWitt is safe so much as it means the danger moves around the basin from year to year.

La Salle County

La Salle, with Cotulla sitting right on Interstate 35, is the number three oil county and the number two for gas. It’s small and getting smaller, around 6,500 people, with a poverty rate near 27 percent. The roads tell the story plainly. In 2024 the whole county had only 84 reported crashes, but three of them were fatal and killed seven people, and about half of all its crashes involved a commercial truck. When you mix interstate freight with loaded lease trucks on the same stretch, a low crash count can still carry a high body count.

Webb County

Webb is the gas heart of the Eagle Ford and a different animal from the rest. Laredo makes it the biggest county in the play by far, with about 281,000 people, and it’s one of the busiest freight corridors in North America, where I-35, US-59, and US-83 all funnel border trade. It produces more natural gas than anywhere else in the Eagle Ford. Its crash totals are huge, more than 6,700 in 2024, but those blend oilfield trucks with border freight and city traffic, so read Webb carefully. The oilfield is one current in a much bigger river here.

Dimmit County

Dimmit, around Carrizo Springs, is hard frac country, and it carries the marks of it. It has the lowest median household income of any county in this group, under $39,000, and a poverty rate near 28 percent. In 2024 it had eight fatal crashes, but those crashes killed 16 people. That gap is what high-speed, two-lane roads do: when a wreck happens out here, more than one person tends to die in it.

Gonzales County

Gonzales sits on the eastern edge of the play, around the towns of Gonzales and Nixon, with about 20,000 residents. It saw seven traffic deaths in 2024 across 480 crashes, more than 100 of which involved a commercial truck. It’s a reminder that the Eagle Ford reaches well east of the counties people usually name.

Atascosa County

Atascosa, around Pleasanton and Jourdanton, is the gateway south from San Antonio, where US-281 and I-37 carry the traffic into the field. It’s the second-largest of the inner-ring counties, near 54,000 people and growing as San Antonio spreads south. In 2024 it logged more than 900 crashes and nine traffic deaths, three of those fatal wrecks involving a commercial truck.

Live Oak County

Live Oak is the junction county. Around Three Rivers and George West, I-37, US-59, and US-281 come together, which puts a lot of oilfield iron through a county of only about 12,000 people. It had eight traffic deaths in 2024 across 435 crashes. If you’ve hauled in the southern Eagle Ford, you’ve driven Live Oak, probably tired, probably at night.

Frio County

Frio, around Pearsall on I-35, posted the most lopsided truck number in the whole group in 2024. Of its eight road deaths, seven came out of crashes that involved a commercial truck, and six of its seven fatal crashes were truck-involved. That’s about as clear a fingerprint of heavy industrial traffic as the crash data ever leaves.

Wilson County

Wilson, around Floresville and La Vernia, is the county where the oilfield meets the San Antonio suburbs. It has the highest income and the most college graduates in this group, and it’s the fastest-growing, which makes it more of a bedroom community than a pure oil patch. It’s on the list because the eastern Eagle Ford doesn’t stop at the county line, and a lot of workers who live a normal suburban life still drive into the field every morning.

McMullen County

McMullen is the purest picture of what an oilfield county looks like with everything else stripped away. Around Tilden, it’s one of the least-populated counties in all of Texas, about 544 people. There’s almost no town and almost nothing but lease road. In 2024 it had only two fatal crashes, and both of them involved a commercial truck, and trucks were in more than half of every crash the county recorded. When a place is nothing but pads, pipe, and the roads between them, the road is the whole risk.

The roads: oilfield trucking and the crash data

If you remember one thing from this page, make it this. The most dangerous piece of equipment in the Eagle Ford is the truck, and it isn’t close.

The federal researchers at NIOSH studied oil and gas worker deaths across the country and found that the single leading cause of death isn’t a blowout or a fall or a fire. It’s vehicle crashes, and most of those happen out on the public highway. A single fracked well can take hundreds of loaded truck trips, by some estimates more than a thousand, hauling the water, sand, pipe, chemicals, and crude in and out. Multiply that across thousands of wells and you get what South Texans already know: the two-lane roads out here carry a river of heavy iron they were never built for.

The corridors carrying most of it are easy to name. Interstate 37 is the spine, running San Antonio to Corpus Christi through Atascosa and Live Oak. US-281 and US-59 feed in from the north and east. US-90, SH-72, SH-97, SH-16, and SH-44 thread the field. And under all of those sit the FM and county roads, built decades ago for a farm truck and a cattle trailer, now carrying 80,000-pound rigs day and night.

Two things stack on top of the traffic and make it worse, and both of them trace back to choices a company made.

The first is fatigue. Oilfield hands work long hitches, often 12-hour shifts, sometimes for many days straight, and then climb into a truck or a crew van for a long drive back to a man-camp or a motel. When a company schedules a worker for a 14th straight long shift and a 90-minute drive afterward, the exhaustion behind the wheel isn’t bad luck. It’s the predictable result of how the work was set up.

The second is the undercount, and it cuts in the worker’s favor to understand it. Highway crashes are not required to be reported to OSHA, the federal workplace safety agency. So OSHA’s own numbers miss most oilfield road deaths. When NIOSH cross-checked Texas crash records for just three years, it found 56 oil-and-gas motor-vehicle deaths that never showed up in the OSHA data at all, and in more than half of them the worker wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The official count of how many oilfield workers die on the road is almost certainly low, and the true number is worse.

This is where the community-safety part stops being abstract. The loaded sand hauler doing 70 on a county road shares that road with the rancher’s wife, the school bus, and the family driving home from Sunday dinner. When a carrier skips maintenance, or pushes a driver past safe hours, or puts a barely-trained driver in a fully-loaded truck to keep up with the boom, the people they put at risk aren’t only their own workers. It’s everybody else on that two-lane road too.

The pattern across the basin

Step back from the individual counties and three things come through clearly in the data.

First, this work is far deadlier than ordinary work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures a fatal-injury rate for each industry. For 2024, the rate for mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction was 13.8 deaths for every 100,000 full-time workers. For all American workers combined, it was 3.3. Doing this work is roughly four times more likely to get you killed than the average job in the country.

Second, the Eagle Ford sits inside one of the deadliest oil regions in the United States. When NIOSH studied oil and gas deaths nationwide from 2014 to 2019, the Western Gulf Basin, which includes the Eagle Ford, accounted for nearly 16 percent of all the deaths it counted, second only to the Permian Basin in West Texas. South Texas ranks among the deadliest oil regions in the whole country.

Third, the people doing the most dangerous work usually don’t work for the oil company whose name is on the gate. They work for the contractors and service companies the operator hires, and hires below that. That fact matters a great deal to who can be held responsible, and it has its own guide, but keep it in your head as you read these numbers. The worker is at the bottom of the chain. The operator is at the top. The risk gets pushed down, and the paycheck gets pushed up.

There’s a legal piece to “where,” and it’s worth a plain word here even though the depth lives on the legal spokes. Where you were hurt is not just a fact about geography. It can decide which courthouse hears your case.

So a worker hurt on a lease in Dimmit County will often have his case heard in a Dimmit County district court, in front of a local judge and a jury drawn from the people who live out there. That can cut more than one way, and a qualified lawyer thinks about it early. It’s one reason the county on the accident report is never just a line on a form.

Questions to ask any lawyer you are considering

You don’t have to take anybody’s word, including mine. The right questions will tell you fast whether a lawyer actually knows this kind of case or just runs ads.

A lawyer who does this work won’t be bothered by any of these. If the answers get vague or defensive, that tells you something.

Common questions

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