Struck-By and Caught-Between Injuries: The OSHA Fatal Four on Texas Oilfields

1. What “struck-by” and “caught-between” mean

A forty-foot joint of heavy casing can outweigh a car. A high-pressure line under load can whip hard enough to take a man off his feet. The rig floor is a small space full of moving steel, and when the work gets rushed, the gap between a worker and that steel is where people get hurt.

Safety people have names for the ways that steel reaches a worker, and it helps to know them, because those names will show up in the company’s paperwork about your injury.

The label matters more than it looks. The category the company writes down points at the failure behind it. A struck-by from a falling tool points at whatever was supposed to keep tools secured overhead. A caught-in points at a guard that was missing or a machine that should have been locked out. So when you hear these words, understand that each one has a set of safety rules attached to it, and those rules are where a case usually starts.

2. Why these are the leading on-site killer

Two numbers tell the whole story of oilfield deaths, and they fit together.

The first number is about the road. Taken as a whole, the biggest killer of oil and gas workers is the drive. Roughly 4 of every 10 workers killed in this industry die in a highway vehicle crash, according to the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries data OSHA cites. That danger has its own page in this guide: Oilfield Trucking and Hot Shot Accidents.

The second number is about the location itself. Step off the highway and onto the pad, and the leading killer changes. OSHA reports that three of every five on-site deaths in oil and gas extraction come from struck-by, caught-in, or caught-between hazards. Three of five. On the well site, moving steel kills more workers than fires, falls, and poison gas combined.

The title of this page mentions the “Fatal Four.” That is OSHA’s name for the four kinds of accidents that kill the most construction workers: falls, struck-by, caught-in-between, and electrocutions. The oil patch never got its own official version of that list. It does not need one. The same killers show up on every rig, and two of the four, struck-by and caught-between, own the top spot on the well site itself. Falls, the other big one, have their own page in this guide.

Here is what I want you to sit with. There is no mystery in these deaths. The same few scenes repeat, year after year: the moving pipe, the rotating shaft, the pressured line, the backing truck. The companies know these scenes better than anybody, because they investigate them, log them, and insure against them. When the same accident keeps happening for decades, at some point it stops being an accident and starts being a cost the company has decided somebody else will pay. Usually that somebody is a worker, and the family waiting on him at home.

3. Where they happen

Most struck-by and caught-between injuries come out of a handful of places on location. If you worked the patch, you know every one of them.

Moving pipe. Almost everything on a drilling or workover location involves “tubulars” (the rig word for pipe: drill pipe, casing, tubing). Pipe comes off trucks, gets racked, rolls down the catwalk, comes up the V-door, gets stood in the derrick, and goes in the hole. Every step of that trip is a pinch point. A joint swings on the winch line. A stand shifts in the racks. Tongs and slips work inches from a floorhand’s hands. When pipe gets loose, or a rack is not chocked, or a load is rigged wrong, the man in the wrong spot has no time to react.

Rotating equipment. A rig is a collection of spinning machines: the top drive or kelly, the rotary table, the drawworks (the big winch that raises and lowers the pipe), catheads, pump parts, belts, and shafts. OSHA’s own hazard page lists exactly this equipment when it warns about workers being struck by or caught between unguarded machines. Rotating steel does not let go. A glove, a sleeve, or a loose FR jacket near an unguarded shaft can pull a hand, an arm, or a whole man into the machine. It takes less than a second.

High-pressure lines. Frac jobs, cementing, acidizing, and well control all push fluid through temporary iron. The pressures run in the thousands of pounds. OSHA warns that when the connections securing those lines fail, the line itself becomes a struck-by hazard. A pressured line that lets go whips like something alive, and the fittings on the end of it hit like a cannon shell.

Vehicles and heavy equipment on location. The same trucks that dominate the highway numbers keep killing on the pad. Sand trucks and water trucks back through a crowded location. Forklifts move pallets at night. Cranes and gin poles swing loads during rig-up and rig-down. A pad is small, loud, and busy, and a man on foot is invisible to a driver more often than either of them thinks.

And above all of it, in the most literal way, hang the dropped objects. Tools, clamps, and hardware work loose from the derrick and come down like missiles. A one-pound wrench dropped from the monkeyboard arrives at the floor with enough force to kill a man in a hard hat. That connects this page to the falls guide. The same derrick work that risks a falling man also risks falling steel.

The deaths are only part of it. For every worker killed by moving steel, there is a much longer line of workers who survived it and left part of themselves on the location.

4. The safety rules and guards that should have prevented it

None of the scenes in the last section surprise anybody in the industry. That is exactly why the safety rules exist. The rules are old and specific, and they were written because workers kept dying in these exact ways.

Start with the machines.

That rule applies across general industry, including drilling and servicing rigs. And OSHA has been specific with this industry. Back in 1995, the agency put out a hazard bulletin about barrier guards for drawworks drums after workers were caught in them. The industry has known for at least thirty years, in writing, that an unguarded drawworks can pull a man in.

Next, the space around the work.

Overhead, the fix has a name too. The industry standard for dropped-object prevention is ANSI/ISEA 121, and OSHA points to it in its oil and gas guidance. It means a written program for securing every tool and piece of hardware used at height, so a wrench cannot leave the derrick in the first place.

And before any of it starts, there is supposed to be a plan. A “JSA” (job safety analysis) is the written, before-the-job walk-through where the crew names the hazards of the task and the controls for each one. OSHA treats it as the basic tool of the trade. When a company skips the JSA, rushes it, or has the crew sign a form nobody read, that tells you how the company treats every other safety rule on this page.

Now the one the lawyers argue about.

Read that again, because companies sometimes wave the exemption around like a permission slip. It is no such thing. The exemption removes one specific OSHA standard from well drilling and servicing work. The danger stays. So does the duty. The OSH Act’s General Duty Clause still requires every employer to keep the workplace free from recognized hazards that are likely to kill or seriously hurt somebody. A machine that can start with a man’s arm inside it is about as recognized as a hazard gets. OSHA itself says the hazards of drilling and servicing are covered piece by piece through its general industry standards. The industry’s own standard, API Recommended Practice 54 (the American Petroleum Institute’s safety practice for drilling and servicing operations), spells out safe practices for this exact work. And most companies write lockout and energy-isolation procedures into their own safety manuals anyway. So when a pump or a rotary starts with a man inside the machine, the honest question is never whether a rule existed. Some rule almost always did. Often the first one broken was the company’s own.

Every protection in this section costs money and minutes: the guard, the barricade, the tie-off program, the JSA, the lockout kit. When they are missing, that is a choice, and the worker is the one who pays for it.

If OSHA investigated your accident, that file matters, and it has limits. What an OSHA investigation does for your case, and what it cannot do, is covered in the OSHA investigations guide (coming soon).

5. Who is responsible

Here is the question that decides these cases, and it is almost never answered by the name on your paycheck.

A well site is a stack of companies. The operator (the company that holds the lease) sits at the top. Below it, a drilling or workover contractor runs the rig. Around them work the service companies: casing crews, wireline, frac crews, cementers, trucking, rentals. Each company brings its own crew and its own equipment. So when moving steel hurts a worker, the first job is sorting out whose crew, whose machine, and whose decisions put that steel in motion. And very often, the company that created the danger turns out to be a different company than the one that employs the injured man.

The company whose crew or equipment hurt you. Maybe another contractor’s forklift backed over you. Maybe another crew’s unguarded machine caught your arm, or their rigged load fell on you. That company can be held responsible under ordinary negligence law (“negligence” is the legal word for careless fault). Workers’ compensation does not protect that company, because it is not your employer. And Texas courts have said the special legal shield for property owners, Chapter 95, protects only the property owner itself. The other contractors on location do not get to hide behind it.

The company running the job. Texas law going back to Redinger v. Living, Inc. holds that a company which retains control over how another company’s work is performed owes a duty to use that control with reasonable care. The Texas Supreme Court has since made clear that the duty runs only as far as the control the company actually kept, and that the control must relate to the specific condition or activity that caused the injury. So a supervisor who directs the order of the work, or who lets it run in a dangerous way in a crowded space, can put his company on the hook for the danger his direction touched.

The operator or property owner. This is where Chapter 95 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code comes in, and it is a steep hurdle. In general, the statute makes the worker prove both of two things: 1) the owner exercised or retained some control over how the work was done, AND 2) the owner actually knew about the danger and failed to adequately warn. One is not enough. You have to have both. The Texas Supreme Court has applied Chapter 95 broadly. It reaches even injuries caused by the owner’s own crews working alongside contractors. The full picture, including the two ways past the shield and who it does not protect, is in the Chapter 95 guide.

Your own employer. If your employer carries workers’ compensation, you generally cannot sue it for negligence; the trade is comp benefits instead, except that the surviving spouse or children of a worker whose death was caused by the employer’s intentional act or gross negligence may still pursue exemplary damages against a subscribing employer. But some Texas oilfield employers are “non-subscribers” (companies that opted out of workers’ comp). Those companies can be sued directly, and they lose most of their defenses when they are. Either way, your employer’s status changes nothing about your claims against the other companies on location. The main guide walks through how that works.

The manufacturer of the machine. If the equipment that hurt you was designed or sold without an adequate guard, or the guard failed, there may also be a products liability claim (a claim about the design or condition of the machine itself, aimed at the company that made or sold it). That question takes engineering work. It is worth asking early, before the machine disappears back into service.

It is common for several of these to be true at once. Finding every responsible company, before the rig moves and the evidence scatters, is one of the first jobs in any struck-by or caught-between case.

6. What this means for you and your family

7. Questions to ask any lawyer you are considering

You do not have to take anybody’s word, including mine. These cases are too important to hand to the first billboard you see. Test any lawyer you talk to.

A qualified lawyer will not be bothered by a single one of those questions. A lawyer who gets weird and defensive about them just answered the most important one.

Common questions

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