Last week Wyoming’s petroleum industry helped kill draft legislation that would give greater power to landowners to challenge Wyoming’s trade secret exemption in the disclosure of chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Wyoming Refining Co.’s oil refinery is situated literally on Main Street in Newcastle and a mere half-mile away from Newcastle High School. The school is equipped with a “panic button” that shuts off all ventilation in the building in the event of a toxic spill.

If there’s not an abrupt change of course in Wyoming’s rate of workplace fatalities, the Cowboy State is on track to lose 36 workers to on-the-job deaths this year. They will leave behind wives, husbands, daughters, sons, parents and friends — the type of tragedy that devastates families.

Just months prior to two flash fires at the Sinclair oil refinery (one on May 8 and another on May 25) injuring a total of six workers (at least three of them, regrettably, burned “severely”) Wyoming Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors had witnessed several other fires and fire hazards while performing a “process safety management audit,” according to the agency.