A natural gas leak recently prompted evacuations of workers and road closures at 9th and Locust in downtown St. Louis. A hissing sound could be heard as gas escaped the line. Those who were evacuated could smell the gas.

The use of engineering controls and monitoring equipment will go a long way in protecting your employees. But just like any other safety equipment, you must maintain them. Calibrate personal monitors on a regular basis. For the most part, this means at least once every 30 days. Check the manufacturer’s recommendations for your particular monitor.

If you work in the oil and gas industry, then you know how dangerous the job can be. The conditions can be harsh and the weather unpredictable. Not to mention the hazards that exist with complex industrial equipment. But did you know that one of the most serious hazards you’re exposed to is something you can’t even see? That’s right. The invisible hazards we discuss here are some of the deadliest gases in the industry.

A six to an eight-block area of downtown Columbia was evacuated recently due to a gas leak. Road construction workers struck a natural gas line at Legion and N. Main Street around 2:00 pm.

A 46-year-old hockey-playing oilfield worker nearly died last December connecting a hose to a valve at a rural Saskatchewan production operation in February, 2014. His face was sprayed with a mix of gas, water and oil. He inhaled and swallowed it.

As oil field-related jobs draw people to Reeves County, Texas, owners of one RV park receive up to 30 inquiries per day. “It is a big problem to find housing here,” said one of the owners. “It’s either extremely expensive, or mostly it’s just not available.”

In the oil and gas industry the higher the rig count shows good signs of an oil boom, but that also means there could be more people in the oil field that lack experience. “Have accidents increased in West Texas and in the nation as a whole for oil and gas? Yeah, absolutely but so has the workload. We have over 1,000 rigs operating in the US," said Chantell Schneider, Pro Mainland Safety.

The rural plains of North Dakota are lonely and unforgiving. This is the flattened, semi-industrial part of the state, where the infrastructure of oil production—oil and natural gas holding tanks connected to pipelines and nearby pump jacks – is omnipresent.

One of late summer's more popular and growing events in South Dakota took place in Ellis County on the first weekend in September. The 9th annual White Trash Pasture Party ran Friday, Saturday and Sunday at a location about a half-mile south of Fargo.

Highway 302, an 83-mile-long, often single-lane road that runs from Odessa, Texas, home to a variety of oilfield servicers, to Loving County, in the western part of the Permian oil field basin, is a stretch that saw traffic jump by 76 percent in 2017, and it's continued to rise this year.