It’s common knowledge that the oil and gas industry is dangerous and the death toll is higher than other industries, but the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows it hasn’t been improving.

An employee checking asphalt levels from the top of a tank died after falling 15 feet and hitting his head on a concrete structure supporting the tank. The September 2012 accident at Corvallis, Mont.-based M.R. Asphalt Inc. resulted in 16 safety and health violations, including one willful for failing to provide a guardrail or fall protection on the working surface.

A natural gas company’s failure to provide a worker with FR clothing lead to a fatality, according to OSHA, which has cited Pennsylvania-based J.R. Resources for eight safety and health violations. The employee died from injuries sustained during a flash fire.

Since 2009, eleven employees working for drilling companies and related industries died in accidents that could have been prevented, according to a story in the San Antonio Express-News.

According to the fiscal year 2013 Congressional Budget Justification for OSHA, the agency will be more transparent in divulging information to the next-of-kin of workplace fatality victims. OSHA has long been criticized by activists such as Alabama’s Ron Hayes, whose son was killed in a grain silo, of frustrating victims’ families by leaving them out of the information loop.

The nation’s red and blue states often are miles apart in social attitudes and, of course, political outlook. It turns out that they also divide into distinct camps when it comes to a grimmer measure — fatal traffic accidents.

Although falls continue to be a concern, those just-released Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures on 2011 U.S. fatal occupational injuries show that fatal work injuries in the construction industry declined to 721 in 2011 from 774 in 2010 -- a decrease of 7 percent.

The U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) will again focus its annual mine roof control program on efforts to improve mine rib control during the 2012 Preventive Roof Rib Outreach Program, known as PROP. For the second consecutive year, in 2011, fatal rib roll accidents in underground coal mines outnumbered more typical fatal roof fall accidents.