hey! new here and little experience with trucking but i am in Texas where oilfield is everything... i hear a bunch of horror stories about the safety of oilfield trucking and just wanted some honest opinions... 1. how bad is it? 2. is safety likely to improve or get worse in the next year? 3. what, if anything, would improve safety the most? 4. how could i tell a safe company from an unsafe company before working there? i really appreciate any feedback anyone gives!
The field gravitates to people who don't care about their own safety.... kind of hard to even pretend about it.. its like a tough man competition for morons
I live in Texas and make a decent living driving regional dry van, mostly hauling tires (but we haul a lot of stuff). I looked into oilfield work, and concluded that it was too dirty, uncomfortable, and feast-or-famine for me. I never even considered the safety issue!
1. In some ways it's a lot better, but in some ways it's worse, than hauling freight. 2. It's not going to change much. The risks are well known and the strategies used to minimize them are well established. 3. Getting rid of unsafe drivers and unsafe carriers. This is mostly sandboxes and vacuum trucks. 4. Check their SAFER snapshot, look at the condition of their equipment, observe the behavior of their drivers.
IMO the oil field rates have been reduced to below the cost of operation. Many have jumped to the other side of the street and found they were lied to to.finding they are covering the ones that jumped the other way. These company's could care less about you or your time. One is better off driving a garbage truck and sleeping in your own bed.
That depends on what you heard. Sometimes people in the trucking business take liberties with the truth
