Twin Cities hospitals are front line in treating Bakken burn victims
by:
MAYA RAO
, Star Tribune February 14, 2015
There are no specialty centers near Bakken fields.
Kyle, 27, recovers at Regions Hospital after a fire on an oil site where he was working in the Bakken badly burned his legs.
Flames seared the pants off Kyle’s legs as he raced across a bed of ruddy red rocks, screaming for help.
A pipe on a machine processing oil at high heat had burst, soaking him in methanol and sparking a fire.
“You could just feel it cooking my legs,” he said. “It almost sounded like chicken frying in an oiler.”
Hours
later, Kyle woke up at Regions Hospital in St. Paul last month, after a
600-mile plane ride from the oil fields of North Dakota. His legs were
burned so deeply that the bottom layer of skin would never grow back. It
was the worst pain he’d ever felt.
Burn
injuries among North Dakota workers have surged to more than 3,100 over
the past five years, as the once nearly barren prairies have become the
epicenter of a massive oil-drilling boom. Despite the flammability of
Bakken crude and the danger of oil-rig work, North Dakota has no burn
centers. The Twin Cities is the closest place to go for patients like
Kyle, 27, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that his last
name not be used.
While
other kinds of injuries may be more common, oil field burns are among
the most painful and costly to treat. An oil field worker’s treatment at
a burn unit can cost $1 million.
“The burns from the oil fields can be pretty dramatic,” said Bill Mohr, a surgeon at Regions....... more here
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