There have been more than 3 deaths in 18 years: you can look up the accident reports. Just because the Guardian focuses on three cases doesn't mean that those w

There have been more than 3 deaths in 18 years: you can look up the accident reports. Just because the Guardian focuses on three cases doesn't mean that those were all there were. The oil rig death statistics are also difficult to interpret. In the UK, for example, there was one offshore oil death last year (per the HSE). Because it's a small industry, there's massive year-to-year variation in per-hundred-thousand rates. The Piper Alpha disaster in the late 80s had 167 deaths, which overwhelms those years where little goes wrong - but only if you look at the statistics over a longer period than 1 year.