Cummins marketed itself as “the number one choice for SST Energy” in a glossy case study about diesel drilling power. The January 2014 bulletin praised three generator modules per rig, 7,500 operating hours per engine each year and support promised within 24 hours. It sold SST Energy as a rugged proving ground for Cummins technology. What the brochure did not mention was the SST Energy OSHA record already sitting behind that polished little bastard of a sales pitch.
OSHA records show three worker deaths at SST Energy sites between 1992 and 2011. Two occurred after the company began using Cummins generator power in 2005. One of those two workers was electrocuted while cleaning a diesel-powered generator, although OSHA does not identify its manufacturer. The other fell between 50 and 70 feet after a climbing-assist device failed. A third worker had died years before the Cummins relationship, after a travelling block and hook struck him on a drilling rig.
There is no evidence that a Cummins product caused any of those deaths. That point matters, and TCAP will not smear a manufacturer onto equipment that OSHA left unidentified. The sharper question is why Cummins printed a hymn to trust after two relationship-era fatalities and one month after Wyoming OSHA issued SST Energy 12 citations. Five of those citations initially carried the repeat classification. That is not proof of product liability. It is proof that corporate storytelling can leave an astonishing amount of bloody reality outside the frame.
SST Energy: Three Power Modules And One Sanitised Story
Cummins described SST Energy as a leading Rocky Mountain contract driller that designed, engineered and built mobile drilling platforms at a 17-acre facility in Casper, Wyoming. Each rig needed at least three diesel-powered drilling power modules. Every module could supply 1,400 horsepower, or 1,104 mechanical kilowatts. Together they powered the lighting, drilling equipment and control systems across the site.
The duty cycle was brutal. Cummins said each engine could operate for as many as 7,500 hours a year, which is roughly 86 per cent of every hour on the calendar. SST Energy had used KTA50 generator power since 2005 and became the first regional Cummins customer to adopt the QSK50 engine with the DSG 86 alternator. Cummins wrapped the package in a one-year unlimited-hour warranty and promoted its ability to get service personnel onto a rig within 24 hours.
That makes the case study useful. This was not a loose logo swap or a dealer’s passing mention. Cummins named the engines, alternators, output, warranty, service promise and customer engineer. It praised the “full force of Cummins” and said SST Energy “puts its trust in Cummins”. The bullshit sits in what the document excludes, not in what it specifies.
The SST Energy Generator Electrocution
On 19 February 2007, an SST Energy floor hand cleaned the number two diesel-powered generator at Rig 56 near Pinedale, Wyoming. He used a wire brush on steel grating over the rear section. OSHA reported that he contacted an energised cable directly below the generator. That cable powered the radiator fan motor for the diesel engine, and the worker was electrocuted.
OSHA’s incident keywords included electric cable, cleaning, electrocution and lockout. The resulting inspection recorded three serious violations and $15,000 in penalties. That is the regulator’s account, stripped of brochure varnish: a worker, a wire brush, steel grating and live electricity where death could reach him.
Here is the necessary hard stop. OSHA did not name the generator manufacturer, model or engine in its report. SST Energy had begun using Cummins power two years earlier, but chronology cannot identify a machine. Anyone claiming this was definitely a Cummins unit would be making shit up. Cummins still chose to market the customer later, and its case study said nothing about the fatality beside a generator.
Fifty To Seventy Feet Onto The Dog House
The next relationship-era death came on 2 February 2011 near Douglas, Wyoming. An SST Energy derrickman descended the rig ladder using a climbing-assist device. OSHA said the device failed. The worker fell between 50 and 70 feet onto the rig’s dog house, entered hospital that day and died on 15 February from complications of a lung injury.
The inspection produced two serious citations and one repeat citation. Initial penalties totalled $23,400. An informal settlement reduced the total to $17,550, while all three citations remained in OSHA’s current summary. This was not an anonymous mishap floating somewhere in an industry-wide fog. It was another death on SST Energy’s record and another enforcement file carrying the word repeat.
Cummins later told readers about lower noise, reduced vibration, improved serviceability and equipment designed for harsh oilfield conditions. Those are legitimate product claims. They are also grotesquely incomplete context for a corporate character reference. A sales department can measure vibration to the decimal and still find no room for the human being who fell up to 70 feet when a climbing aid failed. That is one hell of a selective instrument panel.
The SST Energy Fatality Before Cummins
SST Energy’s OSHA history began much earlier than its relationship with Cummins. On 8 July 1992, a worker at Rig 56 near Granger, Wyoming was handling a stand of pipe as the rig tripped into the hole. OSHA said the drill pipe accelerated and the driller could not stop the travelling block. The worker tried to escape, but the block and hook struck him.
The hook landed across his upper legs and almost completely amputated them. OSHA recorded the injury as fatal. The inspection eventually carried one serious violation and one other violation, with penalties reduced from an initial $5,250 to $1,875 after an administrative law judge’s decision.
This death came 13 years before SST Energy started using Cummins generator power. It therefore says nothing about Cummins equipment and nothing about the later supplier relationship. It does say that the customer’s public safety history already contained a worker killed by drilling machinery. Cummins’ marketers did not inherit liability for that history, but they did inherit the basic duty not to turn customer due diligence into decorative bollocks.
Twelve Citations Before The Ink Dried
Wyoming OSHA opened a planned, complete inspection of SST Energy’s Rig 62 near Cheyenne on 19 June 2013. It issued citations on 5 December. The initial record listed five repeat violations, five serious violations and two other violations, with proposed penalties of $72,150. Cummins’ bulletin states that it was printed in January 2014.
Read those dates again. The regulator issued a dozen citations, including five initially labelled repeat. The next month, Cummins printed a document declaring itself the number one choice for SST Energy. We cannot prove when Cummins approved the copy or what its staff knew. We can say the enforcement file and the sales brochure passed each other like trucks on the same goddamn access road.
The final numbers were lower, and hiding that would be dishonest. An informal settlement deleted two repeat citations and one serious citation. OSHA’s current summary records three repeat, four serious and two other violations, with final penalties of $10,460. The case closed in August 2014. Settlement changed the count and the money; it did not magically turn the remaining repeat and serious citations into confetti.
The surviving items covered areas that belong at the centre of drilling safety. The list reached overhead cranes, fire prevention, hoisting lines, confined spaces, abrasive-wheel machinery, ladders and platforms, electrical equipment and hazard communication. This was the operating environment in which Cummins advertised rugged modules, comprehensive support and trust. The engines got a maintenance interval. The customer’s record got shoved behind the fucking switchboard.
The Well That Wandered
A separate federal court dispute adds another angle, but it needs careful labels. In 2007, Patmos Energy hired SST Energy to drill a coal-bed methane well. A later court order recited that the rig had power issues on the second day, delaying work. The drill string became stuck three times, surveys showed significant deviation and Patmos abandoned the well on 12 November.
Patmos alleged that SST Energy failed to provide all specified equipment, supplied equipment that did not function properly, used an inadequately trained crew and ignored instructions. SST Energy gave a very different account. It said the well could have been corrected and completed under budget, while Patmos ran out of money and could not attract investors. Those are competing positions, not findings that SST deliberately sabotaged anything.
The judge granted SST Energy summary judgment on breach of contract, implied warranty, negligence and consequential damages, largely because the contract allocated or waived those risks. The court rejected Patmos’ late willful-and-wanton theory for both procedural and evidential reasons. However, Patmos’ claims for breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, plus declaratory relief, survived that ruling. In other words, the case was not the simple judicial kicking that either side’s publicist might fancy.
Nothing in the order identifies Cummins equipment as the source of the rig’s power trouble. Do not bolt that allegation onto the QSK50. The point is narrower and meaner: while Cummins later sold SST Energy as a showcase for dependable drilling power, a federal court record already described a job involving power trouble, stuck pipe, a wandering well and bitter allegations about equipment and crew. That is a filthy great caveat for a brochure to leave downhole.
SST Energy Worker Hours Go To Court
The machinery was not the only thing accumulating hours. In 2015, former SST Energy employee Shannon Beall filed a federal lawsuit alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. He said SST Energy paid hourly, non-exempt workers an hourly wage plus non-discretionary bonuses, but excluded those bonuses when calculating overtime. He alleged that this was a company-wide policy affecting workers who regularly exceeded 40 hours a week.
In January 2016, the court conditionally certified an FLSA collective action and allowed notice to go to potential participants. That order was an early procedural decision under a deliberately lenient standard. It did not decide that SST Energy broke the law, and this article does not pretend otherwise. The court found enough at that stage to let similarly situated workers receive notice of the alleged common pay practice.
Still, the contrast bites. Cummins celebrated engines running up to 7,500 hours a year, while workers later went to court over how SST Energy allegedly calculated their overtime hours. One figure made the sales sheet because relentless utilisation sounded heroic. The other became litigation because people, unlike diesel engines, can object when the arithmetic smells like arse.
Cummins’ Due-Diligence Disconnect
The Generator Files does not need to prove that Cummins caused SST Energy’s fatalities. It did not, on the evidence available. Nor does it need to convert allegations into verdicts or pretend initial penalties survived untouched. The actual indictment is about selection, framing and the corporate decision to use this customer as a trust prop.
By January 2014, the public record already included a 1992 rig death, a 2007 generator electrocution and a 2011 fatal fall. The Cummins relationship had begun before the latter two deaths. OSHA had also issued 12 citations only one month before the bulletin’s stated print date. Even if the marketing team knew none of it, that ignorance would reveal a piss-poor screening process. If it knew and published anyway, the omission looks worse.
Cummins could have sold the engineering without blessing the customer. It could have described output, filtration, insulation, service coverage and fuel use, then stopped. Instead, it constructed a character reference around reliability and trust. That choice drags the customer’s record into the same light as the product because Cummins itself tied the two together.
This is what customer marketing does when nobody installs a moral lockout. It energises reputation, lays polished grating over the cable and assumes readers will never look underneath. Cummins wrote that SST Energy trusted Cummins. Three workers had already put their lives into SST Energy’s rigs. Only one side made the fucking brochure.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cummins – SST Energy Corporation case history, Bulletin 4087333, printed January 2014
- OSHA – SST Energy inspection 309497824 and 2007 generator electrocution
- OSHA – Accident report 200980795, employee electrocuted while working on generator
- OSHA – SST Energy inspection 314507468 and 2011 fatal fall
- OSHA – SST Energy inspection 114616535 and 1992 travelling-block fatality
- OSHA – SST Energy planned inspection 314513425, opened in 2013
- US District Court for the District of Utah – Patmos Energy v SST Energy, summary-judgment order
- US District Court for the District of Colorado – Beall v SST Energy, conditional FLSA certification order