America's 'Death Highway' and the startling reason fatalities have surged: 'You're just brain dead'

Traffic across the barren West Texas landscape began skyrocketing around a decade ago - with barreling 18-wheelers, flatbeds and tanker trailers snaking as far as the eye could see along a two-lane road through formerly sleepy prairieland.

The Lone Star State was experiencing its latest oil boom, and the Permian Basin – home to a sparsely populated and unforgiving terrain – had become ground zero for fortune seekers, conglomerates, transport companies, roughnecks and felons alike.

The exponential industry growth saw the number of rigs in the region jump from 92 in May 2009 to 565 in October 2014, clogging woefully unprepared roads.   

And as US 285 became the heartbeat of the bustling industries, it also earned a chilling nickname among locals: ‘Death Highway.’

The stretch from the New Mexico border to Fort Stockton, until that point, was where 'tumbleweeds and cattle loitered along the fence line,' writer and Permian Basin native Christian Wallace explained in his 2019 podcast Boomtown.

'Now that it’s become the nation’s, and perhaps the world’s, most critical artery for crude oil, it looks like a scene from Mad Max,' he added.

A devastating 839 crashes were recorded between 2016 and 2021 on the northern stretch of 285, from Pecos to the New Mexico border, which saw a 34.5 percent increase in traffic during that same timeframe. 

The southern portion from Pecos to Fort Stockton recorded 540 crashes from 2015 to 2019, including ten deaths – with the road experiencing a 21 percent increase in traffic growth, according to Texas Department of Transportation (TxDot) figures.

Despite comprising less than 2 percent of the state’s population, the Permian Basin was accounting for 12 percent of all traffic deaths by 2019, Wallace wrote in Texas Monthly, describing his own perilous journey on the ‘notorious’ road.

‘I had taken 285 north out of Pecos toward the drilling frenzy happening around the ghost town of Orla, near the New Mexico state line,’ wrote Wallace, whose podcast inspired Paramount’s new hit Landman, starring Billy Bob Thornton.

‘The procession of trucks and big rigs that dwarfed my 1500 GMC pickup grunted its way to Orla bumper-to-bumper, coughing black exhaust and stirring up clouds of caliche dust so thick I had to turn on my wipers. 

'About halfway there, a welder’s truck flew past me and something - a metal rod, best I could tell - came off the truck and struck my windshield, cracking it in half.’

In 2022, TxDot recorded 26,031 crashes across the Permian Basin, resulting in 394 fatalities and 889 serious injuries. 

In contrast, before the explosion of oil and gas activities, the region in 2011 saw 18,019 crashes - only 169 of them fatal, according to figures from Texas A&M. 

Just last month, Death Highway was listed as the third most dangerous roadway in America, along with nearby 302, according to data compiled from more than 1.3million commercial drivers using Motive – a company built around electronic logging devices for vehicles and fleet management.

Highway 285 and 302 in Pecos recorded 32.17 collisions per 1,000 vehicles, Motive reported – calling the roadway 'a magnet for oilfield traffic and hazardous weather.’

Flames and plumes of black smoke have become common sights along ‘Death Highway’ and other overcrowded Permian Basin roads, where truck-heavy traffic backs up for miles as first responders and life flights tend to accident victims.

According to a study earlier this year commissioned by the Permian Road Safety Coalition, a nonprofit founded in 2015 to address the escalating road crisis, crashes in the region are twice as likely to be fatal than in the rest of Texas.

Nearly 15 crashes per 1,000 resulted in at least one death in the Permian Basin, compared to the statewide average of seven per 1,000. 

US 285 features frequently on a Facebook page that’s cropped up to monitor the area’s road dangers: West Texas Oil Field Update, which was created in an effort to alleviate further congestion as a result of vehicle incidents and bring a heightened awareness to the issues observed while driving.

‘Infrastructure not designed to accommodate the amount of traffic, distractions, fatigue, a lack of care and concern by motorists, and driving cultures from all over the United States meeting in one relatively small area has created very dangerous driving conditions,’ the page laments.

State officials have been racing to address the issues that materialized almost overnight in a previously unruffled corner of Texas. 

Eric Lykins, TxDot Odessa District engineer, grew up in the central part of the state and had visited the Permian Basin in the past.

But when he arrived to work on the infrastructure two and a half years ago, even he was taken aback by the frenzy.

‘There’s nothing like the experience out here,’ he told DailyMail.com. 

‘I just have a heightened awareness, constantly trying to watch what’s happening around me, because we have blowouts on trucks; you have tires that maybe come off of vehicles and hit the other vehicle; you have, of course, our work zones and just getting through those.'

‘It’s not a comfortable drive,' he continued. 'And I tell people, if you really want to get the true experience of coming to the Permian Basin, you need to drive 285 in the mornings when the crews are going out.' 

'You need to drive I-20 from Odessa to Pecos between 6 and 7 in the morning, or drive 3012 from Odessa going towards Kermit – because it’s going to be two solid lanes … just both lanes are going to be full, and it’s just headlights and tail lights as far each direction as you can see.

‘With the mix of the trucks and things, you just have to really be paying attention to what’s going on around you,' he explained.

Accident statistics, however, indicate that not everyone is following that advice.

Instead, driver distraction, phone usage, operating vehicles under the influence and simple exhaustion have all contributed to the road's ‘Death Highway’ reputation.

'When you've been in the oilfield for ten to 11 days, working 14 hours a day, you just become so tired that you're not thinking straight,' longtime trucker James ‘Whiskey’ Stroup told Bloomberg in a 2018 interview. 'You're just brain dead, because you're living off four to six hours of sleep.'

Midland County Sheriff Gary Painter, who worked in regional law enforcement for nearly 50 years before his 2019 death, noted to the outlet how industry demands often meant that drivers were overworking themselves to make six-figure salaries.

'Some of them are speeding, some of them are too tired to be driving, but they're making money,' he said. 'Some of these guys are just trying to make as much money as they can.'

Then there are the other associated behavioral risks. 

Lykins pointed out that of 125 traffic fatalities in the 12 counties of his Odessa district last year, ‘roughly 45 of those were unrestrained occupants, which means the person that died didn’t have on a seat belt.’

In addition, alcohol and drug usage is rampant among drivers working hard and playing harder. 

Odessa topped the list of US cities with the highest rate of fatal drunk driving accidents, according to a study by a Philadelphia law firm using 2018-2022 data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Nearby Midland came in sixth.

While public safety campaigns are endeavoring to address the human factors contributing to the dangers, engineers and other state workers such as Lykins are desperately scrambling to expand road infrastructure.

‘The fact is that when the hydraulic fracking industry took off around 2012, the traffic volumes out here just made an exponential leap,’ he said. 

‘For people that aren’t familiar with delivering these large infrastructure projects, it’s not something that happens overnight … the unfortunate reality is, it took almost from 2012 to 2017 – took at least five years even – to get the first project started.'

The main goal is widening the roads from one to two lanes in each direction, and progress has already significantly reduced the fatality rate in his district to the lowest number since 2010. 

TxDot has been building Super 2 highways where they have  extended passing lanes that alternate, depending on which direction you’re going.

'So let’s say you’re going northbound, you’ll have a roughly two-to three-mile passing lane for that northbound direction, and then when that passing lane drops off, you’re back down to one lane. Then the opposite side of the roadway, the southbound has a passing lane for their direction,' he explained.

The aim is to reduce the frequent accidents caused by passenger cars or other vehicles trying to overtake slower-moving commercial vehicles – or failing to see trucks, for example, making sudden turns and stops.

‘There are drivers that take extreme risk – passing in no passing zones, passing in blind curves, passing going up hills,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘We have a lot of head-on collisions just from drivers trying to pass when it’s not safe.’

For Lykins, who despises the nickname Death Highway, it has become a ‘personal’ mission to make US 285 and other overloaded roads of the Permian Basin safer.

‘We’re all fully invested’ he said. ‘It means something to us – and people expect us to be making things better.

‘We take it serious.’