Date of Award

January 2021

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Public Health (MPH)

Department

School of Public Health

First Advisor

Nicole Deziel

Abstract

The oil and gas drilling activities had greatly developed in Ohio in past decade. Unconventional natural gas development is a newly developed technology, which requires more heavy-truck trips in the drilling process. Limited studies investigated the association between drilling activities and increased rate of traffic accidents. Ecological study was conducted to analyze the association. Number of unconventional wells were obtained as exposure variable from Ohio department of natural source, and the data of traffic crashes were collected as outcome variable from Ohio department of public safety. Other variables including sociodemographic data and spatial distribution of primary roads were examining as confounders. Poisson regression models were used to conduct multivariable regression analysis. Continuous, binary and categorical variables were defined to indicate the exposure. The fitting result showed that the traffic incident rate ratio estimate for well number was 0.9944 (0.9939, 0.9949) for continuous model (per 10 wells), 0.9247 (0.9210, 0.9284) for binary model (drilled vs not drilled), 0.9460 (0.9417, 0.9503) and 0.8629 (0.8561, 0.8699) for categorical model (medium vs low drilling intensity, high vs low drilling intensity, respectively). The study also found counties with primary roads across had higher traffic incident rate compared to counties without primary roads across.

Comments

This is an Open Access Thesis.

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