Gas Leak Victims Described as Close-Knit Team : Deaths: After one worker collapsed in well, two others jumped in to help but were overcome, witnesses say.

Speaking quietly in a voice tinged with grief, Cal Hoskins recalled Thursday how his son, Jason, had always wanted to follow his footsteps into the oil fields.

On Wednesday, Hoskins watched helplessly at the oil field outside Ventura where he had worked for 17 years as paramedics tried unsuccessfully to save his son after a deadly leak of hydrogen sulfide gas.

“Someone asked me to hold the IV,” the father said. “That was all I could do for him.”

Jason Hoskins, 22, was one of three oil workers who died from the gas leak, an incident that has raised questions about the safety precautions used on the field leased by Vintage Petroleum about 10 miles north of Ventura.

The rules of the oil fields tell workers to back away when the rotten-egg stench of hydrogen sulfide emanates from a well. But in this case, the bond of a close-knit team proved stronger than the rules.

After Jason Hoskins collapsed in the well, two other workers employed by Pride Petroleum of Ventura to drill the well jumped in to save him, only to be overcome themselves, according to witnesses’ accounts.

Four other men who tried to help were hospitalized with breathing problems, caused when the deadly gas deprived their bodies of needed oxygen.

To Cal Hoskins, a 25-year veteran of the oil fields, Wednesday’s tragedy represents a “textbook case” of heroic instinct and camaraderie overtaking safety procedures.

“Everyone wants to go and help their buddy because that’s just the way it is,” Hoskins said. “Hydrogen sulfide gas doesn’t usually take just one.”

Wednesday, the lethal gas also claimed the life of Sean David Harris, an ambitious young man described by his roommate as “Mr. Oil.”

Harris, 26, had worked for the firm since 1986 and “was on his way up the ladder” with the company, said Don Gandy, a Pride supervisor who roomed with Harris in Oxnard. “He was gung-ho.”

The gas also killed Ronald Johnson, 24, a new father who was planning a wedding.

“We planned on living together for the rest of our lives,” said Shannon O’Toole, Johnson’s fiancee. “We planned on having more children.”

O’Toole and Johnson lived in Ventura with their 6-month-old son, Tyler. “His son meant the world to him,” O’Toole said as she began to cry. “He wanted to teach all kinds of things to him. The only think that’s keeping me here on this earth, and not going with him, is his son.”

Jason Hoskins was also about to become a father. But he will never see his first child, due Sept. 26. “It’s all I have left of him,” said his wife, Tiffany, occasionally crying as she sat in the family’s living room.

She recalled the night before the accident, when the family watched a television movie about Alaskan oil fields. And she remembered what her husband said about hydrogen sulfide.

“You can smell it like rotten eggs,” she recalled him saying. “After awhile you don’t smell it at all. And then you’re dead.”

Jason Hoskins started working at Pride Petroleum a year ago. His father, who worked for Vintage, got him the job through an old friend, Toby Thrower.

It was Thrower who broke the news to Cal Hoskins on Wednesday.

When Cal Hoskins received a phone call just after noon about the oil field accident, he sensed that his son had fallen victim to the deadly gas.

Hoskins ran out to his truck and raced up the Ventura Freeway to the oil lease where he had worked from 1972 to 1989.

Before he could reach the crush of paramedics and firefighters, Thrower, his son’s supervisor, tried to stop him.

“Don’t go up there. You don’t want to go,” Thrower told him.

His son and two friends, Thrower told him, had been overcome by deadly hydrogen sulfide gas in the cellar of an old well.

Water had begun gushing out of the well, so Jason Hoskins had gone into the cellar to shut off a valve, Thrower told him. When he passed out, Johnson went down to try to save his friend.

After Johnson succumbed to the fumes, Thrower, 55, said he ran to call for help. Before he returned, however, the third member of the crew, Sean Harris, had also jumped into the cellar and passed out.

By the time Cal Hoskins arrived, the three men had suffered cardiac arrest. Paramedics were working, in vain, to revive the three young friends.

“They were a team,” Hoskins said sadly. “They’d been working together for a year now and they were all tight. They were just kids.”

Thrower himself later grew ill from the fumes and received special oxygen treatment at St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital on Wednesday night.

He arrived disoriented and despondent, said Tom Millington, the physician who heads the hospital’s hyperbaric medicine department.

“You actually had to press him and say ‘Breathe,’ ” Millington said. “We had to keep waking him up to keep him with the program.”

After receiving some oxygen from a tank, Thrower began to feel better and asked to leave the hospital. He also asked for a cigarette, Millington said.

Instead, Thrower underwent treatment in the hyperbaric chamber, a pressurized cylinder that allows doctors to administer doses of pure oxygen.

Thrower was released from the hospital Thursday morning and returned to his Oak View home. Feeling better physically, he remained distraught about the accident, said his wife, Shirley.

“It’s hard on everybody,” she said.

Jeff Sandoval, 34, of Bakersfield, working at the site for Schlumberger Well Services, also suffered respiratory problems from inhaling the deadly gas.

Sandoval declined to comment, but Millington said that Sandoval had been lowered into the well on a harness, wrapped his arms around one of the victims and pulled him out. Aware of the gas leak, Sandoval held his breath, Millington said.

“It saved his life,” Millington said. “If he had breathed he would have been the fourth victim.”

Even so, he suffered respiratory problems severe enough that his breathing nearly stopped at Ventura County Medical Center. After treatment in the hyperbaric chamber, he was released Thursday.

Two other victims, Derek Abbott, 18, of Oak View, and Jerry Walker, 41, of Bakersfield, remained at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in fair condition Thursday.

J.B. Wilmeth, the doctor overseeing their treatment, said both had been examined for brain damage, a possible side effect of exposure to hydrogen sulfide.

Beyond any physical damage, the survivors suffer the inevitable emotional trauma from seeing co-workers fall. Cal Hoskins, himself, said he wondered if he would be able to return to his life’s work in the oil fields.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to drive by that well.

“But it’s also my life.”

Staff writer Jason Grant contributed to this story.

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