Originally published at: These are the most dangerous jobs in the United States - Boing Boing
…
9 Likes
Conspicuously absent: well, I won’t spoil it. OK, I will.
“Police officer” doesn’t even make the top 10 in the official BLS statistics.
35 Likes
US President is a surprisingly dangerous job.
17.7% death rate, equally from assassination and natural causes.
19 Likes
I love the use of the term “Miscellaneous Farm Worker”, as in my mind that means there must be a class that is “Specific Farm Worker”, and I can’t help but wonder which role I play vs. my Wife on our farm?
(Let’s be honest - she’s probably both the Specific and the Miscellaneous and I’m really more just the Occasional.)
14 Likes
I don’t think “natural causes” count in the context of work-related deaths though. The median age of US Presidents at inauguration is 55, so a nontrivial number of that group would be expected to die of natural causes over the following 4–8 years regardless of what job they had. Especially during the first century and a half before modern medicine really got its shit together.
11 Likes
If natural causes don’t count, then 8.9% of Presidents have died in office from assassination. I would rather be logging. (I’d actually prefer a better sample size)
5 Likes
I think it would be hard to conclusively identify “natural causes”, though. What about job-related stress? I think an argument could be made that FDR died sooner than he would have, as a direct result of his presidential activities. (I’m not sure the same could be said of, say, William Henry Harrison.)
6 Likes
I don’t think I ever really appreciated how much work my dad did. When I say he was a mechanic (everything from small engines up to heavy diesel rigs) and logged with his father and brother, I don’t mean in two different parts of his life. For all intents and purposes, he held two full time jobs for at least 20 years. (Add in the fact that he was also an alcoholic during this time period and you may see an interesting vicious circle.)
None of that excuses his abusing mom and me, of course, but it does make me think about how there’s often more to a story than we’re seeing, no matter how close to it we are.
It also explains a bit about why I was already estranged from him by the time I was 18. I had been emancipated (read: left on my own by both parents) when I was 16, eventually moving in with my mom and her boyfriend when she came back to the area. (Think roommates instead of parental relationship.)
The specific timeline is a little blurry, but I got a call from my aunt (dad’s sister) that he was in the hospital and I should really go see him now. I was reluctant, but hearing some of the details I decided she might be right.
If I was 18, dad would have been 43, making my grandfather somewhere around 68. Grandfather was long past the point where he should have been operating a chainsaw for any length of time, but they were shorthanded that day, so he was felling trees. His blade got stuck and being the impatient type, instead of turning it off before trying to extract it, he just started jerking back on the chainsaw, freeing it just as dad was coming up to help.
When the blade was free, the chain roared back into operation, contributing to the problem of controlling the machine. The tip of the blade sliced dad across his lower abdomen, missing his liver and other internal organs by mere millimeters. (Decades later I can joke that I’m not sure if his liver would have been destroyed by such an encounter, protected as it was by all the alcohol.)
He didn’t die that day, but that wasn’t even the first time he’d almost been killed while logging. He’d survived being in a base that was shelled in Vietnam, having at least two trees dropped on the cab of his skidder, car accidents, and I don’t even know what else, but the chainsaw was the closest he’d come dying at that point.
I wish I could say he stopped drinking after that; after our very uneasy and brief reunion in the hospital. I wish I could even say that we reconciled after that and tried to be family again. Unfortunately him getting the help he needed to be sober was at least another decade afterwards. Recovery from having one’s abdomen sliced open like that apparently is not conducive to avoiding substances that make you black out completely.
Grandfather did retire from logging after that day, though. It took dad and my uncle several more years to get out from under it, since they both were now responsible for the equipment and various contracts.
TL;DR? Don’t go into logging.
29 Likes
Sure. although the list is short, it’s easy to see what the 4 cases labeled as natural causes are:
- Zachary Taylor - food poisoning (cholera morbus)
- William Henry Harrison - pneumonia. The bloodletting didn’t help.
- Warren G. Harding - heart problem and pneumonia. Sounds like COPD and cardiac arrest to me.
- FDR - massive stroke
Maybe the stroke and the pneumonia are caused by job stress. Harding’s health problems were well documented as preexisting. Food poisoning is not usually considered so much of an occupational hazard, but I suppose one has to wonder if someone who isn’t president would attend so many dinner events.
I think the lower bound is 4 deaths (assassination) and upper bound is 7 deaths caused by occuptation. But I think it’s closer to 4 than 7.
6 Likes
Also the dangerous bits of being a police officer involve poor cardio-vascular health and/or car accidents (including those during daily commutes). Any job involving driving a vehicle puts it up there as a dangerous job. In terms of odds of being murdered on the job, retail jobs in general are about on par with police officers, with some specific types of retail being more dangerous. In terms of being subjected to violence, being a nurse is more dangerous, at least in some states, as is being a taxi driver in some areas.
I’ve seen stats for workplace deaths where for the police they counted heart attacks, covid, etc. as “line of duty” deaths. I don’t think any other profession gets those included in the stats, though…
11 Likes
I can only think of one example where a police officer got less consideration for the dangers of the job than most civilians would…
18 Likes
Yes, in fact, COVID was the leading cause of in the line of duty deaths for 2 or 3 years. Before that, car accidents were the leading cause of in the line of duty deaths, and the vast majority of those were not while in pursuit. It does look like this year, gunfire is the leading cause, but I’m not sure what all that includes. I wouldn’t be surprised if it includes suicide. I also wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t.
11 Likes
Harrison’s pneumonia was famously work-(and stupidity)related. He insisted on giving a two-hour plus inaugural speech in freezing rain with insufficient clothes for the cold. He quickly fell sick and died about a month later.
7 Likes
And teachers…
9 Likes
He didn’t get sick until a couple of weeks after the inauguration. I think the prevailing theory these days is septic shock due to cholera or typhoid. The bloodletting and laxative treatments didn’t help, either.
ETA: For those interested in such things:
9 Likes
I had no idea that getting cold and wet can give you pneumonia. I thought you had to have a bacterial or viral infection for that to happen.
1 Like
Fortunately, with the US being so enlightened, the most dangerous jobs are also the the ones with the best pay and health care. Wait, I’m receiving a note…hmm, it seems it’s just the opposite. That makes no damn sense.
11 Likes
… unfortunately, there are viruses and bacteria everywhere, and anything (like for instance hypothermia) that fucks up our immune response will facilitate us getting sick 
6 Likes
Something feels wrong about these statistics, in particular:
Doing the math:
105 * 100,000 / 57.5 = 182,609 full-time roofers
72 * 100,000 / 35.9 = 200,577 full-time aircraft pilots and flight engineers
Is that right? There are really more pilots & flight engineers than roofers in the U.S.?
Edit: I realize they are referring to FTEs, not full-time individuals, but it still doesn’t make sense to me.
1 Like
Wow, thanks for sharing. Abuse and trauma are generational, so good on you for doing what you can to break the cycle, but I really hear you when you say
So many people, both men and women, have been worked to the bone simply to provide a better life than the one they knew. Then the frustration and exhaustion kicks in and they end up replicating the same trauma their parents inflicted on them. It takes a tremendous amount of will, empathy and perspective to overcome generational trauma and even then we are compelled to live out some of our trauma on those we love as we work through it. The hope is that love, empathy and plenty of therapy win out, but it’s never easy.
Even if it wasn’t a full resolution, I’m glad you had the opportunity to be with your father in that moment of vulnerability, as tragic as it must have been. I still struggle with holding my father in a balanced perspective and have tried my best (with strong prodding from my therapist) to see him as the same fragile, unique human I try to see my kids as every day. It’s never easy and I wish you the best. 
11 Likes
