At 7:45 in the morning, I walked from my car into my workplace. I glanced to the right and saw a man working on the roof of a house near the school I work at. He was taking apart one part of the roof in the two-story building, but I thought two things at the time.
First, repairing the roof must have been incredibly expensive for the homeowner. Second, the roofer was just, well, on the roof. If there was one misstep, one mistake, he could fall off and at best break a leg, at worst lose his life. I couldn’t be a roofer. I’m a very clumsy person and I can see myself taking one bad step.
Unsurprisingly, roofing is the sixth most dangerous job in America. It’s an incredibly important job, as any homeowner can tell you, but there’s a reason most homeowners don’t go onto roofs and fix it themselves.
But the real most dangerous job in America isn’t what you’d expect.
Logging
Personal injury attorneys from Agruss Law Firm analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find the jobs with the most fatal injuries per 100,000 workers.
In the U.S., logging workers had the highest rate of fatal injury. They had 82.2 deaths per 100,000 workers, which makes sense when you think about it. Trees can fall in the wrong direction and are tall and heavy enough to kill when they’re being cut down. According to the National Traumatic Occupational Fatalities Surveillance System, between 1980–1989, the fatality rate of loggers was 23 times that of all U.S. workers. Between 2010 to mid-2020, there were 314 logging fatalities, and those who died were overwhelmingly male. Their median age was 43, and the three states with the most logging deaths were West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina.
I have a huge tree in my front yard that had to have branches cut to avoid protruding into the house and the power lines. It was planted some time almost half a decade ago as a Christmas tree that went out of control, and it certainly requires professionals to cut down, or else it will destroy the whole house or block traffic on the road for hours. I am certainly not looking forward to the expense, but if done wrong, it can result in significant safety concerns or just destroy the house.
A sheer look at the size of some trees cut down by loggers, and the speed at which the tree falls, make it very unsurprising that the profession is so dangerous. You can very easily see how one tree can cause a domino effect of other trees falling in directions that are hazardous to loggers.
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For loggers, however, the Agruss Law Firm notes that not all logging jobs are created equally in terms of danger. The “fallers,” who are responsible for cutting trees with hand-held chainsaws, face the greatest chance of death and danger.
Why being a faller is so dangerous
A quick Google search of “why being a faller is so dangerous” logs the Faller Logging Safety guide from the Oregon Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation. The guide brilliantly notes that “trees kill,” but also goes on to illustrate and talk about all the various ways fallers can die.
The biggest hazard cited by the guide is snags, which are dead or dying trees that are still standing. In Washington County, there was a 52-year-old logger killed in 2003 from the dead top of a snag breaking off and falling on him. The faller wasn’t necessarily inexperienced either — he had been working as a logger for over 30 years.
These were rare instances, but not too rare. The guide recommends never working under a hung tree and making the removal of hung trees a major priority for loggers because they are so hazardous. Trees that fall can also hit other trees, which can fall in unexpected directions.
Other hazards for fallers include kickbacks, which is when a tree jumps over a stump and toward the faller, and the falling zone, the hazardous area around the case of a falling tree.
Certain areas are even more dangerous for loggers, including mountainous areas or rough, steep terrain, like Colorado or the Appalachian Mountains.
It’s not only falling trees that kill loggers. It’s accidental contact with the dangerous equipment fallers use, including chainsaws and logging machines. According to Jeff Mulhollem at Penn State University, some loggers also die due to falling from a high elevation.
Takeaways
Logging is essential since it provides us with timber, and we need wood for construction materials, flooring, furniture, and a whole lot more. I knew logging was unsafe before, but I didn’t realize it was that unsafe.
Besides logging, most of the ten most dangerous jobs in America are blue-collar jobs that often don’t require a college education, including farmers, ranchers, truck drivers, iron and steel workers, and fishers. None of them are what we would consider well-paying jobs. The highest paying job on the list is being a pilot — the third most dangerous job in America with a fatality rate of 55.5 per 100,000.
On the left, logging might not be the most popular profession because of the environmentalist movement and concerns about climate change and deforestation. However, loggers are just like any of us, trying to make ends meet the best way we know how.
It’s a job that can be made safer the same way any job can be made safer: breaks to reduce fatigue, properly maintained equipment, and making sure safety procedures are followed.
It’s definitely not something I could do.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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