Mine Disaster

I hate reading about coal mine disasters. Having worked underground, I can identify with the emotions of the people involved. When you work in a mine, you are trained and trained and trained for safety. But there is no way you can anticipate some of the problems that will occur. You can’t predict an earthquake. You can’t anticipate an unrecorded oil well location (which is what flooded that mine in West Virginia a couple of years ago). You never have a great idea of the integrity of the rock you are digging into. A friend of mine worked in a gold mine in Durango, CO where they “glory holed” (punch through) into a lake. Needless to say, the lake flooded the mine.

But reading about this mine made me wonder what are the most dangerous occupations. As with everything these days, it seems as if the Internet is your friend. A quick Google gave me this link, with this table:

The 10 most dangerous jobs by fatality rate are:

Rank	Occupation	Deaths/100k	Total Deaths
1	Logging workers	92.4	85
2	Aircraft pilots	92.4	109
3	Fishers and fishing workers	86.4	38
4	Structural iron and steel workers	47	31
5	Refuse and recyclable material collectors	43.2	35
6	Farmers and ranchers	37.5	307
7	Roofers	34.9	94
8	Electrical power line installers/repairers	30	36
9	Driver/sales workers and truck drivers	27.6	905
10	Taxi drivers and chauffeurs	24.2	67

Taxi drivers? Who knew. I guess it is because the US 42,636 people were killed in vehicle accidents in 2004 (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/RNotes/2005/809897.pdf)

The other interesting conclusion that I drew from this chart is that there are not really many more pilots in this country than loggers (91,991 loggers vs 117,965 pilots)

And here is a little tidbit from the report I linked to above:

“Fatal injuries from being struck by objects jumped 12 percent...that is now the third most common fatal event, surpassing homicide on the job, which dropped 9 percent to 551. That continued a steep decline from a peak of 1,080 on-the-job murders in 1994.”

“on-the-job murders”???

I guess I am glad that I worked underground afterall.