The Most Dangerous Job In America




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.

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.