Fatality Rate by Occupation

Several people were surprised last week at a list I found on the 10 most dangerous jobs - as measured by fatality rates by occupation. Many questions arose as to why some occupations that were expected to have high fatality rates (military, police, firemen) were not on the list. So I spent some time and researched it.

In the process I found the data for 2010, as shown in this photo. Notice that in 2010, police have crept up to #10 on the list, while firemen are still outside the top 10. Fishermen and loggers are still 10 times more likely to die on the job than either police or firemen. I can understand their inclusion on the list, as well as pilots, miners, roofers, and maybe even truck drivers...but was shocked to find farming as being particularly dangerous!

I also looked into why our military personnel are not included on the list and found it is because they don't include them in the statistics. So I poked around for a little information on just where they would fall if they WERE included. I found one stat that said from 1980 - 2002, a military member had a 0.0892% chance of dying on the job. That is the same as 89.2 deaths per 100,000 employees, which would put them at #3 on the list - behind fishermen and loggers, but ahead of pilots. That would also push the police out of the top 10 again.

I then became curious as to what the death rate is in the most dangerous part of the military (I think): those serving in Iraq. I found a stat from 2003-2006, which stated the death rate was 392 per 100,000 which would of course be #1 on the list. However, we haven't limited any other occupation by region, so I bet we could drive a few of those numbers higher also if we cherry-picked the most dangerous areas for each of those occupations. Interesting stuff.