There Are No Accidents

Introduction: The Crisis of Accidental Death

Every year in the United States, more than 173,000 people die from what are commonly called accidents. This staggering number is higher than the death tolls from strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, or diabetes. If a fully loaded jumbo jet fell from the sky every single day, killing everyone on board, the public outcry would be deafening. Yet because these deaths happen one or two at a time through falls, house fires, or car crashes, they rarely make the national news. We often use the word accident as a way to suggest that these events are just a random part of life that no one can control.

The reality of who dies in these events reveals a deeper story about power and inequality. People living in poverty and members of minority groups die at significantly higher rates than the rest of the population. Black people die in house fires at twice the rate of white people, and Indigenous people are nearly three times as likely to be killed by a car while walking. In the poorest states, the rate of accidental death is often double that of wealthier neighboring states. This data proves that whether a person survives a mistake heavily depends on their access to safe housing, well-designed streets, and protected workplaces.

Author Jessie Singer experienced this loss personally when her best friend, Eric Ng, was killed by a drunk driver. At the sentencing, the driver described the event as an accident that simply happened, a phrasing that seemed to remove his own responsibility from the act. This highlights a major conflict in how society uses the word to describe tragedies. On one hand, an accident is seen as a random, unpredictable fluke that could happen to anyone. On the other hand, experts can predict with high accuracy exactly how many people will die on the roads or from overdoses each year.

Public health experts have long tried to change this fatalistic mindset. Many researchers refuse to use the word accident entirely, preferring the term unintentional injury. They argue that calling a crash an accident implies it was an unpreventable act of nature. In the mid-20th century, the first administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration kept a swear jar in his office to penalize anyone who used the word accident to describe a car crash. These experts believed that if society stops viewing these deaths as random, engineers can start designing better cars and safer roads that protect people when they make mistakes.

Despite these efforts, the number of accidental deaths has skyrocketed by over 100 percent since the early 1990s. This rise is partly because the government systems meant to protect the public are severely underfunded or ignored. The government spends far more money researching rare diseases than it does on preventing the injuries that are the leading cause of death for Americans under age forty-five. Furthermore, these preventable deaths cost the country over one trillion dollars a year in lost wages and medical bills. Because the public often picks up the tab for these costs through taxes and insurance premiums, corporations face very little financial pressure to fix the unsafe conditions they create.