Why Do Federal Airport Screeners Have the Highest Injury Rates?

[rachmaninoff]

Federal airport screeners continue to have the highest injury rate among the nation's workers nearly two years after the Transportation Security Administration discovered the problem.

The rate of screeners injured on the job fell in 2005 to 29% from 36% the previous year, according to the latest TSA figures. But the rate remains higher than any of about 600 job categories tracked by the Labor Department.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060111/ts_usatoday/airportscreenersstrainssprainshighest"

Who knew?

 

[matthyaouw]

I'd still rather be that than an Alaskan king crab fisherman.

 

[rachmaninoff]

I'd rather be that than an Alaskan king crab, fished.

 

[DaveC426913]

Well, the misuse of the word 'danger' is key here...

The injuries they are talking about are

...strains, sprains and spasms...

I'll bet Alaskan King Crab fisherman (those that live) dream about mere sprains...

 

[fourier jr]

dang everybody said what i was going to say...

i bet loggers have it bad also

 

[daveb]

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for 2004 the highest rate was agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, followed closely by mining.

 

[Moonbear]

Yeah, I'd say there's quite a bit of difference between pulling a muscle in your back and sustaining a life-threatening injury.

 

[fasterthanjoao]

yep, it doesn't really seem to me to be any use calculating figures like that. other jobs are indeed more dangerous, even though this may be the one (of those sampled) with the highest injury rate.

but then, who's to say what counts as an injury, paper cuts? broken nail? stubbed toe?

could be linked to the average IQ of the workers i'll bet..

 

[Danger]

Well, the misuse of the word 'danger' is key here...

Yes. Let's not be bandying it about without due care and attention.

 

[Gale]

i once read that being president was the most dangerous... the percent of presidents who've died in office was bigger than that for any other occupation...

 

[chroot]

Or maybe the screeners are just a bunch of whiners who realize they can exploit the system that employs them, particularly since there are no so many rules now that make it difficult for them to be fired.

- Warren

 

[DaveC426913]

Yes. Let's not be bandying it about without due care and attention.

I wasn't admonishing anyone. I was merely pointing out that when it comes to dangerous, sprains and spasms don't really cut it.

 

[Danger]

Sorry, Dave; that was supposed to be an indignant retort to having my name taken in vain. I guess that I should have used the grin smilie.

 

[DaveC426913]

ten characters

 

[zoobyshoe]

but then, who's to say what counts as an injury, paper cuts? broken nail? stubbed toe?

If you count any kind of injury, then a job like maching tool operator probably has a 100% injury rate per day. Every place I worked people had to stop at least once a day to pull a tiny metal chip out of their hand. Some of these are so fine you can barely see them. Dial calipers make an excellent pair of tweezers for this.

All chips produced by all machine tools are super sharp. It's almost like working around masses of broken glass. Turning some metals on the lathe in some set ups produces a tangled blob of serrated razor wire. Milling with a good, sharp end mill leaves a pile of sharp, pointy chips more dangerous than a porcupine. Mostly, though, people cut themselves on the burr left on the corners of the parts themselves.

 

[scott1]

I thought it would a South Korean poltican because:
1)They have to worry about the Nerighbors to the North with Nukes
2)They have to worry about getting assanited by there neghibors
3)they have to worry about getting into fights with other polticans during a legistion seccion
4)There Neghibors to the north might try to invade.
5)Google Earth will tell terroist there exact postion on Earth so terroist can attack.

 

[DaveC426913]

but then, who's to say what counts as an injury,

Actually, that's an easy one. Anything that results in lost work time or productivity - at least enough to show up on the books.

Stubbed toes and paper cuts may take a few minutes to kiss and make better, but that doesn't go on the books.

 

[Mk]

I thought it would a South Korean poltican because:
1)They have to worry about the Nerighbors to the North with Nukes
2)They have to worry about getting assanited by there neghibors
3)they have to worry about getting into fights with other polticans during a legistion seccion
4)There Neghibors to the north might try to invade.
5)Google Earth will tell terroist there exact postion on Earth so terroist can attack.

Do you purposefully use the wrong there just to annoy me?

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I don't remember making that report...


Any how, seriously how many time sin your life have you wanted to throttle one of those people? I'd say it's a pretty dangerous job. People are grumpy about long lines at the airport and then they have some weirdo going through their things and asking them to take off their shoes and what not.

 

[Astronuc]

Federal airport screeners continue to have the highest injury rate among the nation's workers nearly two years after the Transportation Security Administration discovered the problem.

I believe that the article refers to those who screen (X-ray) the heavy bags, which are checked, not those which are carryon. The bag weight limit has been reduced from 70 lbs to 50 lbs.

It would be interesting to compare TSA statistics with those of airline baggage handlers who actually do more lifting of the bags than the TSA screeners. Many sreening systems have conveyor belts on which the bags, most of which roll, can be placed, so there is little lifting.

The problem is perhaps three-fold:
1. Inadequate training of the screeners by TSA with regard to how to handle baggage

2. The screeners do not exercise and their muscles are ill-suited to lift heavy bags. Following from #1, Weight-training should be part of the job (although TSA would probably expect any such training to be done on one's own time).

3. Improper equipment such as back-support belts or harnesses to mitigate muscle strain. Ever see the airline baggage handlers and people at places like Home Depot wearing those black or orange harnesses around there waist?

I have worked construction (and a little logging), and believe me, that is way more dangerous than handling bags. Lost fingers, broken limbs, injured/broken backs, and even death are part of the risk - but someone has to do it. Many industries have training programs designed to make workers more aware of the danger and more thoughtful about how the work is accomplished in order to minimize injury or fatality. However, some industries have little (poor) or no such training.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I have worked construction (and a little logging), and believe me, that is way more dangerous than handling bags. Lost fingers, broken limbs, injured/broken backs, and even death are part of the risk - but someone has to do it. Many industries have training programs designed to make workers more aware of the danger and more thoughtful about how the work is accomplished in order to minimize injury or fatality. However, some industries have little (poor) or no such training.

One of the really cool things about my job is that I get to see a many different types of industry, up close and personal. But every now and then I see a place that is simply hard to believe. Some of the jobs that I have passed on include:

An onion processing plant. My eyes started to water while I was still in the parking lot. It was forty degrees F inside, wet floors, an electricians nightmare, and something hundred pound buckets flying around on long chains that hung from trolleys, one of which nearly hit me in the head - oh, watch that the guy says. Many of the worker's families were sleeping in station wagons in the parking lot.

A plating plant.
Cyanide was everywhere. I mean this place was a toxic waste dump.

A plant that used many large metal-cutting machines, where many of the employees were missing a finger... or two, and... I swear... the safety manager was a one-armed guy called lefty - a casualty of the plant.

A guy at a certain potato chip plant fell into a large vat of boiling oil. Another drowned in a tower of cooking oil.

I turned down one job when warned that I was eliminating a lot of jobs and not to go up on the catwalks. Nice place!

 

[Mk]

Don't work at an oil refinery. I don't recommend it.

 

[Astronuc]

Don't work at an oil refinery. I don't recommend it.

I worked at an oil refinery in the compound and packaging department. The job was mostly unloading trucks and railroad cars of empty containers, e.g. 55 gal oil drums, and occasionally smaller drums for transmission fluid.

One time I fell out of freight car (box car) sideways and fractured a rib. The swelling was great enough, that I could not tell I broke my rib (fortunately it did not break the skin nor puncture the lung). I went to the infirmary where a doctor and nursing assistant tried but failed to get the X-ray working. I took some aspirin and put ice on the swollen area. I went back to work, in a lot of pain. But the refinery achieved 1 million man-hours without a lost time accident (a record for the plant) - because I went back to work. The day after the record was achieved, some guy got electrocuted and was sent to the hospital.

--------------------
In another funny story, I almost got fired for handling too much weight. There were three leaking drums of lubrication oil, each weighing 120 lbs (54.4 kgs). We had to move them from a shipping pallet to a sump to drain the oil off and prevent a spill on the production floor. One guys started rolling his drum, leaking oil on the floor, which I thought was pretty stupid. So I picked up my drum and started walking quickly to the sump. Guys started yelling at me to put the drum down, and the supervisor told me to stop and put down the drum and roll it, stating "You can't lift 120 lb!" I thought that was a ridiculous statement, because I was standing there in front of the supervisor quite obviously holding the drum in one arm without much effort. I explained that I routinely worked out with heavier weights. Then the supervisor explained to me that under union rules, no one was allowed to lift more than 50 lbs, and that if I did it again, I was going to be fired. When I did it again, I made sure no one was looking.

 

[Eimacman]

I have found that the most dangerous jobs are:

1) Mercury mining
2) Arctic and subarctic fishing
3) Farming
4) EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal)
5) Mining (below ground not strip mining)
6) Metal refining, including furnace lancing, etc
7) Industrial cleanup, including cleaning chemical reactors, heat exchangers etc
8) Deep sea diving ocean salvage
9) Shallow diving depths of less than 100ft
10) High-rise construction worker

And my main definition of 'hazardous' is directly based on the probability that the job in question will kill you if you had such a field of work.

Mercury mining one is constantly exposed to mercury vapor and rock fall.
Any kind of fishing exposes one to extreme weather conditions in which the probability of being rescued can be small to nil.
Farming can be extremely dangerous, I personally know of a farmer getting his arm ripped off, when he fell into a spinning PTO shaft, another fellow had a three quarter ton round bale fall off his front end loader onto him wile he was on his tractor and broke his back, he was on that tractor for ten hours before he was found, I my self suffered three broken ribs when I was trampled.
The main danger of EOD is being blown to pieces if you make a mistake, like removing a 2000lb UXB from a factory.
In mining there is the constant risk of rock fall, coke damp, and poison gas. Now you might be thinking "Neutrino detectors are located in mines how can they be that unsafe?" well that is because they are no longer being worked.
Metal refining exposes a person to lethal chemicals like cyanide and temperatures, and getting hit by a 20lb blob of white hot steel will make a mess out of you.
In industrial cleanup one can be exposed to all kinds of chemicals, and hydrolic cleaner rams can punch a hole through a person like a 90mil at point blank range, and fall risk such a falling in a 200ft tower or down a 500ft utility shaft (safety belts are rarely used).
Diving both shallow and deep exposes one to nitrogen narcosis, decompression sickness, equipment malfunction causing your mixture to being wrong (too much oxygen or helium during deep dives).
High-rise construction presents many hazards such as being crushed, falling, and being impaled on rebar.

And as I stated before I was a farmer for nearly 30 years (had to pay college expenses somehow) and getting your hands and arms occasionally slashed by barbed wire, getting tagged by a horse or cow, slipping and falling face first into a tractor drawbar, being nailed by a 2000lb bull, and having implements drop on ones person; and doing the job in rain, storm, snow, ice, flood, high wind, and blazing summer heat; wile are not common occurrences are rather likely to happen unless one is extremely vigilant and some times it is going to happen like wile running fence and your horse spooks and explodes under you and you are just lucky enough not to fall into the fence, split your skull, break your back, neck, other parts of your anatomy, or worse having 1200 pounds of frightened equine coming down on top of you are things that can just happen without the slightest indication.

Now there are other positions, jobs, and other dangerous jobs that are equally dangerous, such as being a firefighter, or an infantryman during time of war, to name a few but as I said before I believe that the measure of danger in this case is directly proportional to probability of mortality over time. If your a postman or post woman you are not very likely to die of a paper cut, unless it has anthrax on it.

 

[Andre]

Wow, that thread came from the deep. Anyway, I see that pilots are not on the list. I knew that

 

[tribdog]

doesn't seem to matter where I work or what I'm doing, I seem to get hurt all the time. So based on personal experience the most dangerous jobs are 1)blackjack dealer 2) surveyor 3) bum 4) bubblewrap testing.

 

[Math Is Hard]

I think the most dangerous job must be doing whatever Evo does.

 

[tribdog]

I think the most dangerous job must be doing whatever Evo does.

PF Moderator?

 

[Eimacman]

Andre, Tribdog, Math Is Hard

Two examples of things that occur wile having a dangerous job, involving my brother and nephew.

My brother was picking up a 5 ton coil of steel from a metal refinery near where I reside. Although these coils are small, DOT regs generaly will not allow more than one to be placed on a flatbed at a time. My brother was guiding the crane opperator, that was loading the coil when the operator misjudged the placement of the coil causing the 100 ton crane to begin to topple over. The operator dropped the coil from ten feet above the trailer and it came down missing my brother by inches. He was catapulted threw the air and landed hard on the ground. He was off work for a few days for he was slightly injured when he hit the ground and his rig suffered several thousands of dollars of damage not counting totaling a 135,000 dollar trailer which was bent into a flattened 'U'.

My nephew on the other hand was not so luckey on his work as a pyrotechnician. Even ATF agents could not figure what exactly happened. Simpley to put it something just whent off and there was a tremendous explosion. He and a frend were a few feet from ground zero, the shock wave shattered windows five miles away, cars and trucks several hundred yards away were burned down to their axles. My nephew suffered second and third dregree burns over 78% of his body and blast effects. He and his frend was on life support in the burn center ICU for nearly two months, his frend which was closer to the blast died after about a week. Although my nephew is now doing well he can never work again.

These are examples of things of what can go wrong wile working at a dangerous job.

Eimacman

 

[rootX]

PF Moderator?

and cursing from lots of people ... ---> a deadly job

 

[JasonRox]

Or maybe the screeners are just a bunch of whiners who realize they can exploit the system that employs them, particularly since there are no so many rules now that make it difficult for them to be fired.

- Warren

It's true. I have friends who work for airports and all they do is their homework.

One time my buddy never showed up for class for like 3 weeks (works full-time) and then he came back ahead of everyone!

 

[WarPhalange]

My brother was picking up a 5 ton coil of steel

See, that's why they tell you to bend your legs when you lift heavy things.

 

[Math Is Hard]

PF Moderator?

Maybe the banned crackpots are beating her up?

 

[Andre]

<serious on>

Eimacman, of the roughly 200 colleague jet pilots, I knew personally, I saw more than a dozen die on the job during my carreer, five of them were friends. You'd have lunch together one moment and see them go off for an afternoon trip, never to return home again.

Anyway the last one of those five was in 1992, (the first in 1979) after that safety records improved miraculously and fatal accidents decreased spectacularly for some reason. We had only two more fatalities in total in the RNLAF after that year, while we had 2-5 every year before that.

</serious off> So let's party.

 

[Andre]

Let me elaborate on one of them, a student of mine. At a certain point in my flying instructeur carreer I was usually assigned the most difficult cases, the weakest students. So this guy had problems in tactical formation flying on the inside of the turn to maintain level flight, which is awkward but highly necesary. Instead he used to descend to keep the lead air plane better visual, a distinct no-no in tactical low level flights.

So we had some real tough exercises but he made good progress and in the end I was confident that he 'got' it now and that he was safe to proceed. Others confirmed that, as the trainer and examiner are never the same.

About one year later he died in a crash, due to making exactly that same mistake again. That's something to get very unhappy about.

 

[turbo]

Given the medical histories of my co-workers, my time as a chemist in a pulp mill may have been pretty hazardous. The Kraft process uses alkaline chemicals (called white liquor), pressure, high temperature, etc to break wood chips down into fiber. In the process of dissolving the connective tissue, LOTS of complex organic compounds are produced, about which little is known. The extracted liquor (now called black liquor) is concentrated and is burned in chemical recovery boilers, and the resultant slag is dissolved in tanks, and the slurry (now called green liquor) is pumped back to another section of the mill to be re-calcined. All through this process (until combustion in the boiler) people get exposed to the complex organic by-products of the digestion process. There are many other chemicals used in pulp mills and paper mills too. My concern is that former co-workers a developing cancers at a pretty scary rate. Lung cancers are common as are pancreatic cancers. My former boss (and good friend) the Technical Director of the mill died of lung cancer, the Asst. Superintendent of the pulp mill lost a lung to cancer and survived for a few more years until it came back and spread, and a nice lady in her late 40s that worked on my shift in the paper mill just found out that she has inoperable lung cancer. Another fellow who worked on my shift on the paper machine has a pretty nasty form of pancreatic cancer. It seems like otherwise-healthy people who have worked in this mill are getting cancer at a much higher rate that I see in the general population.

 

[LowlyPion]

In this regard, long term environmental risks, you may want to consider the clean-up workers at Chernobyl.

 

[Eimacman]

Andre

Although being a pilot, and I am assuming that you are talking about fighter pilot during war time, is a dangerous occupation. How ever that would not be as dangerous as mining mercury in that you stand a better than 40% probability of dieing the first day and that increases with time to the point that for the average lifetime of being this kind of miner, and such lifetimes are very short, you stand better than a 90% chance of your occupation killing you. If this were true for flying, and I am not saying it is, out of your 200 over 100 would die from flying in the first year and every year, and this is a conservative estimate. And as some one else mentioned, the workers that shoveled boron on top of the still burning reactor at Chernobyl had the most dangerous job ever, in that 100% of them died, all of them. Apply this to aviation and you would be taking your life in your hands by just looking at an aircraft. There are hundreds of technicians whose purpose is to eliminate as much risk as possible out of flying, and pilots receive the best training with the most experienced trainers and instructors, using the best equipment available. Mercury miners on the other hand are given little or no training, in fact if they new the danger they would not do it, given little safety equipment, and are exposed to thousands of times the maximum safe limit for mercury vapor and the very bad biological effects of such exposure. The amount of danger is not the same and thousands of people die due to industrial accidents in the jobs such as this you do not hear about them on the news often.

So:
Fighter pilot, dangerous job;
Mercury miner more dangerous job.

 

[turbo]

Mercury miner more dangerous job.

Do you have trustworthy links? Most heavy metals are pretty benign to the people digging them out of the ground. They are are more dangerous when they are refined and converted into forms that people can more easily ingest and metabolize.

 

[mgb_phys]

Most mercury mines are in countries with less than spotless worker safety records.

Most deep mines in modern countries (with the exception of USA coal mines!) are pretty sae due to an obsessive safety culture.

 

[Eimacman]

Turbo-1

I was just searching for the links that you requested and found that I have made a horrid mistake! I was thinking of the wrong occupation, it is the people that work in the refining process that are exposed to the danger not the miners! I am afraid that I may be suffering from foot-in-mouth disease or brain rot brought about by disuse of gray matter. My sincerest apologizes for such a mistake.

Eimacman

 

[Eimacman]

To make up for my mistake I came up with this simple formula:

total number of deaths caused by the job
______________________________________ = the danger of the job
total number of persons doing the job globally


This is a simplistic formulation that will give one at least a 'ball park' estimation of the danger of any job. I do not know how to put a example of a more accurate formula using statistical analysis here for I don't know how the controls on the reply box work. and I can not cut and paste a complex formula out of my word processor.

Oh WarPhalange I will be more careful with idiomatic expressions in the future.

Eimacman

 

[mgb_phys]

The trouble with that is when the "total number of persons doing the job globally" is small. For a while astronomer was listed as the most dangerous profesion, because although only a few people died on the job there aren't many of them.

 

[turbo]

Turbo-1

I was just searching for the links that you requested and found that I have made a horrid mistake! I was thinking of the wrong occupation, it is the people that work in the refining process that are exposed to the danger not the miners! I am afraid that I may be suffering from foot-in-mouth disease or brain rot brought about by disuse of gray matter. My sincerest apologizes for such a mistake.

Eimacman

You don't need to apologize to me - your clarification of the issue was sufficient. Most heavy metals are not too dangerous to the people mining the ores. Refining them often involves finely dividing them, and using chemical and/or electrical processes to concentrate them and convert them to forms that are usable in industrial processes. That can be dangerous for people working in mills in countries with lax occupational protections.

 

[turbo]

The trouble with that is when the "total number of persons doing the job globally" is small. For a while astronomer was listed as the most dangerous profesion, because although only a few people died on the job there aren't many of them.

What happened? Astronomers falling asleep and falling out of the observer's cage "back in the day"?

 

[tribdog]

I hear suicide bomber is a pretty dangerous job.

 

[Math Is Hard]

I hear suicide bomber is a pretty dangerous job.

 

[Andre]

I hear suicide bomber is a pretty dangerous job.

Now, why would that be? After all, a Suicide bomber is pretty sure of his faith and what many people want most is certainty. Moreover in some religions suicide bombers seem to earn a harem of maidens afterwards.

 

[turbo]

Volcano-virgin is a pretty dangerous job, too. I'm surprised Wolram is still with us.

 

[mgb_phys]

What happened? Astronomers falling asleep and falling out of the observer's cage

A few high altitude and heart attacks.
Mostly high altitude, bad roads and terrible drivers.