Jessie Singer

A journalist recounts the surprising history of accidents and reveals how they’ve come to define all that’s wrong with America. We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators. As the rate of accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the “accident” to avoid consequences for their actions. Born of the death of her best friend, and the killer who insisted it was an accident, this book is a moving investigation of the sort of tragedies that are all too common, and all too commonly ignored. In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.

The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price

There Are No Accidents

Katy Watkins

More people die by accident today than at any time in American history. The accidental death toll in the United States is now over 173,000 people a year, or the equivalent of more than one fully loaded Boeing 747-400 falling out of the sky, killing everyone onboard, every day. Americans die by accident more than by stroke, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, pneumonia, kidney failure, suicide, septicemia, liver disease, hypertension, Parkinson's disease, or terrorism. 

The physician William Haddon, the first administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, called the idea that accidents were random and unpredictable, "the last folklore subscribed to by rational men."

In accidents, power, in all its forms, be it a fast car or a plea deal, decides which story we hear. Across the United States, and across history, I found this as a common marker of accidents. The people who tell the story are always the powerful ones, and the powerful ones are rarely the victims.

In the beginning, the story of car accidents was a story about murder. The storytellers were driven by the way the car changed the hierarchy of transportation. At the time, the walking people of America were at risk as they had never been before. Before cars, save for taking care when stroling closely behind a horse, no one told you how or when to walk. With the arrival of the automobile, and the traffic signals and traffic laws that would follow, pedestrians were not just downgraded and instructed, but killed in the streets in skyrocketing numbers. It is no wonder that those people, newly demoted and highly at risk, cried murder. 

When we tell a “human error” story—when we blame the jaywalker, the accident-prone worker, the nut behind the wheel, or the criminal addict—we are being duped into distraction from the ways that we can prevent accidents. And this allows the same accidents to happen again.

Perspective can put a distorted lens on the truth, and powerful people can use these distortions to control how we blame. Police officials can control the narrative of an accidental shooting by simply selecting which video to release. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the rightful rage in response to police killings has risen with the advent of bystander videos of the events.

 best, blame is a bad way to understand accidents, and at worst, blame is an effective tool for powerful people to manipulate an accident's aftermath. Blame can stand in the way of preventing accidents and destroy the lives of the people who survive them

"If they were to go out and fix the problem," he explained, "it would be a tacit acknowledgment that the problem existed." Fixing the problem means there is a problem. Blaming someone means there is no problem at all.

Epidemiologists such as Baker often compare people's differing approaches to disease and accidents to show why it is more effective to change conditions than to try to change people. If we focused on human error during the polio era, for example, the only method of preventing the disease would have been discouraging the use of swimming pools. To prevent AIDS, we would only encourage abstinence. If we treated disease like we do accidents, there would be no polio vaccine and no medications to treat HIV. But we don't treat disease the way we do accidents—except when disease intersects with accidents. There is medicine to treat HIV, for example, but the tools and resources that reduce accidental HIV transmission, such as access to clean syringes, are often made illegal in favor of just telling people not to do drugs and punishing them when they do.

In the United States, thanks to Ralph Nader and William Haddon, all motor vehicles are tested and rated on how safe they are for the people inside. But since 1997 in Europe and 2003 in Japan, vehicles have also been tested and rated for how safe they are for pedestrians, too, should the driver hit someone. European and Japanese automakers regulate the safety of vehicles for the safety of people inside and out—and make drivers aware of the safety of the vehicle they are buying.

When these regulations were first published internationally on the advice of the United Nations, and adopted elsewhere, the United States declined to follow suit.

It is an act of love to demand accountability for the dead. And it takes rage to prevent the same accidents from happening again. When I talk to those left behind, such as Cohen and Kottick, they can recognize the good that has been done—the lowered speed limit, the safer intersection—but they rage at the cost they have paid. Accidents are predictable and preventable. It should not require so much loss and so much rage to stop something so wholly in our power to stop. But this is the work left to those of us left behind. Our love and rage are all we have.

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