Job-related accidental deaths down in Maine

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BANGOR – Fewer workers died in job-related accidents last year, but the number of people killed in incidents with commercial drivers went up.

Regardless, the state officials who keep track of the numbers don’t like either one.

For them, saying that there is a decline, an increase or even a trend in either statistical category would be an inaccurate assessment of the numbers. Death is a mystery, and in the accounting world, where precision is paramount, the events surrounding the time of a person’s death – and why – are hard to understand and put into numbers.

“They’re more of a random event,” said Bill Peabody, deputy director of the Maine Bureau of Labor Standards.

In its yearly report released Tuesday, the national Bureau of Labor Standards said 26 workers experienced job-related injuries that resulted in death in Maine last year. That’s down from 32 in 1999.

At least 65 percent of the workers’ deaths were transportation-related and occurred either on roads, rails or waterways.

“Half of them were water-related,” said Lynne Lamstein, director of outreach education for the state bureau.

About 15 percent of the deaths were the result of contact with an object or a piece of equipment, and the remaining deaths occurred for various reasons.

Of the 26 deaths, 12 of them happened to self-employed people, primarily fishermen.

The BLS statistic, however, does not include people who have been killed in accidents involving commercial vehicles, where the driver of the commercial truck or car may not have died.

In 2000, there were 28 fatal crashes involving commercial vehicles that killed 34 people, said John Fraser, motor carrier supervisor with the Maine Department of Transportation.

That’s up from 26 fatal crashes in 1999 that killed 29 people, he said.

The worst of those accidents occurred in May 2000 in Cornville, when three children and an adult were killed when the car they were in collided with a loaded log truck. The logger was not injured.

Fraser has seen his share of commercial vehicle accidents, and the reasons they happen remain a mystery to him. Most of them may not have occurred because of mechanical problems.

Each year, DOT randomly selects and inspects commercial vehicles, and the percentage of those with defects and put out of service has declined, Fraser said. In 2000, 25 percent were to get off the roads, compared with 78 percent of those inspected in 1986.

That leaves driver inattention as the possible reason for most commercial vehicle accidents, either on the part of the worker driving the vehicle or, if another vehicle is involved, that driver.

Or does it? Fraser isn’t convinced.

At one accident earlier this year, near Sydney, a driver veered off Interstate 95 and traveled across the rumble strip. He overcorrected, and the truck rolled over. The driver was seriously injured.

But what caused the driver to veer?

“It had all the earmarks of him falling asleep,” Fraser said. “Or was he reaching for something?”

Then again, the accident may have happened because of a steering problem, but the column was so badly bent that it couldn’t be looked at more closely.

“It was just bent, destroyed metal,” Fraser said. “There was nothing there.”

That accident, and others, leaves more questions than answers for Fraser.

“What happens in those vehicles, in those last moments?” he asked. “Who knows what really happens?”

For investigators, it’s purely supposition.

“I have a real problem of telling someone that what happened was dah, tah, dah, tah, dah,” Fraser said. “Nobody knows what really happens in those last few moments before an accident.”

And asking the people involved doesn’t necessarily result in an answer.

“What does it matter if you ask?” Fraser said. “Are they going to tell you the truth? Or do they really remember? It just goes on and on and on.”

At Maine’s Bureau of Labor Standards, education and training in workplace safety are available to employers who ask for it. Among other issues, the bureau is trying to educate workers and their bosses about domestic violence and how it affects a workplace and an employee’s job performance. It also is training teens about how to be safe at work.

“We believe if teen-agers are taught safety early, it will carry with them,” Lamstein said.