Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

It's never a bad idea to compare a story like this to the overall work-related injury/fatality statistics:

https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju...

There's the absolute number of events to consider, plus the overall rate of injury to consider, the latter being more of a risk estimate. Here are the top three by a fair margin (first number is total deaths, second is rate is per 100,000 full time employees in that sector, for the year 2020):

Construction: 1,008 10.2

Transportation and warehousing 805 13.4

Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting 511 21.5

I don't see any breakdown in that data for the space industry, but that's the kind of information that would put this report in some kind of context.

With high tech manufacturing you’d want to compare against mature higher risk industries such as oil and gas, chemical, pharmaceutical manufacturing, food manufacturing, and semiconductors, plus military noncombat operations and military contractors.

There are ideally engineering controls and standard operating procedures or documented deviations, even in research or pilot facilities. Construction and agriculture, apart from the design phase (like residential crafts, HVAC, industrial electricians or cement etc) do not have the same workplace standards as an industrial facility or field site with cohabitation of engineering, operations, and contractors. There are always exceptions with safe contractors and bad facilities.

If you are routinely testing a pressure relief valve and there is not a documented procedure around this or a permit addressing limiting exposure to that energy that might be a problem in retrospect. Ideally, industries would operate in good faith of regulations and not just outside the envelope of punitive measures. But regulatory stuff is complicated and specific depending on location. I simply wanted to point out it would be helpful to compare incident statistics against common risk profile industries.

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