There Are No Accidents

Why So Many Preventable Deaths Happen

In the United States, more than 173,000 people die each year from events commonly called accidents. That total is higher than deaths from stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, or diabetes, yet these losses rarely receive the same attention. A fatal fall, fire, overdose, or car crash usually appears as an isolated event, so the public learns to see it as bad luck instead of part of a larger pattern. The word accident helps create that illusion by suggesting that nothing could have been done.

The deaths are not random, and they are not evenly spread across the population. People living in poverty, Black communities, Indigenous communities, and workers in dangerous jobs die at much higher rates. Black people die in house fires at about twice the rate of white people, and Indigenous pedestrians are far more likely to be killed by drivers. In poorer states and poorer neighborhoods, accidental death rates are often dramatically higher because safe housing, reliable medical care, safer roads, and workplace protections are weaker or missing.

Jessie Singer’s interest in this question became deeply personal when her close friend Eric Ng was killed by a drunk driver. In court, the driver described the crash as something that happened, language that made the death sound detached from any chain of choices. That moment exposed how often the word accident works as a shield. It softens responsibility and hides the predictable conditions that made the death possible.

Public health researchers have tried for decades to change this way of thinking. Many prefer the term unintentional injury because it makes clear that a death was not meant to happen without pretending it was unavoidable. Safety officials long ago recognized that if crashes and injuries are treated as random acts of fate, governments and corporations feel less pressure to redesign roads, products, workplaces, and laws. Once the event is seen as preventable, different questions become possible: what failed, who ignored the danger, and what would stop the next death.

The scale of the problem is also hidden by weak measurement. Medical errors may kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, but many of those deaths are not officially counted as such. When death certificates and reporting systems fail to capture the real cause, the danger remains politically invisible. A society cannot fix what it refuses to name, and it cannot prevent what it insists on calling chance.