johndecember.com johndecember.com / places | People · About · News · Books | search Search · star Market

There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster - Who Profits and Who Pays the Price by Jessie Singer

Purchase on Amazon

Places Discussed


Posted 2025-10-27

People PlacesBook Notes by John December

Jessie Singer surveys a range of incidents causing death and injury and reveals that the word "accident" can hide blame, obscure causes, shift responsibility, and burden victims with costs, injuries, illness, and deaths. This book explores incidents in domains including automotive and traffic, mining, industrial, environmental, and health. She concludes that groups with power operating in these domains have a strong motivation to shift costs, responsibilities, and risks to workers, victims, taxpayers, and the general population. Singer illuminates the casual relationships among dangerous environments, design flaws, working conditions, and human error. She asks us to uncover the hidden responsibility embodied in the word "accident" and the truth beneath — that owners, designers, operators, and regulators enable dangerous conditions that incubate harm. She points out that known and validated safety procedures, risk reduction, and injury-mitigation knowledge can reduce injuries and deaths. She frames the book with the account of the death of her friend, killed by a driver of an automobile, to illustrate the deep emotional scars of harm caused, and explains the depth of caring of the "stay safe" (p. 259) wish that people can give each other.

After reading this book, I have a better understanding of these points:

  1. The root use of the word "accident" is to eliminate or deflect responsibility away from those who have power over the environment in which it occurred. The author traces this practice to a range of incidents in various domains. In the case of mining harm, the company-owned and operated property and working conditions escape responsibility. Instead, the blame falls on the backs of workers characterized as careless. In the case of automobile harm, responsibility is pushed away from car manufacturers and the engineers designing roads onto the phrase "the nut behind the wheel" and the aberrant behavior of a few "bad apples." This rhetoric holds the people in power over these domains blameless, framing them as trusted experts, and, since they are blameless, they cannot be held responsible for any incident.

    Singer shows how the investigator Sidney Dekker worked to reverse this concealment of blame. His book, The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error', reveals this bias and shows how blame shifting seeks to preserve reputations, and that "blaming human error is a win-win for those in power who do the blaming" (p. 191). Dekker's work uncovers how complex systems can obscure responsibility in an interlocking set of components and actions. He states: "Complex systems fail and succeed because of the interaction between a whole host of factors" (p. 192). By "analyzing the layered systems that lead to an accident," we can uncover the larger design decisions and requirements that leaders and decision-makers place on the system (pp. 192-193). As an alternative to blame shifting, Dekker shows "how systems can make us safe" through practices that work under constraints and conflicts to find the balance in the practice of safety (p. 191).

  2. The ideology underlying the use of the word "accident" is one in which the belief is that the world is absolutely fair and that systems such as mines, roadways, highways, automobiles, products, chemicals, and medicine are safe and effective because they are designed and built by experts who work without bias, self-interest, fault, or profit-focused motivation. These premises hold that, in cases of harm-causing incidents, only stupid people or mysterious forces are at play to foul up these supposedly perfect systems. The anatomy of incident investigations shows this: "Formal accident investigations start with the assumption that someone failed, usually the person closest to the disaster, and work backward. Starting anywhere else--such as the assumption that the built environment surrounding the accident was unsafe--would threaten the status quo" (p. 191).

  3. The word "accident" itself satisfies a "deep itch" to absolve responsibility (p. 168) and conform to a belief that the "world is fair" (pp. 168-169) and thus support a "cognitive bias toward blaming human error." Proceeding the word "accident" by the word "just" is circular thinking: it characterizes the word "accident" as an incident without any cause by definition, so that it defines itself in terms of itself: "just an accident," which makes the responsibility go away. There is no one to blame, no one to investigate, and no condition to correct.

  4. Another ideology supporting the word "accident" is that all environments pose risks, and that unregulated environments represent "freedom." This "freedom" ideology holds that "protecting us from accidents is actually an infringement on our liberty" and that "the regulatory agency is an oppression of the rights of the free market" (p. 252). This thinking holds that all environments are simply expressions of market forces, and that these must remain unfettered. So any restriction on conditions in any domain created for the public good or to protect consumers, workers, or the environment is inherently anti-capitalist--with a (foolish) accusation of communism. The absurd conclusion of this ideology is that "accidents are freedom."

  5. To go forward, the author calls for a way out, which is to recognize (p. 250):

    1. "Accidents are not a design problem--we know how to design the built environment to prevent death and injury in accidents."

    2. "And accidents are not a regulatory problem--we know the regulations that will reduce the accidental death toll."

    3. "Rather, accidents are a political and social problem."

    4. "To prevent them, we only need the will to redesign our systems, the courage to confront our worst inclinations, and the strength to rein in the powerful who allow accidents to happen."

  6. The author concludes with a call for action (p. 254): "Let's build our own environments with the assumption that the people around us will make mistakes." We can use validated and common-sense ideas—for example, understanding car risks by size, alternatives to cars, overdose prevention, techniques to help elders learn to fall in ways that limit harm, use gun locks, use safe pill storage, among other proven practices. Further, "We can demand all of this from the most powerful people we have access to--our bosses, our landlords, the local government officials who control our built environment-- seeking tools and resources that make safety accessible for the most vulnerable" (p. 254).

As in the books Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives (2024), Killed by a Traffic Engineer (2024), and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer (2021), Singer's 2022 book overturns the fundamental assumption of innocence the people who plan, design, build, and operate systems, products, and infrastructure claim. The simple word "accident" enables blame shifting that allows dangerous conditions to give rise to harm and suffering.

In the case of transportation decisions, automobile harm (Miner, et al, 2024) gets ignored, the bias toward automobile accommodation continues (Walker, Tapp, and Davis (2022), and the crowning of the car as king of the road (Norton 2008) and the ultimate technological savior of our cities (Norton 2021) leads to assumptions that must be re-examined (Handy 2023).

Singer in this book goes a long way toward uncovering the mechanisms by which the word "accident" enables larger patterns, such as automobile bias in transportation.

Related Links

Related Books

search Search · star Market
2026-04-28 · John December · Terms © johndecember.com