America’s most dangerous job

 Construction workers, truck drivers, loggers, aircraft pilots and factory workers are all considered to have dangerous jobs. But the most dangerous job per capita is that of cell tower worker.
The roughly 8,700 men and women who climb cell towers to make repairs and perform maintenance suffer 115 deaths per 100,000, according to statistics from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, making cell tower work the most dangerous job in America. While truck drivers and sales workers suffer many more deaths, their rate of death on the job is only 27.6 deaths per 100,000, according to the department. (Loggers and aircraft pilots had second most deaths per 100,000, with both recording 92.4 deaths.)
Those federal statistics do not include serious injuries to cell tower climbers, such as the one that left a 23-year-old father of two small children with permanent traumatic brain injury. It happened on June 15, 2013, when Thomas Jeglum was climbing a tower in Allentown, Pa., preparing to install telecommunications equipment. Jeglum was wearing a climbing harness as he reached near the top of the tower when the rung to which he was attached broke off, sending him falling some 50 feet to the ground. He broke his pelvis, spine, arm and legs in addition to suffering brain damage. Jeglum was in a coma for months. He survived but would never be the same. He was eventually moved to a full-time neurological rehabilitation facility in California.
A lawsuit ensued in which the plaintiffs charged that AT&T was at fault for not having a safe, permanent climbing apparatus on the tower as did many others in the region. AT&T, a subsidiary and an engineering company eventually agreed to settle the suit for $30 million. Shanin Specter represented Jeglum’s guardians along with Kline & Specter’s Michael Trunk and Patrick Fitzgerald and co-counsel Robert Buccola, Jason Sigel and Marshall Way of the northern California firm of Dreyer Babich Buccola Wood Campora.
Kline & Specter represents workers injured on the job site whether it be on a cell tower, in a factory or at a construction site. Some of the most prevalent causes of serious workplace injuries involve workers falling from elevated equipment or structures and also falling objects at work sites, highway accidents and those involving motor vehicles, workplace equipment such as forklifts, factory machinery and other devices, electrocution, carbon monoxide poisoning and trench cave-ins.
Most recently, the firm in 2019 achieved a $10.6 million settlement for a truck driver whose legs were crushed when a massive steel pipe rolled off his truck during unloading in Duquesene,  Pa. (Read article) Around the same time Kline & Specter attorneys won a $9.2 million jury verdict for a sanitation worker in Reading whose leg was caught and amputated in a screw conveyor at a meat processing plant when the device unexpectedly activated. In an earlier case, the firm won a $46.5 million jury verdict in Philadelphia against a security company for the families of two women employees shot to death by a fired worker at the Kraft Foods plant in Northeast Philadelphia. (See the Brown/Wilson Case)
If you suffered a serious workplace injury, please contact Kline & Specter, which has more than 40 attorneys, five of whom are also medical doctors, to promptly provide you with a free review of your case.