4 of the Most Dangerous Jobs in Pennsylvania

Many people feel like Pennsylvania is a nice place to live. You have rural sections like Lancaster County, which supports a large Amish community. You also have major cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where there’s plenty of commerce and population density.

If you decide to live in Pennsylvania, you will presumably need to figure out something to do for money. If you’re retired or independently wealthy, you won’t need a job, but otherwise, you’ll need to take your skills and education into account.

You might also think about dangerous jobs and whether you want to avoid them. We’ll talk about some of Pennsylvania’s most hazardous industries right now. You might feel okay with doing some of the work we describe, or you may choose to avoid these niches because of the high fatality and injury rates.

Construction Worker

In Pennsylvania, like in other states, you have a good shot of hurting yourself if you work in construction. If you hurt yourself while doing construction work in PA, you can always file an injury claim and collect workers’ comp. You have 120 days to file an injury claim if it happens on the job, but maybe you’ll want to avoid this kind of work entirely.

In construction, you can fall from scaffolds or other places. You often have to work high off the ground, and if you lose your balance or slip, you can break a leg or your neck.

You might also hurt yourself if someone runs a vehicle into you. You can hurt yourself with a saw, a nail gun, or other dangerous tools.

You can usually join a union if you work in construction, which means a decent starting salary and benefits. You can also sometimes get construction industry jobs if you didn’t go to college or never graduated from high school.

Still, the danger element might more than offset those potential perks. You’ll need to consider long and hard before committing to doing this kind of thing for money.

Delivery Driver

You might also decide to become a delivery driver in PA. You can deliver food, like pizzas, or you might deliver groceries.

More than ever, individuals pay for drivers to bring them groceries, and you can also get a company to pay you to deliver flowers, chocolates, or other gifts. With more individuals working from home than ever, we’re living in the delivery driver’s heyday.

Driving might seem like a good idea. Like construction, you don’t usually need to graduate from high school to do it.

You can do it whenever you feel like it, for the most part. You won’t have a boss breathing down your neck like you might experience working in an office setting. All you’ll require is a clean driving record, a driver’s license, and no felony convictions in your past.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that if you drive for several hours every day, you stand a much better chance of another vehicle hitting you. The more you’re on the road, the more likely you’ll be in an accident.

Maybe you’re a great driver, but that does not mean everyone else is equally careful and follows traffic rules. Also, if you deliver to a bad neighborhood, you might risk someone sticking you up and taking your money, the goods in the vehicle, or even the car itself. Philly has some bad neighborhoods, so you should keep that in mind if you decide to try and deliver food or other items there.

Uber or Lyft Driver

You can also get a job working for Uber or Lyft. In major cities, you can almost always find work for these companies if you have a car that’s less than a few years old and runs well. You’ll also require that clean driving record and driver’s license, and you’ll need a clean rap sheet, other than misdemeanors.

Driving for Lyft or Uber carries the same appeal that goes along with food delivery. The same dangers also exist, though.

You never know if someone will try and rob you or carjack you if you drive around in the wrong neighborhood. If you’re a local, you may know to stay out of certain areas, particularly at night. If you don’t know the city because you just moved there, you may not realize you’re headed to a dicey part of town to pick someone up.

Also, you don’t know if you might pick someone up who’s having a bad day. Maybe you get into an argument with them because they must wear a face mask because of Covid-19 rules, but they don’t want to do it.

Getting into an argument with the wrong person at the wrong moment can have lethal consequences. Consider all of that before you agree to take on this new career.

Roofer

If you do roofing work in PA, you might make a respectable living that way. If you work as a licensed and bonded roofer, you can start your own company, or you can work for one if you demonstrate that you know how to handle yourself.

You will need physical strength since you’ll have to lug roofing shingles and other equipment around all day. Apart from that, though, you have gravity about which to worry.

Much like construction, you’re working up high a lot, with nothing but air and imagination between yourself and a steep plunge. You can always overbalance when walking on the roof, or you might trip over something.

If that happens, you can fall. That might mean a sprained ankle or something relatively innocuous, but you can also break your neck or back.

Roofing is a blue-collar job, like construction. It might appeal to you because you don’t have to go to college to learn how to do it, but the danger exists in Pennsylvania, and anywhere else you want to attempt it.

Consider the risks when thinking about taking on one of the jobs we mentioned in PA.

 

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