It is true that King crab fishing in the Bering Sea is dangerous business, but the most dangerous one the Northeast Coast, where fishermen go after groundfish — the bottom-dwelling species like flounder, sole and cod. This proves that commercial fishing is, by almost any measure, the most dangerous profession in the United States. The Alaska Bering Sea crab fishery — the one featured on “Deadliest Catch” — is the fourth most dangerous, behind the Atlantic scallop fishery and fishing for West Coast Dungeness crabs.
Jennifer Lincoln of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the lead author of the study, said that there are different hazards in different fisheries and in the Northeast, they go to sea for longer periods of time and further out to sea with larger crews. So when a vessel sinks, there are more lives at risk. The Gulf of Mexico is warmer water; New England is cold.
The agency has taken many measures to reduce accidents and in 2007, it expanded its surveillance to include the rest of the country’s fishing areas, and found that there were fisheries even more problematic than Alaska’s. Fatality rates were calculated using the number of vessels, the number of days at sea and the average number of crew members aboard each vessel. This yields the number of full-time-equivalent commercial fishermen.
