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Along I-90 in Massachusetts (and I presume elsewhere in the state), there is a digital billboard which sometimes displays a message from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation that a tow truck driver is killed every six days in the US. (I'd love to find a picture of it, but as I'm driving when I see it I haven't been able to take one.) Certainly the message that one needs to be careful on the roads, especially when there are emergency and service vehicles around, is an important one and a good reminder. But 60 or so deaths a year for tow truck drivers sounds like an awful lot.

I've tried doing some research into the source of this statistic, and I've found news articles quoting somebody said it, but I haven't found the underlying source of this number. The closest I've found is a blog post on the MassDOT's site which says:

The Statewide Towing Association “STA” of Massachusetts, a member of the TIM Network, estimates that a tow truck operator is killed on the job every 6 days, totaling upwards of 60 deaths per year.

But I don't know where the STA got this number from. Is this an accurate description of how often tow truck drivers are killed in the US? Is it specifically about “on-the-job” deaths, or does it include other causes that just happen to have killed tow truck drivers?

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    While I'm certainly curious how the on-the-job fatality rate for tow truck drivers compares to other jobs, particularly ones that involve being alongside roads such as road construction workers, crossing guards, and police officers, I thought that my question should be focused on just the truth of the main statement if I understand how this site works correctly. But if people want to bring in comparisons in their answers to help explain if the rate is high or low in some sense, I certainly wouldn't object.
    – user44729
    Commented Apr 19, 2018 at 12:26
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    "60 or so deaths a year for tow truck drivers sounds like an awful lot" - it's important to specify if that's on-the-job accidents, especially if filtering to ones where the driver isn't actively driving (as implied if the main goal of the message is to increase caution when driving through areas where roadside assistance is being rendered), or total deaths. It is quite easy to believe that 60+ tow truck drivers die each year from causes unrelated to their profession.
    – WBT
    Commented Jul 10, 2019 at 21:02
  • Can't speak for Massachusetts, but here in central Utah, tow truck operators are generally regarded as little better than "car thieves that happen to be licensed." Just about anyone can tell you a horror story about having their car towed and held ransom for no valid reason and being unable to get the police or the courts to do anything about it, and a lot of people around here would welcome a higher on-the-job death and/or injury rate for them!
    – Mason Wheeler
    Commented Nov 10, 2019 at 17:21

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Well, looking at the census data for fatalities due to transportation incidents and homicides... following the links from www.osha.gov....

https://stats.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm#2016 OSHA says 26 fatal injuries in the industry of Motor Vehicle Towing in 2016 (line 568) (link from Static charts, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2016)

2003 numbers says 28

2005 numbers say 35

So... I think it's at least plausible that there was some year where the statistics coudl be stretched to say 60. Certainly, I'm willing to believe that there was at least one year that had 60+ overall deaths among tow truck drivers. It doesn't look like you got 60 deaths of tow truck drivers purely from motor vehicle accidents, though.

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  • The OSHA data has 0 in the column for ""Violence and other injuries by persons or animals" for all these years, so I think OSHA doesn't track the violence data for tow-truck drivers, since that number doesn't pass the smell test, since I've seen at least a few articles about tow-truck drivers being shot by people they tried to tow over that time frame.
    – Eugene
    Commented Nov 13, 2019 at 23:44
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    It would be interesting to know, regarding those deaths, how many were accidents (e.g. hit by a car while towing along a highway or street) and how many were due to violence (e.g. during a vehicle repossession).
    – Kyralessa
    Commented Jul 2, 2020 at 12:39

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