SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : For Some, Danger Is All in a Day’s Work

It was a hot July day when Duane Wright nearly caught fire.

As he battled a wildfire in Northern California, a wall of flame seared him with 1,000-degree heat. An ear partially melted and severe burns covered half his body. As medics peeled off his clothes and airlifted him to a hospital, Wright nearly died several times. He was 21 years old.

Two years later finds Wright working at a dispatch center and planning a return to firefighting with the California Department of Forestry. “The organization I work for is top-notch and the adrenaline flow of fighting fire is something,” he says. “You’re on top of it and you’re using it to your advantage. You feel almost superhuman. If you don’t get it, you miss it.”

When is work worth risking your life? For the nation’s roughly 15% of people employed in dangerous occupations, reasons can run from thrills, fulfillment and prestige to good pay to outright ignorance.

Indeed, some jobs that sound risky are pretty safe, while others that sound safe are quite dangerous. The California state prison system, with 30,000 guards, hasn’t seen one killed since 1986. On the other hand, Nancy Howell estimates in her book “Surviving Fieldwork” that anthropologists have a fatality rate of 0.14%, comparable to heavy manufacturing and construction.

Dangerous jobs generally do involve machinery and moving vehicles, building and mining or hostile environments, such as firefighting, flying and exposure to violence.

“While some are natural thrill seekers, others are more likely to take risks and gamble with their lives because they have less to lose,” says J. Paul Leigh, a San Jose State University economist who conducted a 1987 study on jobs with the highest fatality rates.

“A predominantly high number of people raised in poor, uneducated backgrounds are in risky jobs. A high-income offers immediate gratification and a way out. That person’s not thinking of the dangers,” Leigh says.

That’s often the case in construction, where severed limbs and falls off buildings are common. “Most don’t have the education to be doctors or lawyers and many didn’t finish high school,” says Pat Poston, 47, a former general contractor who coordinates set building for Hollywood television studios. “Carpentry is a great-paying job. A carpenter with two years in the business can make $60,000.”

For flipping cars and jumping off buildings, stuntmen and women can earn up to $300,000 a year. “That might be attractive, but no amount of money can make people do the thing they fear,” says David Ellis, 38, vice president of Hollywood-based Stunts Unlimited, which coordinates stunts for most big-budget domestic films. “There has to be an attitude--a thrill to mastering things that are difficult.”

That attitude may even have a biological basis. One study, by University of Delaware psychologist Marvin Zuckerman, suggests the presence of a personality trait that drives those possessing it to seek varied, novel and intense sensations and experiences, even if it requires physical or social risk.

“I like danger--it’s a necessary part of growing and pushing beyond what you thought you could do,” says Beverly Suzan, a New Jersey striptease magician and fire-eater who has wrested guns from and blown fire at abusive audience members to keep them in line. Whether swallowing heckles or swords, “the challenge is making it turn out right. If you keep your wits, if something goes wrong, you can pull out of it. Throwing fire in someone’s crotch is giving me the element of control.”

Understanding that most job accidents occur through human error and are often preventable through training and safety precautions makes their risk more psychologically manageable. It also serves as an impetus to correcting problems when tragedies do happen.

The death of anthropologist Nancy Howell’s son and several colleagues from disease, travel and misreading foreign cultures prompted her to publish a guide to safer fieldwork conditions. Ex-Marine Joseph Kinney formed the labor watchdog National Safe Workplace Institute in Chicago after his brother died in a building scaffolding collapse.

“When something does happen, you deal with it by reducing the incident to technical things--what went wrong,” says Richard Barta, 41, president of Muldoon Marine Services Inc. in San Pedro and a commercial diver who’s been a near-drowning victim himself. “If it makes you question whether you belong in the profession, you’d better get out. People leave the trade because it’s monotonous or it doesn’t live up to ideals. The risk makes it attractive.”

For some, the challenge is all-important. Take astronauts, who accept 60-hour weeks, $35,000 to $60,000 annual salaries and a 5% fatality rate for a chance at the most advanced form of flight.

“Ever since I was 5 I wanted to fly airplanes, and this is a technological extension of that,” says astronaut Col. Robert Cabana, 42, a Discovery space shuttle pilot. “We don’t look at our job as being dangerous. There’s no adrenaline rush. We train so hard to circumvent any problems that arise, I feel like I’m just doing my job. I find it much more difficult to watch my friends take off and not have any control over it.”

Cabana’s test pilot days tested his nerve more. “The flying the military does in a mission is probably more dangerous. When you encounter something life-threatening, your heart doesn’t race, you just take care of it. I have friends that have lost their lives. It’s fact of life. I think the way most pilots deal with that is think, ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’ ”

Despite the control individuals believe that they may have over their jobs, 76% of the 45,622 workplace inspections conducted by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administation during the 1990 fiscal year resulted in violations. OSHA requires companies with 10 or more employees to post summaries of job-related injuries and illnesses every February and keeps copies of these reports available for employers and OSHA inspectors. Even that isn’t always effective. Employers are not required to inform applicants of such hazards and don’t always report them when they do happen.

Such was the case of John Shelton Ivany, 48, editor-in-chief of the Manhattan-based music magazine Hit Parader, who 15 years ago found himself broke, with a daughter to support. “I was desperate for money, and cab driving is an easy job to get. I didn’t think it was dangerous.”

He lasted just under two years, until a passenger put a gun to his temple, ordered him from the car and into a vacant basement. “I said to myself, ‘He’s going to put a bullet in the back of my head.’ He took my cab, my money and my coat in the middle of winter. When I told my boss, he called me a filthy . . . liar. I quit that day.”

For some, who have made peace with the hazards of their work, facing mortality has given a sense of immortality.

“If I can help create something that exists for the next hundred years, there will always be a part of me that goes on,” carpenter Poston says.

Adds Discovery astronaut Don McMonagle, 39: “We need risks to grow as a society. Future generations will suffer if we are not willing to take them.”