According to a story on the most dangerous states for workers, if it weren’t for North Dakota, Wyoming would be the least safe state.

A late carpenter from Grand Forks, ND, Jared Castoreno, had a reputation as a perfectionist when it came to safety, though his employer was not impressed. Jared’s surviving brother, Aaron, says that before he was killed by electrocution, Jared was pressured by his employer. He'd made requests to his boss to have the remodeling location checked by an electrician. “If my brother was working in a different state, he would still be alive.”

The Castoreno family says this tragedy was compounded by North Dakota’s safety record – the highest worker fatality rate per capita in the nation. That’s in a 2015 report from the AFL-CIO, at a rate of 12.5 per 100,000 workers. In Wyoming, that was 12 per 100,000. The same report found that it would take North Dakota’s seven inspectors more than a century to check each workplace across the 70,700-square-mile state.

You know Wyoming’s square miles total isn’t any smaller, at 97,818, with quite a lower population. If you’d like to see Wyoming’s state plan on safety, it’s here on osha.gov. It doesn’t appear to have been amended again since 2006. Maybe we could find more ways to crunch the numbers so that the Cowboy State would be even less proud of its safety record. We’ll just leave that alone for now and quote North Dakota’s Director of Occupational Safety and Health:

"This year, we’re down in fatalities. There is (however) no acceptable number when it comes to the loss of life and injured people."

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