<p>How dangerous is Santa's job, really?</p><p>The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't publish any stats on rooftop holiday gift delivery due to limited data, so this is a bit of an extrapolation.</p><p>First, travel between houses. The NTSB has never recorded a fatal accident involving a reindeer-powered flying sleigh. Someone better at stats than me could probably bound the accident rate based on this record, but it's quite low so we'll neglect it.</p><p>Next, rooftop delivery.</p><p>According to 2022 stats (latest I could find quickly) the USA has ~190K roofers, and had 124 workplace fatalities over the year, a rate of one in 1532 per year.</p><p>Assuming the average roofer spends 12 months * 20 work days * 6 hours, or 1440 hours, on roofs in a given year, and assuming accidents are uniformly distributed, this gives a mean time between accidents of roughly 2.2 million hours, or an accident rate of 4.54e-7 per hour.</p><p>Suppose 4 billion people globally celebrate Christmas, with 2.5 people per household gives 1.6e9 households. Allocating 2 minutes per household for landing, unloading, boarding, and takeoff gives 5.3e7 minutes of rooftop time every Christmas eve (making heavy use of relativistic time dilation).</p><p>Unfortunately, this is 26x the mean time between roofing accidents. So Santa has quite a high chance (>> 50%) of falling off a roof and dying any given Christmas.</p><p>When you add in the possibility of getting stuck in a chimney, the cancer risk from inhaling all that soot on the way down, the near-certain diabetes from eating billions of cookies in one night, and more, I'm glad I'm not the one wearing the red suit.</p>
