Accident

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For Alternate meanings, see: Accident (fallacy), Accident (philosophy), Accident (film), Accident, Maryland, and Car accidents.

A railing accidentally collapses at a college football game, spilling fans onto the sidelines

Train wreck at Montparnasse in 1895

An accident is a detrimental event that occurs unexpectedly and unintentionally. Physical examples include unintended collisions or falls, being injured by touching something sharp, hot, or electric, or ingesting poison. Non-physical examples are unintentionally revealing a secret or otherwise saying something incorrectly, forgetting an appointment, etc.

Technically, accidents do not include incidents where someone is at fault (e.g. negligent); for example, if someone fails to take reasonable precautions in the circumstances. If the results of such negligence were foreseeable, they were not accidental, and the negligent person can be held responsible for any consequences of such negligence. In an "accident", nobody can really be held liable because the event was unforeseeable or very unlikely (for example, if one's computer is knocked over by a friend unintentionally, it was accident; however, one could blame the friend for being careless).

50,425 people were killed in accidents (not including car accidents) in the U.S. in 1995, which is 19 people in 100,000.

Often, accidents are investigated so that we can learn how to avoid them in the future. This is sometimes called root cause analysis, but does not generally apply to accidents that cannot be predicted with any certainty. For example, a root cause of a purely random incident may never be identified, and thus future similar accidents remain "accidental."

The informal term "freak accident" may refer to an unfortunate event that may seem exceedingly unlikely to happen by chance. This term may be used to imply doubts about whether the event actually was an accident.