Death is something no one can escape, but 25-year-old Mike Meines from Pullman has dodged it twice.

Meines isn’t learning of new life-threatening allergies or falling asleep at the wheel either. In fact, the young crop duster has survived two plane crashes, but for Meines and other pilots the risk comes with the career.

For the bright yellow crop dusters that rain pesticides and other chemicals to ensure public safety, completing this task is dangerous.

To apply chemicals to wheat, apples, potatoes and cherries, crop dusters travel lower to the ground than most aircraft and pilots must be maneuverable to clear windmills, power lines, cell phone towers and other tall objects that could be in their path.

This safety hazard is what nearly cost Meines his life.

On a Tuesday in late June 2011, in response to a fungus sweeping the fields, Meines said hhe and his father looked over a new customer’s unfamiliar field. This would be his first job without the help of his dad.

Once Meines, a first-year crop duster, looked over the field from the air he began his “first pass,” a term that describes a crop duster’s first chemical spray.

Meines chose to begin his pass with one spray on one side of a telephone pole and his second on the other side of the pole, a move he said his father would disagree with.

Meines said his father always instructed him to spray the parts of the field with the least obstructions first, since the plane is easier to maneuver when it is lighter, carrying less chemical.

After Meines’ first pass he turned around to go back for his second on the opposite side of the pole.

“I got fixated on the pole and I hit the wires with my plane,” he said.

“I noticed in the front of my plane I saw wire dangling,” Meines said, but he thought the wire had fallen off and that he would have time to land and report the cut power line.

A loose wire is an occurrence that can happen to a crop duster multiple times throughout their career, said Ken Meines, the young crop duster’s father and crop duster pilot for more than 20 years.

However, the reality was that the wire was no longer visible because it had wrapped around the plane’s propeller and seized the plane’s engine.

Within seconds Meines’ plane, heavy from chemical of chemical, began to lose altitude.

 “I could feel the plane dropping out of the sky,” Meines said.

Meines looked up at the only place to land; on the top of a hill in the center of the field.

All was well as the plane descended and the landing looked to be going well, then “25 (feet) off the ground I fell out of the sky like a rock,” Meines said.

Right before Meines’ plane crashed into the Palouse’s hills he said, “This is going to hurt.”

When the airplane collided with the ground, the plane’s nose and left wing smashed into the hill and sent Meines’ face through the window on his left side. The collapsible seat absorbed so much impact that the chair’s mesh and iron makeup cut into Meines’ back, but he was alive.

“All I remember was shaking and a bunch of dust,” Meines said.

Bruised and sore, but with no broken bones, Meines climbed from the wreckage by himself.

 “It was a shocker. Most of the time a power line won’t take you down,” Ken Meines said.

Meines said it was a hard lesson for both him and his father, but unfortunately it wouldn’t be his last accident while crop dusting.

On a muddy April day the following season, working with a new plane, Meines would fall out of the sky again.

Although the fuel gauge read there was one-eighth of a tank of gas left in his plane’s tank, Meines’ plane started to sputter while coming in to land.

“Thirty seconds from the airstrip I put it down in the flat, the wheels sunk in and flipped the plane over on its top,” Meines said, but he walked away from the crash with minor injuries for the second time.

Luckily for Meines the fuel gauge wasn’t off any further or his second crop dusting accident may have been his last.

Unfortunately, Meines wouldn’t have been the first to be lose their life to the crop dusting industry.

Pete Fountain, Idaho director of the Pacific Northwest Aerial Applicator’s Alliance, started flying crop dusters more than 20 years ago and is the third consecutive generation of his family to pursue crop dusting.

Fountain learned the risks of crop dusting firsthand.

“We’ve lost a few friends over the years,” he said.

However, Fountain added, “Typically the accidents we have are rarely fatal.”

Here on the Palouse there are a few extra hazards crop dusters have to cope with, like hills and wind; one time a gust of wind pushed the right wing of Fountain’s plane into the crop and sent his plane cartwheeling, but he wasn’t seriously injured.

Although it is a dangerous job, crop dusting is becoming safer, said Ken Degg, the director of education and safety for the National Agriculture Aviation Association.

It used to be that more than 100 people could die in a crop-dusting season, now six or seven fatalities happen in a bad year, Degg said.

Although many electricity and telephone wires are buried nowadays and many towers are swapping to satellites, he said.

Although Degg and Fountain both acknowledge that crop dusting fatalities are down and the business is becoming safer, both recognize the new threats to pilots.

Fountain said meteorological towers measure wind and are used to determine where windmills will be most productive; these towers are constructed in one day and are often unknown to crop dusters.

These towers are unmarked, unlit and have already cost some crop dusters their lives, Fountain said.

Obstructions like the power lines Meines hit in 2011 are already the number one reason for crop dusting accidents.