‘Dirty Jobs’ Host Mike Rowe Reveals Most Dangerous Job He Would Never Do Again

“Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe recently revealed what he considers the single most dangerous job in the world, one he said he would “never do again.”

The blue-collar work advocate and popular TV host discussed the topic during a recent podcast episode, saying out of all the disgusting, death-defying job sites he’s explored, one stands out as being particularly treacherous. That came when he was opal mining in Australia.

The question posed by podcaster Shawn Ryan mentioned how Allied soldiers during the Vietnam War called “tunnel rats” would volunteer to crawl into deep, pitch-black Viet Cong tunnel networks to find enemies, gather info, and clear booby traps. 

Rowe said the tunnel rat gig was “tough to beat” in terms of being terrible, but also was able to come up with a modern equivalent that he would never do again.

“Opal mining. In the Australian outback, in a little town called Coober Pedy. It was 129 degrees when I was there that day. This is the opal capital of the world … the city itself is underground. It’s too hot to live above,” Rowe said on “The Shawn Ryan Show” last week.

He said the way to look for opals is to dig prospect shafts up to 60 feet deep to start looking for the gemstones. He described being that far underground with nothing but a flashlight and a hard hat as being “in a grave.” 

“The opal miners, on the other hand, are kind of like crab fishermen in the desert, and on steroids. Because there’s no OSHA in this part of the world,” he went on, saying he’s been in all types of mines but none like this before. “The night before we got to Coober Pedy, I wanted to look at the opal fields because we were gonna be working there all the next day … and I’m a little worried. They [flew] me over the fields.”

“When you look down, there are thousands of these prospect shafts that have been dug over the years. None of them are filled in. … As I’m flying, the pilot’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s a hell of a thing … There’s a lot of wildlife out here. There’s emu, there’s ostrich, kangaroo. There are hundreds of them at the bottom of these shafts. They fall in all the time … and they die down there.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s terrible.’” 

Rowe also said he was told sometimes tourists die in the open shafts while trying to capture pictures of the sunset.