PITTSBURGH — Our planet is a perilous place filled with terrifying ways to die. They need not be enumerated here; there is no practical benefit to extending your personal list of dreads. In the event you are knocked unconscious in a freak midair collision with another sky diver, for instance, you — hurtling insensate toward the ground — will be no better equipped to deploy your parachute for having once imagined this scenario.

In pie charts published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States government colors the deaths that occur within its borders in somber pastels. The infamous scourges of heart disease (dusty cobalt) and cancer (dull cornflower) were responsible for 44.3 percent of American deaths in 2017, according to one recent report. But a person expiring between the ages of one and 44 years is more likely to fall under what the charts render a yawning wedge of bilious turquoise: the color of dying by accident.

What cannot be gleaned from such charts are accidents that are thwarted — or the names of the people who attempted to thwart them. Acknowledging them is the self-appointed task of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission: a private foundation that identifies and rewards members of the public for being heroes.

Year-round, a small team of office workers endeavors to analyze the seconds when somebody intervenes to try to prevent death or serious injury. From a tidy headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh, they laboriously collect and scrutinize newspaper stories, hospital records, fire marshal reports, witness statements, family interviews, location sketches, tide charts, photographs of charred clothing, stairway dimensions, expert testimony on seasonal bear activity — anything they can get their hands on to better understand those calamitous situations in which outsiders intervened.