About this site
Mining Incidents is a research tool built on the United States Mine Safety and Health Administration's open datasets. Every reportable incident MSHA has on record is here, fatal and non-fatal, searchable by mine, operator, year, severity, or any keyword in the investigator's narrative.
MSHA publishes this data already, but their own search surface is difficult to use: pagination heavy, multi-form, not built for the people who actually need it. Safety inspectors training new crews, researchers looking for patterns, journalists chasing stories, and families trying to find their loved one's record.
We do not add information MSHA has not published. We do not editorialize. The narratives are written by MSHA investigators, verbatim. Our job is only to make the record easier to find and harder to forget.
Why this exists
I took an MSHA training course taught by Kim Redding and walked out unsettled. The record of what had happened in mines, every incident and every narrative, was public; the public just couldn't really find it. The agency's own search makes the data hard to see. This site is a small counterweight: the same public record, opened up. Credit for the spark belongs to Kim.
Data sources
Primary: MSHA Open Government Data (Accidents and Mines datasets). Refreshed weekly.
Corrections + privacy
If a record is wrong, the correction needs to happen at MSHA, not here. We publish whatever MSHA publishes. But if a page is missing or broken, or a family member wants a record unlinked from search engines for privacy reasons, email incidents@byshovel.com.
Built by Shovel. Free forever. Open by design.