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, defense and compliance counsel pulling operator history for 105(c) actions and FMSHRC proceedings, 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.
Coverage
The index runs from 1983 to the present, the full span of the accident files MSHA publishes. Records from 2000 onward come from MSHA's current Accidents and Mines open datasets. Records from 1983 through 1999 come from MSHA's archived Part 50 accident and injury files: the same federal reporting system in an earlier fixed-width format, decoded into the same coded fields you search today and cross-checked against the fatality counts published by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which they match to within a few deaths per year. Quarterly employment and hours for mines and contractors reach back to 1983 the same way, from MSHA's archived Part 50 address and employment files, so a mine's workforce history starts where its accident history does.
Two notes on the earlier period. The pre-2000 files include no-injury reportable accidents (roof falls, fires, gas and dust ignitions, inundations) that MSHA's current bulk file largely omits, so total incident counts are not directly comparable across the year 2000, though fatality counts are. And 1983 is where the files MSHA publishes begin. Electronic files from 1972 to 1982 are held by the National Archives and are not in this index; the years before 1978 also predate the Part 50 reporting rule, so their counts would not line up with later years.
Corrections
If a fact about an incident is wrong, the correction has to happen at MSHA. We mirror what they publish, verbatim, every refresh. If our parsing dropped or mangled something (a misread number, a mangled date, a name that didn't carry through), that's on us. Let us know and we'll fix it.
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