Electrician
The employee was performing routine preventative maintenance on a transformer when EE was fatally electrocuted.
On July 26, 2025, at 10:44 a.m., Brian Hanson, a 50-year-old electrical & instrumentation (E&I) technician with 5 years, 6 months of mining experience, died when he contacted one phase of a 13,200 high voltage power circuit while conducting preventive maintenance in transformer #95132. The accident occurred because the mine operator did not: 1) de-energize, lock out, or take other measures to prevent electrical equipment from being energized, 2) label principal power switches to show which units they controlled, and 3) provide instruction in the safety and health aspects and safe work procedures of the assigned task.
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The mine operator did not de-energize, lock out, or take other measures to prevent electrical equipment from being energized.
Corrective action: The company has established new policies and procedures for locking equipment out when doing preventive maintenance.
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The mine operator did not label principal power switches to show which units they controlled.
Corrective action: The mine has revised existing preventive maintenance procedure and developed an additional practice of labeling power systems to make them easily identified.
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The mine operator did not provide instruction in the safety and health aspects and safe work procedures of the assigned task.
Corrective action: The company updated the SOP and trained miners on the new procedure.
Findings from MSHA's final investigation report, which supersedes the preliminary narrative above.
- Activity at time of incident
- Electrical Maintenance
- Subunit / location
- UNDERGROUND
- Underground location
- INTERSECTION
- Mining method
- Conventional Stoping
- Accident type
- Contact with electrical current
- Source of injury
- ELECTRICAL APPARATUS,(Not Elsewhere Classified)
- Nature of injury
- ELECT SHOCK,ELECTROCUTION
- Body part affected
- BODY SYSTEMS
- Total mining experience
- 5 years
- Experience at this mine
- 5 years
- Experience in this job
- 5 years
- Degree of injury
- FATALITY
Every record on this page mirrors what MSHA publishes under its Open Government Data program, refreshed weekly. MSHA does not publish per-accident URLs (the Accidents data is distributed as a single bulk file), so this is how to retrieve the source for the specific record below:
- Final investigation report: Read MSHA's final report
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Accident record:
Download MSHA Accidents.zip
then search for Document number
220252180027(the unique key per MSHA Form 7000-1) -
Mine record:
MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System
and search by Mine ID
2401490 - All MSHA datasets: Open Government Data program directory covering Accident, Mines, Inspections, Violations, etc.