For journalists
Background and ready-to-cite material on Mining Incidents — a public research tool over US Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) accident records. Useful for reporters covering mining safety, occupational health, labor, and regulatory enforcement beats.
In one paragraph
Mining Incidents is a free, public-record search and alert tool over the US Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) Open Data. Every reportable accident on file with the agency since January 2000 — fatalities, serious injuries, and other defined incidents — is indexed by mine, operator, controller, classification, and any keyword in the investigator's narrative. The site exists because MSHA's own Data Retrieval System is hard to use; this one is built for the people who actually need the record: inspectors, researchers, defense and compliance counsel, journalists, and families.
Key statistics
Live numbers, pulled from the production dataset on each page render. As of 2026-05-01.
- Records on file
- 272,542
- All reportable accidents
- Of which fatal
- 1,199
- degree_injury_cd = ‘01’
- Latest fatal year
- 2026
- Most recent fatality on file
Reporter-friendly entry points
- /recent — the 100 most recent reportable fatalities, with narratives
- /recent/feed.xml — RSS for the national fatality feed
- /trends — year-over-year + decade analysis with downloadable charts
- /operators and /controllers — fatality counts ranked by operator and parent company
- /state/[abbr] — per-state landings (every US state, with own RSS feed)
- /classifications — every MSHA accident category broken out (roof fall, electrical, methane, etc.)
Citation guidance
Every accident has a stable canonical permalink at /incident/[id]. Cite the underlying MSHA document number when possible — it's on every record page and traces back to the agency's original filing. Citation formats (APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX) for the dataset as a whole are at /citing.
Quotes (background)
Founder Austin Hale is available for interviews on the dataset, MSHA Open Data limitations, and the technical choices behind the tool.
“MSHA already publishes every reportable accident — the data is on their site, in bulk, free. The bottleneck is the search surface. Inspectors training new crews, families looking for a specific record, defense and compliance counsel pulling operator history for a 105(c) action — they all need the same record but the agency's search makes it hard to find. We mirror what MSHA publishes, verbatim, every weekly refresh, and the search and alert layer over the top is what we built.”
Source data
Primary source: MSHA Open Government Data — Accidents and Mines datasets, refreshed weekly. Mining Incidents adds no information MSHA has not published; the investigator narratives are MSHA's own text, verbatim.
Contact
For interviews, dataset access, or coverage questions, email Austin Hale at austin@byshovel.com. For corrections to a specific record, see /about.