Mining Incidents · Research
Research notes
Occasional data analysis drawn from the full MSHA archive. Every figure is computed from the public record and links back to the underlying data.
Peru's unpublished mining-safety fines, 2020-2026: obtained via public records request
Peru's mining safety regulator, OSINERGMIN, published a list of its sanction resolutions naming each fined company through December 2019. Then the list froze. The agency…
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July 23, 2026 Chart
How coal-mine respirable silica measures against MSHA's new 50-microgram limit
MSHA's 2024 respirable crystalline silica rule sets one limit for coal mines: 50 micrograms of silica per cubic metre of air (µg/m³). It is the number that now governs…
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July 23, 2026
Metal/nonmetal mining accounts for 645 of 1,205 mining deaths since 2000
Of the 1,205 fatalities recorded in the archive from 2000 to the present, 645 occurred at metal and nonmetal operations and 560 at coal operations. Metal/nonmetal…
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July 23, 2026
What EX-95 tells investors about mine-safety liability, and what it leaves out
Every public company with U.S. mining operations files a document most investors never read: the Exhibit 95 mine-safety disclosure, required by Section 1503 of the…
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July 19, 2026
The five most-cited mines by total MSHA citations
Ranking every mine in the archive by total MSHA citations, the top five are Marshall County Mine (20,642 citations, $20,840,698 proposed), Marion County Mine (15,705…
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July 19, 2026
5.9% of quartz samples since 2000 never yielded a measurement
Of the 167,619 quartz samples in MSHA's open-data Quartz Samples dataset, collected between January 3, 2000 and June 23, 2026 across 3,431 distinct coal and…
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July 16, 2026
Coal was 55% of mining deaths in the 1980s. Today it is 29%.
For most of the last century, a mining death in America meant one thing: a coal miner in Appalachia. That is no longer where most miners die.
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July 15, 2026
What MSHA's contractor employment data measures, and what it does not
Every quarter, mining contractors file their employee-hours and production with MSHA on the same forms operators use. We have now loaded that entire record: about 1.3…
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July 15, 2026 Chart
A century of coal: 2,234 US mining deaths in 1926, eight in 2025
A century ago, coal mining was one of the deadliest jobs in the United States. In 1926, US coal mines killed 2,234 workers, according to MSHA's fatality record that runs…
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July 15, 2026
The median miner who dies has 10.8 years of experience
The stock character in every story about industrial death is the new hire. The kid in his first week, untrained, unlucky, in over his head. In mining, the record does…
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July 14, 2026
Powered haulage has killed 7 times as many miners as gas or dust explosions since 1983
Ask anyone to picture a mining death and the same images arrive: an explosion deep underground, a roof coming down, men trapped behind a collapse. The MSHA record tells…
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July 9, 2026
Dredge work: 40 of 1,204 recorded mining deaths since 2000
Of the 1,204 fatalities recorded on MSHA Form 7000-1 since 2000, 40 occurred at the subunit MSHA codes as DREDGE. That places dredge operations fifth among work…
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July 9, 2026
Five most-cited mines carry 76,630 citations between them
The five mines with the highest citation counts in our index have accumulated 76,630 MSHA citations combined. Marshall County Mine leads the group at 20,642 citations,…
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July 9, 2026
Weekend deaths are 15% of the mining total since 2000
Of the 1,204 fatalities recorded on MSHA Form 7000-1 since 2000, 178 occurred on a Saturday or Sunday. That is roughly 15 percent of the total, against the 1,026 deaths…
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July 2, 2026
Texas: third among states with 70 recorded mining deaths since 2000
Across the fatalities indexed from MSHA Form 7000-1 for 2000 to the present, Texas records 70 deaths. That places it behind only West Virginia (207) and Kentucky (144),…
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June 24, 2026
Anatomy of an MSHA fatalgram
A fatalgram is the one-page notice the Mine Safety and Health Administration issues after a miner dies on the job. It names the operation, summarizes how the death…
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June 23, 2026
December 1907: the deadliest month in American coal mining
In thirty-one days, five explosions across four states killed more than 700 coal miners, the deadliest month the American coal industry has ever recorded. It opened…
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June 22, 2026 Chart
Under a year of experience: 1 in 8 US mining deaths since 2000
Of the 1,202 US mining fatalities recorded since 2000, each documented on an MSHA Form 7000-1, the Mine Accident, Injury and Illness Report, 144 involved a worker whose…
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June 21, 2026 Chart
Charged $1.8 billion, paid $1.27 billion
In an earlier note, The $1.8 billion paper trail, we flagged that the gap between what MSHA proposed and what mines paid was a research subject in itself. Here it is,…
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June 21, 2026
Every MSHA citation, now beside the incident record
Since 1994, MSHA inspectors have written just over three million citations and orders against US mines. We have now indexed every one, drawn from MSHA's…
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June 20, 2026 Chart
43 years of US mining incidents, 1983 to 2025
Mining Incidents now indexes every reportable accident, injury, and illness on file with the US Mine Safety and Health Administration back to 1983, the start of MSHA's…
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June 10, 2026 Chart
Powered haulage: 30% of US mining deaths since 2000
Since 2000, MSHA has recorded 1,202 mining fatalities in the United States. The single largest classification is powered haulage - haul trucks, front-end loaders,…