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 happened, and sets out the conditions investigators found. It is the public, plain-language face of a federal accident record.

Behind each notice sits a structured record. It carries the accident date, the mine and its operator and controlling company, the classification MSHA assigns to the cause, the victim's occupation and years of experience, and the investigator's written narrative of events. Most also reach a finding on the conditions that contributed and the practices that could have prevented the death. Read together, those fields are what let a single death be compared against decades of others.

The electronic record runs deep. Mining Incidents indexes every reportable fatality MSHA has filed since 1983, 3,111 deaths through May 2026, and a narrative accompanies nearly all of them, so the file supports more than a head count. The years before 2000 come from an MSHA backfill, and a few fields are recorded less consistently there, a limit worth keeping in mind when reading the oldest entries.

The aggregate has a clear shape. Powered haulage, the movement of material and equipment, accounts for about 30 percent of recorded deaths, machinery for 17 percent, and falls of roof or back for 12 percent. Three causes account for nearly six in ten fatalities on file.

Every fatality in that record is browsable, each linked to MSHA's own document and the full incident detail, at miningincidents.org/fatalgrams