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.

Sorting the MSHA fatality record into four eras, coal's share of mining deaths runs 55 percent in 1983 to 1994, 45 percent in 1995 to 2006, 51 percent from 2007 to 2018, and 29 percent from 2019 through mid-2025. In the most recent stretch, roughly seven of every ten miners who died worked not in coal but in metal and nonmetal operations: the stone quarries, sand and gravel pits, cement plants, and metal mines that most people never picture when they think about mining.

The map moved with the mineral. In 1983 to 1994, Kentucky recorded 255 mining deaths, more than any other state. In the last decade it recorded 22, which drops it to fourth. West Virginia, still almost purely coal, remains first at 47, but the states that now sit beside it near the top are not coal states at all. Texas recorded 31 mining deaths in the last decade, and all but one were in metal and nonmetal work. Nevada recorded 16, every one of them metal, the gold country. Georgia recorded 15, every one nonmetal, the stone belt.

The industry did not get safer by becoming less Appalachian. It relocated. As coal employment collapsed, the aggregate and metal sectors, which never stopped hiring, became the larger share of both the workforce and the death toll. A sand and gravel pit outside a growing city is a mine in the eyes of MSHA, and it can kill like one.

These are counts of deaths, not rates. We are not claiming a quarry worker in Texas faces higher odds today than a coal miner in West Virginia did; establishing that would take the state-by-state employment and hours we have not placed beside these counts here. What the counts establish is where the American mining fatality now happens. The center of gravity has moved off the coalfields, out toward the quarries and pits of the South and West, and the public image of the job has not caught up.

Every fatality, by state, mineral, and operator, is searchable at miningincidents.org.