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), and ahead of established coal states including Pennsylvania (64), Alabama (53), and Virginia (39). The ranking is notable because West Virginia and Kentucky carry heavy underground coal fatality counts, a category where Texas has little presence.

The state total sits within a national count of 1,204 fatalities for the period, split 560 coal and 644 metal and nonmetal.

The record we surface does not attach a per-death commodity or subunit tag at the state level in this dataset, so we cannot here break the 70 Texas fatalities into strip and quarry, underground, mill, or dredge subunits. That breakdown exists in Form 7000-1 on a per-incident basis, and answering the question fully would mean tallying each Texas record's subunit field rather than reading it off the state total. The 70 figure is a fair proxy for the scale of fatal incidents recorded in the state, not for how they distribute across mine types.

One caution on reading the ranking itself: a state count reflects total deaths, not risk per worker or per hour. Without the employment and hours figures from Form 7000-2 to serve as a denominator, a high count may reflect a large mining workforce as much as anything about conditions at any given operation.

The per-incident records behind this total, including the subunit and commodity fields for each Texas fatality, are available by mine and operator through the index.