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 assessed-violations records, and set them beside the incident record operators file on Form 7000-1, the Mine Accident, Injury and Illness Report.

Three figures stand out.

First, the money. Every violation record carries the full assessment trail: the proposed civil penalty MSHA charges (the proposed_penalty field), the amount that becomes due after any contest or settlement (amount_due), and the amount the operator actually paid (amount_paid). Proposed penalties across the record total more than $1.8 billion. Because the proposed and paid figures sit side by side, citation by citation, the gap between what was charged and what was collected is itself a research subject.

Second, the concentration. A small share of operations carries a large share of the enforcement record. Upper Big Branch alone shows 3,912 citations and orders and $15.3 million in proposed penalties, and that history was on file before April 2010. Each violation also carries its gravity coding: the significant-and-substantial flag (sig_sub), the negligence finding, and the section of the Mine Act cited, so the record separates a paperwork lapse from a withdrawal order.

Third, the denominator. Every quarter, operators report their employee-hours to MSHA on Form 7000-2, the Quarterly Mine Employment and Coal Production Report. Dividing citations by those hours turns raw counts into a rate, citations per million employee-hours, which is the only fair way to compare a 12-person quarry with a 600-person underground mine. It is the same pairing MSHA itself uses to compute injury rates. Every mine page now shows its quarterly rate, greyed when the reported hours are too thin to be stable.

Each mine's compliance record now sits next to its incident record, field for field.