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 not support him.

Of the mining fatalities since 1983 where MSHA captured the victim's total experience, 2,841 cases, the median miner who died had 10.8 years in the industry. The average was 13.0 years. More than half, 54 percent, had at least a decade of experience. Roughly one in four had twenty years or more. Fewer than one in ten, 289 of 2,841, died in their first year on the job.

The people mining kills are, overwhelmingly, people who know how to mine.

This runs against intuition, so it is worth being exact about what it does and does not show. It does not show that experience makes a miner more likely to die. To claim that we would need to know how many experienced miners are working and for how many hours, a denominator the fatality record does not carry. A workforce that skews toward veterans will produce deaths that skew toward veterans, all else equal.

What it does show is that experience is not the shield the mythology assumes. A decade underground does not move a worker into a safe category. If anything, the record points to a more specific hazard than raw inexperience. Of the miners who died, 672 were within their first year in that particular job, and 162 of those were industry veterans, ten or more years in mining, who had recently moved into a new task or a new mine. The seasoned hand doing something for the first time is a recognizable figure in this data, and not a rare one.

The comfortable version of a mining death imagines a stranger to the work. The record describes someone who had done the work for a long time. That is a harder thing to look at, and it is the more accurate one.

Every fatality record, including the victim's reported years of experience, is searchable at miningincidents.org.