Under a year of experience: 1 in 8 US mining deaths since 2000

Of the 1,202 US mining fatalities recorded since 2000, each documented on an MSHA Form 7000-1, the Mine Accident, Injury and Illness Report, 144 involved a worker whose total mining experience was under one year. The figure comes from the tot_exper field on that form, which captures cumulative time in the industry rather than time at the specific mine.

That works out to about 12 percent of the total, or roughly one in 8 of the people killed. The remaining share carried a year or more of mining experience at the time of the incident, but the first-year group is large enough that it cannot be treated as an edge case.

The tot_exper field measures the whole of a person's mining career, so a fatality counted here is someone who had been in mining, anywhere and in any role, for less than twelve months. A worker can be new to the industry while still holding decades of experience in other lines of work, and the form does not net that against the mining figure.

There is a limit to what this share can show. A count of deaths becomes a measure of risk only when it is divided by the hours those workers actually put in, and MSHA does not publish hours worked broken out by experience level. If first-year workers also account for around one in eight of all hours on the job, then one in eight of the deaths is close to what chance alone would produce, and the figure would say little about whether the first year carries higher risk. We took a best effort at an interesting question, and the public record reaches only this far. The count describes who is dying. Measuring how much more likely a newcomer is to be killed would take exposure data these files do not contain.

Each of these reports, along with the underlying experience field, is indexed and surfaced here per mine and per operator, so the record behind the count can be examined case by case.