Weekend deaths are 15% of the mining total since 2000

Of the 1,204 fatalities recorded on MSHA Form 7000-1 since 2000, 178 occurred on a Saturday or Sunday. That is roughly 15 percent of the total, against the 1,026 deaths spread across the five weekdays. If deaths fell evenly across all seven days, a Saturday and Sunday share near 29 percent would be expected, so the weekend total runs well below a proportional baseline.

The individual days sharpen the picture. Monday is the highest single day at 253, and the weekday count stays between 190 and 253 through Friday. Saturday drops to 117, and Sunday to 61, the lowest of the week and less than a quarter of the Monday figure.

A plausible reading is that fewer people are at work on weekends, and fewer worker-hours produce fewer fatal events. The Sunday total of 61 is not zero, but it sits at the bottom of the range for reasons the day-of-week column alone cannot confirm.

To turn these counts into a per-worker or per-hour risk comparison, we would need hours worked broken out by day of week, and the day-of-week fatality column carries no such denominator. So the weekend share here is a fair proxy for how the fatality burden is distributed across the calendar, not a measure of whether a given hour of weekend work is safer or more dangerous than a weekday hour.

The day-of-week distribution, along with the underlying incident records, is available per mine and operator through the archive.