Sample compliance report

Insight. Peabody is a coal controller: 92 of 93 mines and roughly 95% of citations are coal-designated. Only 14 of 75 currently mapped mines are active, and current employment is concentrated there; the remaining 61 are abandoned, sealed, non-producing, or idled.

Limitations  The single “M”-tagged mine (Shoal Creek, AL) is a metallurgical-coal operation, an MSHA source quirk, not metal mining. Several subsidiary IDs map to multiple name spellings; per-subsidiary breakouts need manual cleanup.

Insight. After contest settlements the assessed amount falls to $48.3M, a 27% reduction from proposed, of which $47.3M is paid, leaving about $1.06M outstanding and concentrated in 2022 to 2026. Special-assessment activity peaked in 2010 to 2012 and has been near zero since 2020.

Limitations  “Assessed” is the final amount owed (paid equals assessed in every fully-resolved early year); if it were a remaining-balance field the outstanding figure would differ. No violation-level penalty data exists before 2000.

Insight. The dominant exposure is 75.400 combustible-material accumulation (8,835 citations, $15.3M). Roof/rib support (75.202a) and machinery safe-condition (75.1725a) carry the highest S&S shares (about 56%), meaning those citations are far likelier to be judged reasonably likely to cause serious injury. Overall 23% of citations are S&S and about 7% cite high negligence or reckless disregard.

Limitations  About 800 citations carry blank gravity/negligence/S&S fields. Gravity is shown as its two components (likelihood, expected injury) because MSHA stores no single composite score.

Insight. Peabody contests 8.0% of citations by count but 35.8% by proposed dollars: it disputes high-value citations and pays the routine ones. Settlement dominates, reducing matched original penalties from $64.5M to $38.6M (about 40%); outright vacaturs are rare. The strategy yields negotiated reductions, not dismissals.

Limitations  Docket decisions are joined by mine ID, not controller, so they can include periods a mine had a different operator. Directional only; do not sum against the Section 2 penalty totals.

Insight. Across the most recent 12 quarters the citation rate ranges about 160 to 285 per million employee-hours with no clear directional trend; the S&S rate holds about 28 to 59. One fatality falls in the window (Q2 2023).

Limitations  Most mine-quarters carry low-hours confidence flags, so the aggregate is effectively the rate of the few high-hours active mines. Employee-hours are self-reported and can be revised. This employee-hours denominator is not comparable to the inspection-hours rate in Section 6.

Insight. Peabody’s enforcement rate of 8.70 citations per 100 inspection hours is below the cohort mean of 10.70 (z = −0.38), roughly the 35th to 39th percentile: about 60% of controllers are cited more often per inspection hour. Among coal majors it sits mid-pack, near CONSOL (7.74) and Robert E. Murray (8.74), above Arch, Alliance and Alpha (all under 7.0).

Limitations  Cohort is all 2,550 rated controllers, not explicitly coal-filtered (though coal majors dominate the top). A lower rate is not necessarily “safer”; it reflects fewer citations per inspection hour and is influenced by inspection intensity and mine mix.

Insight. Of 19 fatalities, powered haulage (7) and machinery (7) account for 14, and “caught in, under, or between” is the recurring mechanism. The most recent was April 2023 at Bear Run; North Antelope Rochelle, Kayenta, and Willow Lake Portal each recorded two.

Limitations  Attributed by the controller lineage in the fatality record, which reaches back to 1996 (before the 2000 violation record); early entries reflect operators later folded into Peabody, so attribution depends on MSHA’s mapping, not ownership on the accident date. The Aug 2022 El Segundo fatality was a contractor employee.

Insight. Peabody accumulated 59,827 citations over about 687,909 inspection hours. The high average inspection-history count on each citation reflects large operations that are heavily and repeatedly inspected rather than sporadically visited sites.

Limitations  The per-citation history fields come from MSHA’s penalty-point calculation; averaging them gives an indicator, not a precise inspection frequency.