Mining Incidents
liveSearchable research tool for US mining safety records.
~500k records · 1983–present · refreshed weekly
What it does →
What it does
Every reportable mining incident MSHA has on file — fatal and non-fatal — searchable by mine, operator, year, severity, or a keyword in the investigator's narrative. Built for safety inspectors training crews, researchers chasing patterns, journalists chasing stories, and families trying to find a record. Updated weekly from MSHA's open datasets.
Why we built it
I took an MSHA training course taught by Kim Redding and walked out unsettled. Every incident was on the record, but the public couldn't really find it — the agency's own search makes the data hard to see. This is a small counterweight: the same public record, opened up. Credit for the spark belongs to Kim.
How it works
- Pull the latest MSHA Accidents/Injuries/Illnesses snapshot from msha.gov each Monday.
- Normalize the schema and join against the Mine and Operator reference tables so every row carries operator name, mine name, and state.
- Run the investigator's-narrative field through an LLM classifier for incident category and severity.
- Index the result into Postgres with full-text search on the narrative field.
- Publish to miningincidents.org; preserve the original MSHA report ID end-to-end so every record traces back to the source row.