December 8, 2007
Mining Disasters II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:35 AM EST Just as an addendum to Fredric Smoler’s post on mining and its death toll, it might be noted that that toll has been decreasing steadily for the last century in this country. There are three principal reasons for this. One has been the effort to prevent another disaster such as occurred at Monagh, West Virginia, a hundred years ago, when 362 lives were snuffed out in an instant. In 1910 the U.S. Bureau of Mines was created to investigate accidents, advise on safety procedures, and teach courses in mine safety. Regulation of mines has been increasing steadily ever since and today is governed by the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, which created the Mine Safety and Health Administration as part of the Labor Department. The second reason has been the growth of open-pit mining and the reduction of tunnel mining, which is intrinsically far more hazardous. Open-pit mining uses far fewer miners per ton mined, and the two principal causes of tunnel mining disasters, collapse and explosion, are negligible factors. The third reason is that management has come to realize that an unremitting emphasis on safety is simply good for the bottom line. The result in the United States mining industry has been spectacular.
Year: Average Annual Deaths / Average Annual Injuries
1936-1940: 1,546 / 81,342
1941-1945: 1,592 / 82,825
1946-1950: 1,054 / 63,367
1951-1955: 690 / 38,510
1956-1960: 550 / 28,805
1961-1965: 449 / 23,204
1966-1970: 426 / 22,435
1971-1975: 322 / 33,963
1976-1980: 254 / 41,220
1981-1985: 174 / 24,290
1986-1990: 122 / 27,524
1991-1999: 93 / 21,351
2000-2004: 67 / 13,601
Even if you factor in the reduction in the total number of mine workers, thanks to greatly increased productivity, the reduction in mining deaths has been impressive. In 1970 there was about one death per million man-hours in coal mining (the most hazardous type of mining). By 1977 the ratio was down almost to one death per three million man-hours. In 1995–99, there was less than one death per six million man-hours.
Indeed the number of work-related deaths in all occupations has been declining for the last century. In 2004 there were only 5,703 work-related deaths in the United States (and almost 14 percent of them were homicides and self-inflicted injuries). That is not many more than the number of miners being killed every year in the first decade of the twentieth century, and we have a vastly larger workforce today than we did a hundred years ago. That’s also equal to the number of miners killed every year today in China.
| 
