Portfolio · Mining Incidents

Mining Incidents

Searchable research tool for US mining safety records.

~500k records · 1983–present · refreshed weekly
miningincidents.org · Searchable research tool for US mining safety records. →
01 · What it is

Search every reportable MSHA mining incident — fatal and non-fatal, 1983 to present (~500,000 records). Filter by mine, operator, year, severity, or a keyword in the investigator's narrative. Refreshed weekly.

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.

Coverage
US
02 · How it works
  1. Pull the latest MSHA Accidents/Injuries/Illnesses snapshot from msha.gov each Monday.
  2. Normalize the schema and join against the Mine and Operator reference tables so every row carries operator name, mine name, and state.
  3. Run the investigator's-narrative field through an LLM classifier for incident category and severity.
  4. Index the result into Postgres with full-text search on the narrative field.
  5. Publish to miningincidents.org; preserve the original MSHA report ID end-to-end so every record traces back to the source row.
03 · Deep links into the live product

Concrete entry points on miningincidents.org — open any of these to land directly in the data the URL describes.

04 · Visit the live product

Mining Incidents is operated by Shovel (ByShovel LLC) and lives at miningincidents.org. The umbrella studio site (this domain, byshovel.com) is the home for licensing inquiries and the broader portfolio.

Follow product updates at @miningincidents.