I rarely if ever have used this platform to express an opinon, preferring to have the site just report facts, but I have a fact to report that I definitely have an opinion on and so, here it is.

MSHA is changing how it counts fatalities. It’s seemingly part of what the Assistant Secretary said at TRAM last October about his desire to “Blur” the lines between Metal-Nonmetal and Coal. As a trainer who does his best to satisfy MSHA by providing relevent material it’s not only helpful but necessary to divide the two. The rules are different and miners most often are going into just one type of mine, not both.

The announcement appears on the MSHA web page that fatalities not be seperated and indeed fatalities number one and two occured in coal mines and three and four were in metal-nonmetal mines. Without a careful counting as the year goes on it will be difficult to compare to previous years or tell how the very different industries are doing. Other helpful training materials that MSHA has provided in the past to help us understand where we are even within the various industries of metal-nonmetal have disappeared. Secretary Zatezalo rightly said last October that as we approach zero fatalities we have to change our approach to continue to make advances, but blurring lines and failing to interpret and publish data isn’t a change in the right direction. If anything these changes will simply make it more difficult to understand where we are and if we don’t know that we certainly can’t tell where we’re going.

We will continue to seperate the industries here even in the title to fatalities, referencing them both by MSHA’s fatality number and numbering them by Metal Nonmetal and Coal. You can also select the Categories and click on tags on the right side of the page to further select industries. I started this page to assist in my own training material design. If there’s any way I can help in yours by interpreting data here let me know. MSHA doesn’t seem to be doing it much anymore.

-Randy