33 Miners Didn't Go Home in 2025. Here's What the Numbers Are Telling Us.
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In 2024, the mining industry had one of its best years on record. Twenty-eight fatalities, the second-lowest total in history, trailing only 2019. December closed without a single death. There was real reason for optimism.
Then 2025 arrived.
By the end of the year, 33 miners were dead. That's an 18% increase over 2024, and the early months were particularly brutal. Between January 3 and March 5 alone, ten miners were killed, more than triple the number for the same period the year before. MSHA issued a safety alert. The industry took notice. But the deaths kept coming.
If you work in mining, oversee mining operations, or manage safety programs for contractors operating on mine sites, these numbers deserve your full attention. Not because MSHA says so. Because 33 people went to work and didn't come home, and most of those deaths were preventable.
What's Actually Killing Miners
The data from 2025 tells a clear story if you're willing to read it.
Powered haulage was the #1 killer, by a wide margin.
Eleven of the 33 fatalities in 2025 were classified as powered haulage incidents. That's haul trucks, tractors, loaders, and other mobile equipment. Here's what some of those actually looked like:
- A haul truck driver went over a berm along the haul road and into a water-filled pit.
- A contract haul truck driver was killed when the ground beneath his truck failed while he was dumping material at a stockpile. The truck overturned.
- A miner was pinned against a rib by a tractor.
These aren't freak accidents. They're the result of berm heights that weren't adequate, ground conditions that weren't evaluated, equipment that was too close to unstable edges. They're the result of the same hazards that existed the day before, and the day before that, until someone died.
Machinery was the second leading cause.
Two common threads kept showing up in 2025 fatality investigations: improper maintenance and unsafe equipment operation. One that stands out, a contractor died from burns after a pressurized hydraulic line ruptured and caught fire while he was cutting shims from a cone crusher with a torch.
Think about that for a second. Someone was using a torch near a pressurized hydraulic system. That's not a training gap, that's a hazard recognition failure at multiple levels.
Ground failures and LOTO aren't going away.
Four deaths in 2025 involved ground or coal rib failures. At least one involved failure to lock and tag out equipment. These are not new hazards. MSHA has been citing them for decades. They're still killing people because somewhere in the chain, management, supervision, or the worker themselves, someone decided the risk was acceptable. It wasn't.
The Part That Should Change How You Think
Here's the detail that doesn't get enough attention: 78% of 2025 mining fatalities occurred above ground, at surface mines and facilities, not underground.
That matters because there's a persistent mental model in mining that underground is where the real danger lives. Cave-ins. Explosions. Black lung. And while those hazards are real, the data says you're more likely to die in the yard, on the haul road, or at the crusher than you are underground.
Surface operations often get less rigorous safety oversight. Fewer formal inspections. Looser permitting requirements. A culture that treats surface work as "less dangerous," and that assumption is costing lives.
Construction sand and gravel operations and bituminous coal each recorded four fatalities in 2025, making them the hardest-hit mining types. If your operation falls into either of those categories, the industry's numbers aren't just statistics. They're your peer group.
What MSHA Is Saying (And What It Actually Means)
After the early 2025 spike, MSHA issued a safety alert urging the mining community to focus on four things:
- Identifying and eliminating safety and health hazards
- Effective safety and health programs
- Thorough workplace examinations
- Hazard recognition and comprehensive training
That's sound guidance. It's also not new. MSHA has been saying versions of this for years.
Here's what I'd add: the difference between operations that get cited repeatedly and operations that actually improve isn't whether they know what MSHA wants. It's whether leadership has built a culture where hazards get reported, examined, and fixed, not buried, minimized, or scheduled for "next quarter."
Workplace examinations only work if the person doing them is empowered to stop work. Hazard recognition training only works if workers believe reporting a hazard won't cost them a shift or get them labeled a troublemaker. Safety programs only work if they're driven by people who care about the outcome, not just the paperwork.
The Takeaway
2025 was a step in the wrong direction. Thirty-three families lost someone. Most of those deaths share a common thread: a known hazard, an absent or inadequate control, and a system that didn't catch it in time.
The good news is that none of the leading causes, powered haulage, machinery incidents, ground failures, LOTO failures, are mysteries. We know what they look like. We know what controls work. The gap isn't knowledge. It's execution.
If you're running a mining operation or managing EHS for contractors working on mine sites, pull your powered haulage procedures and your berm standards today. Walk your surface operation with fresh eyes. Ask whether your workplace examination process is finding hazards or just checking boxes.
The 2024 numbers proved it's possible to do this job and bring everyone home. The 2025 numbers prove we can't take that for granted.
Bryan Barker is an EHS professional with experience across global construction, mining, general industry, global manufacturing, semiconductor, distribution, global retail, data centers, and energy. True North EHS provides practical safety insight for real-world operations.
