Study says mine safety improves for a time after fatality

Mine safety increases in the immediate aftermath of a fatal incident, according to a study conducted at BYU.

Unfortunately, the findings also show that as time goes on and memories of such tragedies fade, so does the heightened sense of mine safety.

"I was surprised that four or five years after a mine's fatal accident, it was just as unsafe as it had been before the accident," Peter Madsen, the study's author and assistant professor of organizational behavior and strategy at BYU's Marriott School of Management, said in a news release. "I would have expected people to remember a little bit longer."

The study is being released near the two-year anniversary of the Crandall Canyon mine disaster. On Aug. 6, 2007, six miners were trapped when an area of the Crandall Canyon coal mine collapsed near Huntington in Emery County. Days later, three rescuers were killed and several others were injured while trying to reach the trapped miners.

The bodies of those trapped inside were never recovered, and the mine was later permanently shuttered.

"To generalize the results of this study to Crandall Canyon, as tragic and costly as that accident was, Utah mining and this type of mining anywhere in the country will be safer as a result (for a time)," Madsen said.

The findings of the study will be published in the upcoming issue of the journal "Organizational Science."

In his analysis, Madsen reviewed data from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration on coal mining accidents from 1983 to 2006, which included 938 fatal incidents at 20,864 mines across the country. He told the Deseret News that he based his findings solely on data.

He is currently working on follow-up research that will include personal accounts of mine incidents and their impacts on individual safety behavior.

According to his analysis, two years after a fatal mine incident, other mines in the U.S. are still less likely to suffer another fatal disaster and that effect strengthens three or four years later, most likely due to increased regulation, before beginning to taper off.

"We recognize coal mining as a relatively dangerous industry, but if you look at the numbers, any given mine is going to experience a fatal accident only once every 250 years, and it can be easy to forget exactly how dangerous it can be," he said.

"So when miners die, it serves as a wake-up call to others, helping them remember that this is a dangerous industry, and they need to pay extra attention to the safety procedures they already have in place."