Fatalities Cost in Mining

To better understand the burden imposed by fatal accidents in the mining industry, it is necessary to develop measures of the economic component of loss to complement existing surveillance research efforts. The Fatalities Cost in Mining web application, developed by the NIOSH Mining Program, uses an adapted version of a well-known cost-of-injury methodology to estimate the societal cost of an individual fatality based on key characteristics of the fatally injured miner. In this model, the cost of a fatal injury has two main components: (1) a one-time direct cost and (2) an annual series of indirect costs beginning at the victim's age at death and ending at age 67 (estimated retirement age). The direct cost is the estimated medical cost associated with the fatal injury. The indirect cost estimate has two components: the victim's wage value (wage and benefits adjusted for growth) and the victim's household production value (time spent performing household tasks and providing care to household members). For each year between the year of death and age 67, the calculator sums the two indirect cost values and then adjusts them for the time value of money using a real discount rate. The web app adjusts all costs for inflation using the GDP deflator.

Please select one of the options below to estimate the societal costs of mining fatalities. The “New Search” option allows for the selection of specific characteristics of the mining fatality from historical fatal injury data. The “Open a Saved Search” option is for loading a previously saved search. Selecting none of the boxes in a variable category has the same effect as choosing all of the variables. To view all data from all years, make no selections in step 1 and proceed to step 2.