page_title: Coal mining in the United States
section_title: Accidents
hierarchical_section_title: Coal mining in the United States / Accidents
caption_attribution_description: English: Coal mining fatalities in the United States 1900-2014 (data from US Dept. of Labor)
context_page_description: Coal mining in the United States is an industry in transition. Production in 2017 was down 33% from the peak production of 1,162.7 million short tons in 2006. Employment of 50,000 coal miners is down from a peak of 883,000 in 1923. Generation of electricity is the largest user of coal, being used to produce 50% of electric power in 2005 and 27% in 2018. The U.S. is a net exporter of coal. U.S. coal exports, for which Europe is the largest customer, peaked in 2012. In 2015, the U.S. exported 7.0 percent of mined coal.
  Coal remains an important factor in the 25 states in which it is mined. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2015 Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Pennsylvania produced about 639 million short tons representing 71% of total U.S. coal production in the United States.
  In 2015, four publicly traded US coal companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, including Patriot Coal Corporation, Walter Energy, and the fourth-largest Alpha Natural Resources. By January 2016, more than 25% of coal production was in bankruptcy in the United States including the top two producers Peabody Energy and Arch Coal.
context_section_description: Mine disasters have still occurred in recent years in the US, Examples include the Sago Mine disaster of 2006, and the 2007 mine accident in Utah's Crandall Canyon Mine, where nine miners were killed and six entombed. In the decade 2005–2014, US coal mining fatalities averaged 28 per year. The most fatalities during the 2005–2014 decade were 48 in 2010, the year of the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, which killed 29 miners.
caption: Coal mining fatalities in the United States 1900–2014 (data from US Dept. of Labor)
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