ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 deals with accidents and mining by concentrating on the problem of the risk of explosion in industrial coal mining from a global perspective. Since it is not possible to use a correspondingly large statistical dataset for a variety of mining regions around the world as the basis of historical analysis, this chapter focuses on large mining accidents or disasters. In a global perspective it is only for these hazards that relatively accurate data are available for longer periods of time. The focus is mainly on the coal industry and the risk of explosion that, in the course of industrialisation since the 18th century, very often caused accidents with very high personal and property damage for certain reasons. Taking into account science and strategies for reducing explosions prior to the 20th century, it is shown that a phase of decreasing security to the middle of the 1880s was followed by a phase of optimisation of protection measures in Europe. Nevertheless, there was a period of major disasters in the ‘old’ mining countries in the early 20th century, in which explosion protection in the United States caught up with the European standard. Only then mining rescue underwent a basic organisational and technological restructuring to avoid explosions of mine gas and coal dust in the Western world. After the Second World War the risk of mine explosions shifted mainly to the less-developed ‘new’ mining countries, such as South Africa, India and China. But even in the special case of China, new organisational structures and the appliance of modern standards of explosion protection in recent years have led to a significant decline of the mortality rate in Chinese coal mining.
