Evaluation of Occupational Fatalities among Underground Coal Mine Workers through Hierarchical Loglinear Models

Abstract

Despite the all precautions, underground coal mining is one of the dangerous industries owing to fatal occupational accidents. Accidents are complicated events to which many factors effect on their formation and preventing them is only possible by the analyses of the accident occurred in past and by straight evaluation of the obtained results. In this study, hierarchical loglinear analysis method was implemented to occupational fatalities occurred in the period of 1980-2004 in the five underground coal mines of Turkish Hardcoal Enterprises which has the most important coal production areas in Turkey. The accident records were evaluated and the main factors affecting the accidents were defined as mine, miners' age, occupation, and accident type. By taking into account the sub factors of the main factors, multi way contingency tables were prepared and thus, the probabilities might effect fatality accidents were investigated. At the end of this study, it was found that the mostly affected job group by the fatality accidents was the production workers and additionally, these workers were mostly exposed to roof collapses and methane explosions. Moreover, important accident risk factors and the occupational job groups which have high probability to be exposed to these risk factors were determined and important information about decreasing the accidents in the underground coal mines were presented.