This thesis aimed to collect, evaluate, present and discuss data on accidents in the Austrian mining and tunnelling industry over the past 20 years.
Based on this evaluation, potential improvements are identified.
The findings are to be incorporated into research, education and industry and contribute to a constantly improving occupational health and safety in mining and tunnelling.
As a basis, similarities and differences in the mining and tunnelling sector, specific sources of hazards, key indicators for accidents and the methods of the European Statistics on Accidents at Work (ESAW) are discussed.
In the main part, data sources regarding the Austrian mining and tunnelling industry were collected, presented and evaluated. The most frequent cause of accidents from 2000 to 2019 in Austrian mining, according to the Montan-Handbuch were “work equipment (gear, equipment, tools, machines, apparatus, chipping fragments” and according to the Austrian Allgemeine Unfallversicherungsanstalt (AUVA) for mining and tunnelling “loss of control of machine, means of transport or handling equipment, hand-held tool, animal”. A comparison of the objects involved in the accident shows that “moving machinery and equipment” causes more serious accidents.
A comparison between mining and tunnelling in Austria is carried out. It turns out that tunnelling has very high accident rates (approximately 95 accidents per 1000 employees) compared to mining (approximately 27 accidents per 1000 employees).
Subsequently, international data sources were collected and presented. Austria has the highest accident rates compared to the international mining industries. Compatible data sources are lacking for a comparison in the tunnelling industry.
In the final discussion, challenges in data collection and comparability of different classifications were addressed. It is important to know the origin, processing and methodology of the classification of accident data in order to be able to estimate the data’s accuracy and limitations of the validity.
The stagnation of the accident figures in recent years makes it clear that investments in occupational health and safety in mining and tunnelling will also be necessary in the future for a further reduction of accidents.