Retrieve MSHA mine ownership, inspection, and violation history for a specific mine ID
domain: MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System (MDRS) · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Go to msha.gov Data & Reports and locate the Mine Data Retrieval System (MDRS) or the Open Government data catalog.
Search by mine ID (7-digit MSHA ID) or operator name in MDRS to view an on-screen summary report.
For bulk/programmatic use, download the underlying flat files (pipe "|" delimited, header row first) published under MSHA's Open Government Initiative, refreshed weekly on Fridays.
Cross-reference the mine ID across the separate Mines, Violations, Assessments, and Accidents/Injuries files since MDRS splits data across roughly 20 linked flat files rather than one relational export.
Join records using shared keys (Mine ID, Event Number, Document No.) to reconstruct a mine's full compliance history.
Known gotchas
There is no live REST/JSON API; access is either the MDRS web UI for manual lookups or scheduled bulk flat-file downloads, so any "API" wrapper found online is a third-party scraper, not an official interface.
Field delimiters, encodings, and file layouts have changed over MSHA's history; verify the current data dictionary before parsing, especially for older archived files (pre-2000 Part 50 data vs. current).
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