The article analyzes the information on the accident rate at the enterprises of the coal industry of the Russian Federation. The influence of the Federal Law «On State Regulation in the Field of Coal Mining and Use, on the Specifics of Protection of the Employees of Coal Industry Organizations», which facilitated the growth of coal production in Russia and the reduction of accidents and injuries rate, as well as the stabilization of social status of the coal industry employees. Assessment is given concerning the influence of the Federal Law «On Industrial Safety of Hazardous Production Facilities» aimed at accidents prevention at hazardous production facilities and ensuring preparedness of the organizations operating hazardous production facilities to containment and elimination of the consequences of accidents occurred, and to reduction of the accident rate at the enterprises of coal industry of the Russian Federation. Attention is focused on the fact that Rostechnadzor adoption of a number of the federal norms and rules in the field of industrial safety had a positive impact on reducing the accidents and injuries rate at the coal enterprises, primarily in the coal mines.
Based on the published data, diagrams were built related to coal mining in Kuzbass, fatal injury rate and the frequency factor for 30 years (1988–2017). The linear pair regression is provided between the number of fatal injuries and the number of accidents in the coal industry of Russia. It has been established that the statistics of fatal injuries at the coal industry enterprises of the Russian Federation for the period of 11 years (1994–2004) is described by the Pearson distribution curves having an extremum.
The analysis of major accidents at the coal mines of Kuzbass was carried out, their probabilistic nature was revealed. Based on the theory of random processes it is established that the accidents at the coal mines are of a probabilistic nature depending on a large number of factors: mining-geological, mining-technical, organizational, technical, human. The sequence of major accidents that occurred in Kuzbas from 1990 to January 2018 is considered as an «event flow», which in the general case is a sequence of random events with random intervals separating them.
It is established that the major accidents at the mines are random events that depend on many reasons and are independent of time from each other. In our real probabilistic world, the major accidents in the coal mines are unavoidable in principle. At the same time, the intervals between major accidents can be significantly increased by developing and putting into practice the effective measures on accidents risk reduction, which would allow to reduce the severity of accidents and reduce the number of lost miners.