Current states , prediction and prevention suggestions for water hazard accidents in China’s coal mines

At present, the pattern of coal resource development in China has changed, but the water hazard accidents that restrict the safety production of coal mine still occur from time to time. In order to explore the characteristics and laws of water hazard accidents in coal mines in China and scientifically study and judge the evolution trend of water hazard accidents, study was performed in terms of the year, region, accident level and influencing factors of water hazard accidents, with the nationwide water hazard accidents from 2001 to 2022 as the statistical objects. Meanwhile, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model was built, and the equal-dimension and new-information grey G(1,1) model was introduced as the benchmark model to predict the fatality rate per million tonnes in coal mine water accidents in 2023-2024. Besides, approprioate prevention and control measures were put forward according to the characteristics of the accidents. The results show that: From 2001 to 2022, there were a total of 1 103 water hazard accidents in China, with a death toll of 4 667 people. Since 2016, the number of water hazard accidents in China’s coal mines has dropped to a single digit, and the death toll of accidents has been controlled within 50 people per year. With the westward migration of China’s coal resource development center and the deepening of coal resource exploitation, the number of coal mine water hazard accidents and the death toll have a rising trend. In China, water hazard accidents in coal mines mainly occur in North China, South China and northeast China, showing obvious agglomeration. In the past two years, the water accidents occurred in northwest coal mines accounts for 36.36% in the total, with the proportion of deaths up to 74.24%. The scale of water hazard accidents in coal mines has been well controlled on the whole. Especially major water hazard accidents in coal mines have been eliminated since 2011. However, the major water accidents used to be decreased but show a rebound in the past two years. The number of major and ordinary water accidents and casualties have decreased significantly. Under the current development pattern of coal resources, the steady increase of coal production leads to the increase of the risk of uncertain water hazard. The prediction accuracy of the LSTM model is higher than that of the equal-dimension and new-information grey G(1,1) model. The predicted fatality rates per million tonnes by the two models in the next two years are 0.004 1, 0.002 2, and 0.003 5, 0.001 2, respectively, for the nationwide water hazard accidents in coal mine. The predicted results show that the number of casualties caused by coal mine water hazard accidents in China shows an overall decreasing trend, which indicates the stable security situation.