SUMMARY.Introduction: open pit mining and underground, have high rates of injuries associated with this industry internationally. Countries like Australia, some from Europe and the United States have made progress in mine safety, both fatal and non-fatal injury; however, other countries do not show the same development example is some African countries, China and South American countries. Colombia shows a very poor progress in mine safety, aggravated by lack of quality records to establish policies on mining health and safety. This research is part of the larger project Assessment of exposure to coal dust in underground mining in three departments of Colombia. Objective: To describe occupational accidents (AT) and illnesses (EL) of these workers and their relations with the exposure time and craft. Methodology: cross-sectional study with 476 workers of the project database macro; Descriptive statistics: measures of central tendency and dispersion, in quantitative variables; frequencies and percentages for qualitative; statistical inference methods to study population prevalence estimate of AT and EL; and tests of association Chi-square to identify factors related variables. Parameter estimates using a confidence level of 95% and association tests α level of 0.05. Results: The age in years of the workers varied between 20 and 76 years with an overall mean of 43 ± 10. The most involved anatomic regions were lower limbs 32.2%, upper limbs 26.9%, head and back with 9.9 % respectively. The occupational disease most commonly diagnosed, was herniated disc. Conclusions: This study shows the magnitude of the problem of accidents observed in the three departments; distribution of accidents in the mining sector, according to the anatomical region, type of injury and its causal agent, this will be input to help develop public policy at the enterprise level, the ARL and other actors SGSST.
