When it comes to operations, ask most mining executives what keeps them up at night and you’ll hear about tailings failures, social unrest, and underground collapses. The big ones. Those risks are real, and they deserve the attention they get. But while the industry watches the horizon for the catastrophe, it’s bleeding out from something far more mundane.
The data has moved on, even if the conversation hasn’t.
Decades of insured loss data spanning more than US$15 billion in gross claims tells a consistent story: Machinery breakdowns and process failures account for the majority of total property losses in mining. Not earthquakes. Not floods. The everyday operational stuff. And buried inside those numbers is a figure that should reframe how the industry thinks about risk: Business interruption drives around 80% of total loss value.
Not damage, but unplanned downtime.
This matters because mining has almost no cushion when production stops. Unlike manufacturing, where output can often be shifted or subcontracted, a mine is tied to a single ore body and processing stream. When a mill goes down or conveyors burn, revenue doesn’t slow, it stops. And in a commodity business, timing is everything. A failure during a copper or gold price spike doesn’t just cut output; it destroys margin that cannot be recovered, even when the ore is still in the ground.
The machinery breakdown picture deserves particular attention. Where miners once ran multiple smaller mills, many now depend on single large units processing significantly higher throughput. When a critical component fails and no spare is on hand, outages stretch for months, sometimes longer. That interconnectivity amplifies the impact of single-point failures in ways the industry has been slow to price in. And it’s not always the dramatic failures that do the most damage. Shorter, recurring unplanned outages can accumulate quietly and materially erode production over time. When those losses are large enough to trigger an insurance conversation, the answer is rarely straightforward. Recovery ratios for machinery breakdowns sit below 50%, among the lowest of any operational hazard category.
That under-recovery is not an anomaly. It is a structural feature of how mining risk is transferred.
Average insurance recovery across mining claims hovers around 45–55%. Compare that to renewable energy, which recovers around 75%. The gap reflects weeks-long waiting periods before coverage kicks in, sub-limits that cap claims, and complex business interruption valuations struggling to keep pace with commodity price volatility and ore grade variation. A pit wall collapse that causes no physical damage but shuts down operations for months? Largely uninsured.
So where does this leave operators?
Resilience needs to stop being a compliance function and start being a financial strategy. The data is clear: Many of the largest losses trace back to improper maintenance, absent spare parts, and inadequate controls, causes that are, in principle, preventable. The industry’s push toward single high-capacity processing equipment has delivered real efficiency gains, but it has concentrated exposure in ways that aren’t fully reflected in how risk is managed or transferred. Redundancy, critical spares strategies, and predictive maintenance are not differentiators anymore. They are the baseline.
On risk transfer, the gap between what standard programmes cover and what disruptions actually cost is widening. Bespoke contract wording, layered structures, captives, and alternative risk solutions – triggers tied to weather indices, commodity prices, or specific operational thresholds – are increasingly how serious operators are closing it.
The industry has spent decades perfecting its response to worst-case scenarios. That focus should stay. But decades of claims data makes one thing clear: it is not always the headline event causing the most damage.
It is the time you are not producing.
Author note
Raul Munoz, Mining & Metals Industry Leader, North America, Marsh