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A better metric is probably "deaths / km" instead of % of workforce.

Also, while those nine deaths are tragic, we've come a long way from the roughly 200 lives the old 15km tunnel took.

Comparison with other tunnels: http://interaktiv.tagesanzeiger.ch/2016/gotthard-system/imgs...

And a German article about the nine people who died: http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/schweiz/standard/die-toten-arbei...

The project took 17 years. So more like 0.02% per year.

0.346% of the population over 17 years. Wouldn't be surprised if it was less than the national average death rate

You're right. Death rate is about 0.8%, to be compared to 0.02% here (40 times less). Of course, this does not account for the difference in the age distribution of workers vs the national population.

I found that whole music performance from the article very weird. It seemed disrespectful to all of the people that actually worked and supposedly died on this project.