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