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[Porrima]

Recently I finally started to really begin playing DF in earnest.
I have used LNP and followed some tutorial but with a world of my own, doing things roughly in the order of the tutorial's suggestions. My fortress lies relatively near its parent civilization's holdings, in a hill next to a forest. The temperature is hot.
Everything's going relatively well. The LNP's population cap doesn't seem to do anything, and now I have 280 zwergen in my fortress, in year 7 or 8 by now. Luckily I have a relatively good PC so I can run it relatively fine. No goblins or other invaders have ever appeared. One minotaur showed up, and promptly got caught in a cage trap. 
Thus my biggest problem has been the lack of water. There is no river, no aquifer (due to following tutorial's "don't get aquifer" orders) and the few murky pools on the surface dried out on first summer - they eventually watered up again in year 4 or something, but for many years I had no water anywhere. For some reason even though I am damned certain we never were at "0" drinks, alcohol ran out at one stage, and something like 60 dwarves dehydrated to death, which made some interesting carvings.
Amazingly, there was no tantrum spiral or no sort of collapse of my fortress at all, which everyone always speaks about.

Eventually I dug down to the caverns, and there was water. I remembered I could finally do a well, and after checking the guide that the distance to the water doesn't matter, I dug an extension to my dining hall, and marked up a spot that was directly above a source of water.

This source of water in the caverns was about 55 z-levels down from the dining hall.

I channeled out the marked spot once. A dwarf made a hole, and now I had a downwards triangle and a hole on the lower floor. I paused the game and in one go, did a series of channels down that one single square all the way down to the water. I figured the dwarf would do the row of holes from up all the way down, and fall to the water one floor down, swimming out (the place was one square away from shore)

This all seemed like a good idea at the time.

I unpaused and focused on something completely else. Suddenly I get a message "Rimtar Damngoodblacksmith is too injured to continue digging" (or close to that). What the Armok? I check combat reports. "Gabbro hits Rimtar to the head, breaking his spine etc." "Spinning Gabbro attacks Rimtar and hits him in the neck, severing a motor nerve" etc.

I go to the dining hall - there's no hole there below the first one I made, just the channel placemarkers. I go down z-levels. I find out that in three occasions, the chute downwards is next to a mining tunnel. From the topmost of these, the dwarves have, apparently, started channeling down. I go down more z-levels, and lo and behold, Rimtar and another dwarf are unconscious / dead / paralyzed all the way down in the cavern river. No one saves them and they die.

Moving up to the dining hall, another dwarf has started channeling, finally from the top. I know I should stop this, but with morbid curiousity I watch as he digs and digs down, eventually reaches the floor from where the other dwarves started - and promptly plummets down the chute to his doom at the bottom of the river and dies.

I am not sure what exactly went wrong. Is it plausible, that since the channel places were reachable from mining tunnels below in three spots, that one dwarf dug one channel in one of these tunnels and worked his or her way down, and when Rimtar and the other guy started from above, they eventually hit an empty floor and plummeted down, as happened to the dwarf who started from up? Or something else?

How should I have done this without fatalities?

At least it was a very interesting moment and added some deaths to my memorial hall that weren't "fetal position from dehydration" or by being killed by vampires.

[vjek]

In this situation, use up/down staircases to dig the initial vertical shaft.
Then designate the top staircase to be channeled.

From that point on, designate the highest remaining up/down staircase to be channeled, one at a time.  Do not designate the next below until the top is gone.  It will be channeled from below.

This will guarantee no fatalities, and no falls.  If you want to be extra careful, only have one dwarf in the entire fortress with the Mining skill enabled.

[Rude]

In this situation, use up/down staircases to dig the initial vertical shaft.
Then designate the top staircase to be channeled.

From that point on, designate the highest remaining up/down staircase to be channeled, one at a time.  Do not designate the next below until the top is gone.  It will be channeled from below.

This will guarantee no fatalities, and no falls.  If you want to be extra careful, only have one dwarf in the entire fortress with the Mining skill enabled.

This will work fine afaik. However, it is tedious

slightly faster / more risky: You said the shaft touched mining tunnels -- this is no good. You should do 1 section at a time, any gaps will mean falls and broken bones. Start at the top of the section and ensure there is no other access to the shaft. Channel down to the last z level (as far as you can dig without falling down) then dig out somehow (like dig back up with stair cases in an adjacent shaft or dig to your main stairwell)
Note at this point that if the section is too long, you may have trouble with dehydration / starving / laziness. Separate large sections into small sections by digging out when you need to. Just don't open access to the undug part of the shaft.
You can safely channel out the last tile as long as there is an adjacent tile to stand on -- and there will be if you made an escape tunnel.

You could do this with even less micro: Dig a staircase next to the UNDUG shaft. When it's complete, just channel out the shaft. Note that this will open access to the caverns (and potentially cave swallows and flying FBs) so you might want to block it off with flooring and grates.
You can construct temporary staircases from the bottom if you need to cover gaps / or if you just want to have access to the ground floor of the cavern.

Also note that any gap in the shaft (z levels without walls to dig through -- I.e. a mining tunnel) will mean falling stone which thanks to the new physics may cause brain damage to dwarfs underneath.

[Sutremaine]

I have 280 zwergen

You have 280 dwarveses?

Dwarves will channel out the ground beneath their feet if there's nowhere else to stand while they do the job, and if there's no floor beneath to catch them they'll just fall until they hit something.

When I dig shafts I generally make a 2x1 staircase and wait until all the stone is moved out of the way before moving on. I designate alternate levels for channelling, and then wait for them to do that before designating the rest. The alternation is an attempt to prevent dwarven stupidity, either from getting carried away and digging underneath their feet right above a dug section or from doing their channelling while standing on a tile being channelled by another, faster miner.

There's still a possibility of a fatal fall if a dwarf happens to be passing over a stair tile at the instant it gets channelled, but this will be rare.

[Merendel]

chuckle I remember doing that once.  Was diging a shaft down to the magma sea for a disposal chute.  What I didnt take into consideration was that my shaft drilled into one of my underground stockpile rooms.  Dwarf A starts diging the shaft from the top like planed but sneaky dwarf B starts diging the shaft from the stockpile.  Dwarf A breaks through the roof of the stockpile and plumets down and lands on dwarf B's head along with a pile of rocks and neither survived.

Most likely what happend there was a dwarf got access to the channle path from one of your mining tunnles down below so you had several sections of the shaft being mined at once and when they connected the FUN begins.   A single dwarf can generaly channle strait down safe enough, the pile of bolders do not seem to hit him as he moves down.  However any gaps in the way you dig into are often fatal and you have to make sure there is no way for the shaft to be accessed part way down or your dwarves will predictably create that gap for you.

[Porrima]

I have 280 zwergen

You have 280 dwarveses?

Many small dwarveses.

 As it ended up, I now have a memorial for Rimtar Goodblacksmith who seemed to have mining on even if she shouldn't have. The memorial reads: Suffocated. Slain by {blank} with a gabbro. Lover of scepters.

Damn that blank.

Thanks all for info.