Coal Miners US
Black lung — a debilitating disease caused by inhaling coal dust — was supposed to be wiped out by a landmark 1969 U.S. mine safety law. But a recent study shows that the worst form of the disease now affects a larger share of Appalachian coal miners than at any time since the early 1970s.
In August, when former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney visited West Virginia to campaign for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Shelley Moore Capito, the Democrat in the race was quick to remind voters what Romney had said a decade earlier about the coal industry.
“I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people, and that plant — that plant kills people,” Romney had said in 2003, standing outside a Massachusetts coal-fired power plant that was facing new environmental controls. The Democratic candidate’s campaign jumped on this, criticizing Capito for aligning herself with “someone who believes coal ‘kills people’” — a deeply unpopular sentiment in a state where coal has long been king.
The irony, of course, is that coal does kill people, most notably the workers who toil to mine it, and whose union — the United Mine Workers — would eventually endorse the Democrat in the West Virginia Senate contest.
Major mining disasters get a lot attention, especially if they involve heroic rescue efforts, with worried families gathered at a local church and quick-hit stories about long lists of safety violations and inadequate enforcement.
But most coal miners die alone, one at a time, either in roof falls or equipment accidents or — incredibly in this day and age — from black lung, a deadly but preventable disease that most Americans probably think is a thing of the past. Coal-mining disasters get historic markers. Black lung deaths just get headstones.
Just weeks after Romney’s Capito campaign appearance, yet another in a long line of studies showed conclusively that not only is black lung back, but that the worst form of the disease now affects a larger share of Appalachian coal miners than at any time since the early 1970s, shortly after a federal law meant to end the disease was passed.
Experts at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reported that, by 2012, the rate of severe black lung had reached 3.2 percent of workers in the Central Appalachian coalfields of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. That’s a nearly tenfold increase over the disease prevalence 15 years earlier — a shocking statistic. In a brief report published in the September 15 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, NIOSH researchers said, “Each of these cases is a tragedy and represents a failure among all those responsible for preventing this severe disease.”
Black lung is caused by inhaling coal dust. The accumulation of dust particles in the lungs makes it hard to breathe. As the disease progresses, victims develop a cough or shortness of breath.
“Living with black lung is thinking about every breath you take,” former miner Robert Bailey Jr. told a congressional committee earlier this year.
“Breathing is something most people take for granted," Bailey said. "It comes as easy as we walk, do our daily jobs, come and go. But with this disease... I struggle to breathe whether I am simply walking up my slight incline of a yard or grocery shopping or trying to participate in ‘Operation Compassion’ at our church when we give out food.”
The new study focused on progressive massive fibrosis, an advanced, debilitating and lethal form of black lung with few treatment options and no cure.
Fifteen years ago, the rate of PMF had dropped to about 0.08 percent among all miners participating in a government monitoring program and 0.33 percent among active underground miners with at least 15 years of work experience. Since then, the national prevalence of PMF has increased dramatically and the rate of increase in Appalachia has “been especially pronounced,” the researchers reported.
“Excessive inhalation of coal mine dust is the sole cause of PMF in working coal miners, so this increase can only be the result of overexposures and/or increased toxicity stemming from changes in dust composition,” the NIOSH researchers wrote.
To people who live in the coalfields of Appalachia — and to the small community of scientists, labor activists, lawyers and media who follow mine safety and health matters — this latest report was no surprise. But amid the constant drone of “war on coal” attacks on the Obama administration’s climate change initiatives, the NIOSH study got relatively little attention from the media — and hardly any from elected officials or candidates.
In some ways, it’s understandable. In 1969, when it passed landmark safety legislation, Congress made eliminating black lung, formally known as coal
workers pneumoconiosis, a national goal. The law required mine operators to design better underground ventilation systems, to provide miners fresh air, and to flush deadly dust out of mine tunnels. Mining machines were equipped with dust-control water sprays. Regular monitoring was required, with enforcement actions and monetary fines for exceeding dust limits.
For two decades, the prevalence of black lung dropped continuously — from 6.5 percent in the 1970s, to 2.5 percent in the 1980s and 2.1 percent in the 1990s. But then the trend reversed, with rates climbing to 3.2 percent in the 2000s.
No one knows for sure exactly what is causing black lung’s resurgence. But it’s likely that, with the thicker coal seams mined out in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, operators are going after thinner seams with faster-moving machines that churn out more dust from silica-laced rock that surrounds the coal.
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