Gary Hairston worked as an electrician in an underground coal mine for almost 30 years. It was hard, often grimy, work. When a big machine called a continuous miner dug into the hard earth, it kicked up all kinds of dust. Slowly, Hairston began to notice that daily tasks wiped him out. At night he woke up struggling for breath. He developed a nasty cough that worsened over time. During a routine health screening a few years ago, doctors noticed a spot on his lung. Their diagnosis was grim: coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, better known as black lung. Its progress is slow, but terminal. When Hairston was 48, he retired to look after his health, and turned to organizing, so that future miners might work in safer conditions.
Miners have always been at risk of black lung, but pulmonologists and medical researchers have seen a marked increase in recent years. The disease, while not genetic or contagious, often wends its way through families who work the mines. Hairston’s brother and father have it, too. Now, between frequent trips to the hospital, he fights for the rights and needs of others like them as president of the National Black Lung Association. He worked for decades before his diagnosis, but these days sees younger workers who don’t make it nearly that long.
“These younger coal miners had been in the mine five years and some barely could breathe, they had to take breath, even at talks,” Hairston said.
Experts point to the increasing prevalence of crystalline silica in the mines as a cause of this change. Silica is often found in quartz, which is embedded deeply within the sandstone that surrounds coal. It is ground to fine dust and kicked into the air by the machines that cut coal from ground, then settles deeply in the lungs, scarring the tissue and making it increasingly difficult to breathe. As mining companies have exhausted high-quality seams of coal, they’ve increasingly turned to inferior veins with larger volumes of other minerals, making silica exposure more likely. Pulmonologists have called the increasing prevalence of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis an epidemic, which they’ve blamed in part on lax regulations, too little protective gear, and lack of safety training for miners. Researchers have found that as many as 1 in 5 miners in Central Appalachia may have black lung, and 1 in 20 have progressive massive fibrosis, the most advanced form of the disease, which is linked directly to silica exposure.
The Mining Safety and Health Administration oversees mine safety and operates under different rules than the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Under its guidelines, miners can be exposed to twice as much silica dust as workers in any other industry. After decades of protest by coal miners and their families demanding a stricter exposure standard, MSHA has introduced some preventative measures, including increased inspections, miner education, and greater dust sampling. But many workers and their allies find the agency’s response wanting, and they want the acceptable level of silica exposure cut from 100 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 50, bringing it in line with OSHA’s regulation.
“We really try to fight for the silica standard,” Hairston said. “So some of these younger miners won’t go through what we went through.”
Federal mining regulators, along with the Kentucky and West Virginia coal associations, did not respond to requests for comment.
Rumblings of an epidemic, and rising concern about silica exposure, have been underlined by data. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released earlier this year found that not only are cases increasing, but mortality rates from black lung and other lung disease have steadily climbed among miners born after 1939, with mortality highest among the youngest miners. An American Thoracic Society study published last year, which involved many of the same researchers as the CDC study, linked increased silica exposure directly to the increase in black lung cases. A joint investigation by NPR and Frontline five years ago found thousands of instances in which miners were exposed to dangerous levels of silica. Calls for a stricter silica exposure standard followed, but still, nothing.
Black lung patients and their advocates petitioned the Mine Safety and Health Administration for an updated silica rule in 2011, but it took until last year for the agency to propose an updated rule and send it to the Office of Management and Budget for review. By April, mine regulators had promised to deliver a draft of the proposal, which would then go through a lengthy public comment period and possible revisions before approval. But the rule is still with the OMB, and no one’s…
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