[ The Department of Labor unveiled a bold initiative to combat the
crisis by curbing exposure to silica.]
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BLACK LUNG IS STILL KILLING AMERICA’S COAL MINERS  
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Kim Kelly
July 7, 2022
The Nation
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_ The Department of Labor unveiled a bold initiative to combat the
crisis by curbing exposure to silica. _

This occupational health image shows the lungs of a coal worker with
Coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP), commonly known as "black lung
disease," a job-related disease caused by continued exposure to
excessive amounts of coal mine dust. , Image courtesy of the CDC.
(Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images)

 

American coal miners are used to getting bad news, whether it’s of a
buddy’s injury, an accident at their mine, a dip in coal prices, or
word of yet another politician ignoring their needs. The
profession—which still plays a complicated role in the nation’s
economy, history, politics, and cultural imagination—remains
incredibly dangerous, even as safety technologies have advanced and
the number of jobs in the industry dwindles. The coal miners I’ve
met through my coverage of the ongoing Warrior Met strike
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Brookwood, Ala., and at labor events around the country are accustomed
to disappointment, so when they do get a win, it’s a cause for
celebration.

The 1,000 Warrior Met miners in Tuscaloosa County 15 months into
their strike
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still waiting for their victory party, but in Las Vegas in June, they
and their coworkers around the country received an encouraging update
on plans to address a much longer-running issue. On June 8, during the
United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) 56th Constitutional Convention,
a government official climbed onto a stage that had previously been
filled by a parade of speechifying union officials and moving tributes
to lost siblings, and shared some good news.

Chris Williamson, the assistant secretary of labor for Mine Safety and
Health (MSHA), unveiled an ambitious silica enforcement initiative
aimed at curbing miners’ exposure to respirable crystalline silica
and its attendant health hazards. As the Department of Labor noted
in a press release
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worker cuts, saws, grinds, drills, or crushes rock and coal, silica
fills the air, and the more a miner breathes in, the greater their
risk of contracting a serious respiratory disease like silicosis, lung
cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or the dreaded coal
workers’ pneumoconiosis, known as black lung.

A major plank of the new silica enforcement initiative will focus on
repeat offenders, and operators who fail or refuse to improve face
steep consequences. MSHA says it will conduct more spot inspections at
coal and other mines
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of citations or repeated silica overexposure to evaluate their health
and safety conditions, and will expand its silica sampling program to
gain more accurate assessments of the current risks. “Our first step
is to work with them,” Williamson told me. “We will help you
revise your ventilation plans or dust control plans to better protect
miners, because we all benefit. That should be what we all want,
right? Mine operators do better when they have healthy workers. …
But at the end of the day, if they’re unwilling or that doesn’t
happen, we have authority under existing law to require modifications
to those plans, or if things get to a certain point, revoke them
altogether.”

Black lung is a death sentence, and an ugly one. “I’ve watched
people die of black lung, and I’ll just tell you, it’s the most
awful sight you’ll ever see in your life,” Danny Whitt, a retired
West Virginia coal miner and recording secretary of the UMWA Local
1440 in Matewan, W.Va., told me. “It’s like taking a fish out of
water, and just laying them on a table, and watching them gasping for
breath and dying. For a coal miner, if he dies with black lung
complications, it’s a horrible death. They just smother.”

Whitt knows the subject well. The first time I met him was during last
year’s Blair Mountain Centennial celebration; as we out-of-towners
gathered in Local 1440’s cheerful, yellow-painted union hall, he sat
on a dais and talked about the disease that’s been killing off his
union brothers for decades. The bulk of the local’s membership is
made up of retirees, many suffering from black lung, and each month,
there are three or four more empty chairs. Whitt himself was diagnosed
with the disease in 1988. The tall, genial Appalachian started working
in the Mingo County coal mines in 1977, drawn in by good pay and the
pull of tradition. He passed the required physical examination, which
he described as rigorous—”They would go from head to toe”—but
his clean bill of health wouldn’t last. “When I started, I
didn’t have black lung, didn’t have any lung issues,” he told
me. “But now I have all kinds of lung issues.”

In 1988, Whitt underwent a routine screening for silicosis, a type of
pulmonary fibrosis caused by inhaling crystalline silica dust, and the
doctors diagnosed him with black lung. The state of West Virginia
deemed him 5 percent disabled by the disease—too low to qualify for
any kind of benefits, but high enough for it to be a problem for
Danny. Now, 34 years later, Whitt struggles to walk long distances,
his energy levels have plummeted, and heat makes his symptoms more
difficult to manage. Last year, when he took a blood gas test (which
measures the oxygen levels in a patient’s blood, and is used to
gauge lung and kidney function) his results came back at 81. “When
Donald Trump contracted Covid, they said his blood oxygen got down to
96, and they were really worried about him,” Whitt told me. “What
about a poor old coal miner who’s down in the 80s?”

There is a perception that black lung is a thing of the past thanks to
technological innovations and increased oversight. Some miners
themselves think it’s something that only affects old-timers and
retirees, and assume that they’re in the clear. The unfortunate
truth, according to the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, is that
black lung is at a 25-year high. Even worse, current conditions mean
that those younger workers are at risk of getting sicker faster, and
of contracting progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe form of
black lung.

“If you go back to my mine today, and look for a couple young guys
and tell them that black lung is on the rise right now, they’d
probably look at me like, ‘What do you mean? That’s an old man’s
disease,’” UMWA International District 2 Vice President Chuck
Knissel told me. “But I know guys that are in the mines right now
that are 25, 26 years old. They go take off for a walk, and say,
‘Man, I can’t breathe. It’s hard for me to catch my breath. I
don’t even smoke cigarettes, what’s going on?’ Yep, you’ve got
coal dust in your lungs.”

Knissel, a gravel-voiced third-generation miner, spent 17 years
working in Pennsylvania’s Cumberland coal mine before following his
late father, Larry
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into the union. At a convention dominated by white-haired elders, even
with his salt-and-pepper beard, the 41-year-old Knissel is practically
fresh-faced. Though he has not yet received an official diagnosis, he
told me he’s sure he has black lung: “I have issues with
breathing. A lot of my friends I’m with every day, I know they’ve
got it too.”

Epidemiologists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety
and Health (NIOSH) began seeing an increase in black lung cases among
younger miners back in 1995
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In 2017, the _American Journal of Public Health _
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NIOSH report documenting an uptick in black lung cases in central
Appalachia since 2000, and found that 20.6 percent of long-tenured
miners have the disease. A year prior, another study
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found a similar situation affecting workers in Kentucky, Virginia, and
West Virginia. In 2018, NPR
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a series investigating the rise in black lung cases in younger
workers, raising alarm bells that were largely unheard outside of the
mining community. Almost five years later, cases are still rising.

According to Secretary Williamson and the veteran coal miners and
union officials I spoke to for this story, there are several reasons
for the continuing spike. Appalachia’s coal seams have thinned out
after centuries of extraction, and so miners have to dig deeper to
reach the desired material. The machinery they use to do it, though,
has improved since their fathers’ and grandfathers’ day, allowing
them to massively increase the volume of rock they cut through. But
this kicks up even more silica in the air. As Knissel explained,
“You’re mining 30,000 tons in a 24-hour period. In the 1960s, it
might’ve taken you two weeks to mine that much.”

There are existing regulations, engineering controls, and safety
standards in place that mine operators are expected to follow to keep
silica exposure down. Miners are also provided with safety gear to
lessen their personal exposure, but, to Knissel’s frustration, not
everyone uses it as often as they should, especially the younger,
“tough guy” types. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he
told me. “It’s just a matter of making it a part of the job every
day, and not an ego thing, or thinking you’re a dork because you
wear your safety glasses and respirator every day. Everybody should be
the dork for not wearing them!”

Still, the onus should not be on individual workers to create a safe
working environment, and while Knissel said that some mine bosses do
try their best to protect their workers and keep dust to a minimum,
others—as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hamby detailed
in his 2020 book _Soul Full of Coal Dust A Fight for Breath and
Justice in Appalachia_
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far less fastidious about following rules or adhering to safety
regulations. In Knissel’s estimation, enforcement is the key to
cleaning up the coal dust problem on the bosses’ end: “The only
way that you’re going to get these coal companies to listen is hit
them in the pocketbook.”

After the announcement, I spotted Williamson inspecting a hulking,
robin’s-egg-blue MSHA Emergency Command Vehicle parked in the middle
of the exhibit hall, and climbed in for a chat. As we settled into its
spacious innards, he explained how his experience as both a labor
lawyer and a coal miner’s grandson has always landed him on the side
of the workers and how important this initiative is to him personally.
“The thought, and especially from my perspective, is, what can we do
now to protect miners, even though we’re going through this
rule-making process that will ultimately promulgate a health standard
that will be much more protective?” he explained. “That’s where
this enforcement initiative comes in; that’s why it’s important.
It’s what we can do now to take some proactive measures to protect
minors against exposure to high levels of silica.”

The West Virginia native has been on the job for less than two months,
but he’s already named silica as his top priority. As he mentioned,
MSHA is also working on a new silica federal regulation, but the
rule-making process is slow, and workers need help now. “We have to
be strategic with it. It’s going to be another resource thing at an
agency that’s already spread pretty thin on resources, but it’s
worth it, because miners are getting sick,” he said. “I’ve seen
so many people develop these lung diseases from working in mining
environments. You can’t play with your grandchildren. You can barely
walk. Eventually, you have to pack around an oxygen tank with you.
That’s no way to live.”

After hearing Williamson’s initiative, Whitt was impressed by its
scope, telling me that someone should’ve done it “years and years
and years ago,” and was pleased to see a fellow West Virginian
standing up for him and his people. “He is from where I’m from, he
only lives about maybe 15 miles from where I’m from in Mingo
County,” Whitt told me proudly. “I think Chris is going to do an
excellent job, and he’s going to bring about some great laws.

When I caught up with Knissel at the pool, he echoed Whitt’s
optimism, and said he hoped the agency will help spread the word about
the black lung crisis. Knissel’s own message to young miners is an
entreaty as much as it is a warning.

“We need to be a little bit smarter as coal miners and as young men,
and protect yourselves,” he said. “You want to be able to enjoy
the fruits of your labor. We got enough shit to worry about: We got
the roof that can collapse in on us, we got motors that can smash into
us. The easy stuff is wearing the things that are provided by
engineers that have figured out that, hey, if you wear this, it’s
going to protect you, and you’re not going to have to wear that
oxygen mask when you’re 50 years old.”

_KIM KELLY is a writer and labor activist based in Philadelphia. She
is the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American
Labor
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_Copyright c 2022 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* Coal Miners
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* Black Lung
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* United Mine Workers
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* Health and Safety
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* Department of Labor
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