To preserve the lives and livelihoods of coal miners, enhance silica regulations
Anew federal regulation to limit coal miners’ exposure to dangerous residue is essential to protect miners’ health, and to maintain the balance between safety and efficiency (and therefore financial viability) in an intrinsically dangerous but still-essential industry.
While the coal industry will continue to shrink, the fossil fuel remains a necessary resource for legacy power plants and other applications. Strengthening safety standards will not unnecessarily hasten the industry’s decline, but will ensure those whose livelihoods and communities depend on coal mining do not have to pay an unjust cost in their own health and well-being.
Out of breath
While coal dust has long been known to cause black lung disease after decades of consistent exposure, miners are becoming sicker at younger ages, according to a joint report from the Post-Gazette and the Medill Investigative Lab at Northwestern University. As coal seams become exhausted, miners encounter much more quartz (crystallized silica), a mineral that when pulverized into an airborne dust, damages lung tissue even more than coal dust.
The particles irritate the lungs, resulting in scarring that, over the years, significantly decreases the lungs’ ability to function. The condition is known as silicosis, and it tends to occur earlier in life than classic black lung disease.
As a result, lung problems are afflicting coal miners at an increasing rate. As of 2018, 20% of Appalachian coal workers who have worked 25 years — much less than a full career for a career that people often begin as a teenager — have some form of silicosis or black lung.
Meanwhile, federal standards for silica dust in mines haven’t been updated for nearly half a century. The increase in lung damage makes it clear that the current limit of 100 mcg per cubic meter is too high. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) should press forward with a proposal to drop the limit to 50 mcg, in order to preserve the lives and livelihoods of those who do the hard work of extracting this still-essential resource.
Coal mining will never be as safe as selling insurance, but that doesn’t mean the public and private sectors should tolerate risks that can be mitigated without destroying the industry — and there’s no question silica dust can be.
While employment in the coal industry is at an all-time low and falling, the industry remains an economic necessity in many parts of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Around the country, around 40,000 people work in coal mining, over 4,000 of whom are in Pennsylvania and 12,000 in West Virginia. A 2020 study from the University of West Virginia showed that nearly 10% of the state’s residents either work or worked in the industry.
Protect health and livelihoods
The federal government has a dual responsibility to the people and communities who depend on coal: to protect them from the health hazards of the work, while not destroying their livelihoods in the process. The proposed silica regulation does both.
While mitigation will be expensive — one estimate pegs the annual costs to the industry at $57 million — it will not be ruinous. Pittsburghbased Consol Energy supports the stricter rules, though the company presumably feels it has a competitive advantage over smaller firms in following them.
One caveat: The regulation will be ineffective if monitoring is left in the hands of mining companies, which have a track record of tampering with results. The miners need the protection of federal regulators who take measurements and have the ability to enforce their own rules.
Enhancing silica dust limits fulfills the government’s duty to sustain both the lives and the livelihoods of the country’s coal miners. The MSHA should pass and enforce the final rule as soon as practicable.