U.S. limits deadly mining dust as black lung resurges
Federal regulators Tuesday issued new protections for miners against a type of dust long known to cause deadly lung ailments — changes recommended by government researchers nearly a half-century ago.
Mining companies will have to limit concentrations of airborne silica, a mineral commonly found in rock that can be lethal when ground up and inhaled. The new requirements affect more than 250,000 miners extracting coal, a variety of metals, and minerals used in products such as cement and smartphones. Tuesday’s announcement is the culmination of a tortuous regulatory process that has spanned four presidential administrations.
Miners have paid dearly for the delay. As progress on the rule stalled, government researchers documented with growing alarm a resurgence of severe black lung afflicting younger coal miners, and studies implicated poorly controlled silica as the likely cause.
“It should shock the conscience to know that there’s people in this country that do incredibly hard work that we all benefit from that are already disabled before they reach the age of 40,” said Chris Williamson, head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which issued the rule. “We knew that the existing standard was not protective enough.”
The new requirements were announced by acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su at an event in Pennsylvania on Tuesday morning. They come eight years after a sister agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, issued similar protections for workers in other industries, such as construction, countertop manufacturing and fracking.
Both mine safety advocates and industry groups generally support the rule’s central change: halving the allowed concentration of silica dust. But their views on the rule, proposed last July, diverge sharply over enforcement, with mining trade groups arguing the requirements are unnecessarily broad and costly, and miners’ advocates cautioning companies are largely left to police themselves.
The dangers of breathing finely ground silica were evident almost a century ago, when hundreds of workers died of lung disease after drilling a tunnel through silica-rich rock near Gauley Bridge, W.Va. It remains one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history.
In 1974, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal research agency, recommended reducing the existing limits on silica in the air workers breathed. For years, the report languished.
The agency reiterated its recommendation in 1995, and a Labor Department advisory committee reached the same conclusion the following year. Both also advised overhauling the existing enforcement for coal mines — a complicated arrangement in which regulators tried to control silica levels by reducing dust overall.
In 1996, work began on a rule to empower regulators to police levels in coal mines. The effort was later broadened to include lowering the silica limit for all miners, but it repeatedly stalled during George W. Bush’s, Barack Obama’s and Donald Trump’s presidencies.