Federal regulators on Tuesday issued new protections for miners against a type of dust long known to cause fatal lung diseases – changes recommended by government researchers half a century ago.
Mining companies should limit concentrations of airborne silica, a mineral commonly found in rocks that can be deadly when ground up and inhaled. The new requirements affect more than 250,000 miners who mine coal, a variety of metals and minerals used in products such as cement and smartphones. Tuesday’s announcement is the culmination of a fraught regulatory process that has spanned four presidential administrations.
Miners paid dearly for the delay. As progress on the rule stalled, government researchers documented with increasing alarm a resurgence of severe black lung afflicting younger miners, and studies implicated poorly controlled silicon as a possible cause.
“It should shock the conscience to know that there are people in this country who do incredibly hard work that we all benefit from and are already disabled before they reach 40,” said Chris Williamson, head of the Safety and Security Administration. the Health of Mines. who issued the rule. “We knew the existing standard was not protective enough.”
The new requirements were announced by Acting Labor Secretary Julie Sue at an event in Pennsylvania on Tuesday morning. It comes eight years after a sister agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, issued similar protections for workers in other industries, including construction, benchtop manufacturing and fracking.
Both mine safety advocates and industry groups generally support the rule’s central change: halving the allowable concentration of silica dust. But views on the rule, proposed last July, are sharply divided over enforcement, with mining trade groups arguing the requirements are unduly broad and costly and miners’ advocates warning that companies are being left to degree in policing.
The dangers of breathing in finely ground silica were evident nearly a century ago, when hundreds of workers died of lung disease after tunneling through silica-rich rock near Gauley Bridge, W.Va. It remains one of the worst industrial disasters in US history.
In 1974, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal research agency, recommended lowering existing limits for silica in the air workers breathe. For years, the exhibition languished.
The agency reiterated its recommendation in 1995, and a Labor Department advisory panel reached the same conclusion the following year. Both also recommended overhauling existing enforcement for coal mines — a complex arrangement in which regulators tried to control silica levels by reducing overall dust.
In 1996, work began on a rule authorizing regulatory authorities on levels of policing in coal mines. The effort was later expanded to include lowering the silicon limit for all miners, but was repeatedly delayed during the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump.
In interviews, agency chiefs during the Clinton and Obama administrations described a mix of politics, industry opposition and competing priorities that blocked progress on a silicon rule. Both said they had prioritized a separate rule to regulate overall dust levels in coal mines, which also took years to complete and was finalized in 2014.
“I’m sorry we didn’t do a lot of things, and silicon is one of them,” said Davitt McAteer, who ran the agency from 1994 to 2000.
Joe Main, who led it from 2009 to 2017, said his agency had planned to build on the work of OSHA, which also faced long delays before issuing the silica rule in 2016. “But the clock it is over in our administration,” he said.
Meanwhile, after years of declining rates of black lung, caused by breathing coal and silica dust, rates of the severe form of the disease had increased. In the 1990s, less than 1 percent of miners in central Appalachia who had worked at least 25 years underground had this advanced stage of the disease. By 2015, the number had risen to 5 percent.
Due to changes in mining practices, workers cut more rock, producing more silica dust. The results began to show up in chest X-rays and tissue samples taken from the miners’ lungs. Clinics in Appalachia began seeing miners in their 30s and 40s with advanced disease.
“Each of these cases is a tragedy and represents a failure among all those responsible for preventing this serious disease,” a group of government researchers wrote in a medical journal in 2014.
While the rule issued Tuesday adopts the limit recommended in 1974, some miner safety advocates worry that its benefits will be diminished by weak enforcement. The regulations largely leave mining companies to collect samples to prove they are in compliance, despite past evidence of gaming and fraud. Miners have described being pressured to place samplers in areas with far less dust than where they were actually working, leading to artificially low results.
Mr Williamson said his agency protects miners who blow the whistle in dangerous conditions and works with the Department of Justice to prosecute criminal cases if they learn of sampling fraud.
Industry groups, meanwhile, argued after the rule was proposed that it was too strict. They asked the agency to limit sampling requirements and allow more flexibility in approaches to reducing dust levels.
The provisions remained largely unchanged in the final rule.
Non-coal mining companies have expressed particular concern about the cost of a new program requiring them to provide free periodic medical examinations to workers. A similar program already exists in coal mining.
Mr Williamson defended the program as a key way for miners to monitor their health and for researchers to track disease.
The effectiveness of the rule may not be clear for years, as lung disease can take time to develop. Mr McAteer and Mr Main said they were disappointed by the recent resurgence of the disease and regretted not having introduced a silicon rule.
“We could have done more,” Mr Mayne said. “I wish we had done more.”
