In 2008, I watched as my father-in-law spent weeks in the hospital, passed into a coma, and eventually died from heart issues directly related to long-term effects of progressive massive fibrosis, also known as coalworker's pneumoconiosis. Also know as black lung disease. He was far from unique. Black lung results in the death of over 25,000 Americans a year. In a country where the number of underground coal miners is well below 50,000, that’s an amazing number. What’s even more disturbing is—that number has been going up.
As Inside Climate News reports, eight former supervisors and eight former supervisors and safety officials from Armstrong Coal were indicted this week over charges that they pressured miners to cover up or falsify dust readings. Miners who worked in the dustiest jobs, those near the “working face” of the mine, handed off their monitors to workers who were working in cleaner air. Monitors were placed in clean air for hours before or after a shift to reduce apparent dust readings. Or miners were simply sent into dusty areas without monitors. Miners knew it was happening. They also knew it meant their jobs if they complained.
But while the monitors were showing everything as fine, in reality miners were working in areas with inadequate ventilation and dust so thick "you couldn't even see your hands in front of you.” It’s a situation that exposes miners to the possibility of not just long-term suffering and death from black lung, but a more immediate end from mine explosions—like the dust explosion that killed 29 miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine in 2010.
There’s a common factor shared by Massey’s instantaneous disaster, and the rolling tragedy that deceptions like that Armstrong’s Parkway Mine is bringing to western Kentucky: Mine operators who put cost and productivity ahead of worker safety. As reported by the Charleston Gazette-Mail, former Republican Senate candidate and serial criminal Don Blankenship, who was the CEO at Massey, insisted on more production per man hour, threatening the jobs of both miners and supervisors if they didn’t reach his goals, and line superintendents were ordered to “run coal” over all other considerations, including safety.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Ruby: Mine safety laws were violated at the Upper Big Branch Mine thousands of times — the same, readily preventable violations, over and over — with [Blankenship’s] full knowledge and under his close supervision.
Supervisors at Armstrong were given the exact same instruction to place production above all else.
U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman: The indicted officials cheated and lied while avoiding the costs of ventilation and production controls, putting the company's bottom line above the health and safety of hundreds of mine workers.
What was happening, is still happening. And with Trump’s encouragement, the one thing about the coal industry that is making a big comeback, is the death of miners.
Armstrong coal is now bankrupt. What that means for miners who are suffering from black lung is that they may, or may not, get medical coverage and assistance to deal with their crippling disease. That’s especially true because one of the ways that “Trump digs coal” is by working to make it harder for miners to qualify for black lung benefits. As
Bloomberg reported last year:
The Trump administration has said many federal regulations, including pollution restrictions, have depressed the coal industry and other sectors of the economy.
Trump’s isn’t the first administration to protect coal mine operators. Republicans have been making a play for coal for decades, because they understand well enough that there are states—like Ohio and Pennsylvania—where coal is no longer a significant part of the local economy, but remains deeply embedded in the regional mythology. Like farming, there’s a romance associated with coal mining that has little to do with the actual industry. Politicians love coal miners. Even when they don’t. Especially when they don’t.
When mine safety laws were passed in 1969, the number of miners suffering from black lung dropped by an amazing, and gratifying, 90 percent. But since then, the numbers have been slowly getting worse, even as the total number of miners has gone sharply down. Some of that is better detection. Some of that is a greater willingness by miners to step forward because of programs meant to help miners with black lung. But some of that is also a change in mining methods. Most underground mines today use “continuous miners,” which are essentially large machines that grind their way through the coal seam. Those machines generate a great deal of coal dust. Without good ventilation plans that are constantly updated to route a high flow of clear air past the continuous miner, and use of water sprays and rock dust to limit both coal dust accumulation in the air and on surfaces, miners find themselves living in what amounts to a world of soot.
Coal dust that enters the lungs never leaves. It doesn’t get metabolized. It doesn’t get removed. Particles remain trapped in connective tissues or pulmonary lymph nodes, where they not only leach their own chemical contents into the body, but trigger the release of enzymes and the growth of fibroblasts. The result is inflammation, fibrosis, and eventually lesions. Areas of the lung can become necrotic—dead tissue filled with bags of black grains.
A 2012 investigation conducted by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity, demonstrated that advances in mining techniques, and a failure to strictly reinforce mine safety rules, were not just making for subtle increases in black lung. They were bringing on a new epidemic of the disease.
Incidence of the disease that steals the breath of coal miners doubled in the last decade, according to data analyzed by epidemiologist Scott Laney at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
Mine operators want to blame this increase on “easy grading” by doctors who certify miners as having the disease. In Kentucky, they’ve been working to limit the number and type of doctors who can complete this certification. And in the most amazing away imaginable.
A measure signed into law in Kentucky this past week would prevent federally-certified radiologists from judging X-rays in state black lung compensation claims, leaving diagnoses of the disease mostly to physicians who typically work for coal companies.
That will almost certainly “bring down” the number of black lung cases. On paper. Unfortunately, it won’t affect the number of workers who are spending their last days coughing and gasping from the results of a drive for “production” and a failure to enforce safety rules. A study in 2018 found the biggest cluster of late-stage black lung disease ever noted, with 416 miners suffering from progressive massive fibrosis.
Armstrong’s Parkway Mine, where supervisors “cheated and lied” is less than eight miles from my hometown. And it’s only about four miles distance, and in the same coal seam, from the mine where my father-in-law worked. Closer still to the mine where both my grandfathers worked. Coal mining is at the end of its age. Outcompeted on every front, it’s doomed to pass away, leaving behind only museums, rusting equipment, and unreclaimed pits of sulfurous yellow water.
But what’s being done now means that coal mining won’t leave behind many miners. In the effort to get the most possible money into the hands of mine operators, those men are going down with the industry.