Federal regulators on Tuesday plan to issue new protections for miners against a type of dust that has long been known to cause a deadly lung disease. It's a change recommended by government researchers half a century ago.
Mining companies need to limit the concentration of airborne silica. Silica is a mineral commonly found in rocks that can be deadly if crushed and inhaled. The new requirements will affect more than 250,000 miners who extract coal, various metals and minerals used in products such as cement and smartphones. Tuesday's announcement is the culmination of a tortuous regulatory process that spanned four presidential administrations.
The miners paid the price for the delay. As progress on the rule stalls, government researchers are alarmingly documenting a resurgence of severe black lung cases afflicting young coal miners, with studies suggesting that poorly controlled silica may be the culprit. It was suggested that it was highly sexual.
Chris Williamson, director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, said: “There are many people in this country who are already disabled before the age of 40, doing the incredibly hard work that we all benefit from.'' “It should shock your conscience to know that there are people out there.” That's what issues the rules. “We knew that existing standards did not provide sufficient protection.”
The new requirements are expected to be announced by Acting Labor Secretary Julie Hsu at an event in Pennsylvania on Tuesday morning. His action comes eight years after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a sister agency, issued similar protections for workers in other industries, including construction, countertop manufacturing and hydraulic fracturing.
Both mine safety advocates and industry groups generally support the core change to the rule, which would cut the allowable concentration of silica dust in half. But their views on the rule, proposed last July, are sharply divided over enforcement, with mining industry groups arguing the requirements are unnecessarily broad and costly; He warns that it is almost entirely up to him.
The dangers of inhaling finely ground silica were made clear nearly a century ago when hundreds of workers died from lung disease after digging tunnels through silica-rich rock near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. became. This 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 lowering existing limits on silica in the air that workers breathe. For years, the report languished.
The agency reiterated its recommendation in 1995, and a Department of Labor advisory committee reached the same conclusion the following year. They also recommended an overhaul of existing regulations for coal mines, a complex arrangement in which regulators try to control silica levels by reducing overall dust.
In 1996, work began on regulations to give coal mining regulators police-level powers. The effort was later expanded to include lowering silica limits for all miners, but stalled repeatedly during the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump.
Agency heads from the Clinton and Obama administrations said in interviews that a mix of politics, industry opposition and competing priorities hindered progress on the silica rule. They said they had prioritized another rule to regulate overall dust levels in coal mines, which also took several years to complete and was finalized in 2014.
“We regret that we didn't accomplish a lot of things, and silica is one of them,” said David McAteer, who ran the agency from 1994 to 2000.
Joe Mayne, who led the agency from 2009 to 2017, said the agency planned to leverage OSHA's efforts, but OSHA also faced long delays in issuing the 2016 silica rule. “But time has run out for our administration,” he said.
Meanwhile, while the incidence of black lung, caused by inhaling coal and silica dust, has been declining for years, the incidence of severe forms of the disease has skyrocketed. In the 1990s, less than 1 percent of miners in central Appalachia who worked underground for at least 25 years developed this advanced stage of the disease. By 2015, that number had increased to 5%.
Changes in mining practices have caused workers to cut more rock and produce more silica dust. The effects began to show up in chest X-rays and tissue samples taken from miners' lungs. Clinics in Appalachia have begun seeing miners in their 30s and 40s with advanced illnesses.
“Each of these cases is a tragedy and represents a failure by all those responsible for preventing this serious disease,” a government research team wrote in a medical journal in 2014.
The rules issued Tuesday adopt limits recommended in 1974, but some miner safety advocates worry that weak enforcement could undermine their benefits. There is. It is largely up to mining companies to collect samples to demonstrate compliance with regulations, despite evidence of past misconduct or wrongdoing. Miners say they were pressured to install sampling equipment in areas with far less dust than where they would actually work, leading to artificially low results.
Williamson said the agency will protect miners who blow the whistle in dangerous situations and work with the Justice Department to pursue criminal cases when it learns of sampling fraud.
Meanwhile, industry groups argued after the rule was proposed that it was too strict. They called on the agency to scale back sampling requirements and allow more flexibility in its approach to reducing dust levels.
This provision remains largely unchanged in the final rule.
Companies that mine raw materials other than coal have expressed particular concern about the cost of a new program that requires workers to undergo free regular health exams. Similar programs already exist in coal mining.
Mr Williamson defended the program as an important way for miners to track their health and for researchers to track diseases.
Because lung disease can take time to develop, the effectiveness of this rule could be evident for years. McAteer and Mayne said they were disappointed by the recent resurgence of the disease and expressed regret for not enacting the silica rule.
“We could have done more,” Mayne said. “I should have done more.”
