Federal regulators on Tuesday issued new protections for miners against a type of dust long known to cause fatal lung ailments — changes that government researchers recommended half a century ago. past.
Mining companies need to limit concentrations of airborne silica, a mineral commonly found in rock that can be deadly when ground up and inhaled. The new needs affecting 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 has spanned four presidential administrations.
Miners paid dearly for the delay. While progress on the rule has stalled, government researchers have documented with growing alarm the resurgence of severe black lung disease afflicting younger coal miners, and studies have implicated poorly controlled silica as a possible cause.
“It should shock the conscience to know that there are people in this country doing so much hard work that we all benefit from who are disabled before they reach the age of 40,” said Chris Williamson, head of Mine Safety and Health Administration, which issued the rule. “We know that the existing standard is not protective enough.”
The new requirements were announced by Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su at an event in Pennsylvania 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 key rule change: reducing the allowable concentration of silica dust. But their views on the rule, suggested in July, miners’ advocates warned that the companies were largely leaving the police to themselves.
The dangers of breathing in finely ground silica became apparent nearly 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 US history.
In 1974, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal research agency, it is recommended to reduce the existing limits of silica in the air workers breathe. Over the years, the report waned.
Agency repeated its recommendation in 1995, and an advisory committee of the Department of Labor reached the same conclusion next year. Both also advised overhauling the existing enforcement for coal mines – a complex arrangement where regulators tried to control silica levels by reducing dust in general.
In 1996, work began on a rule to empower police-level regulators in coal mines. The effort was later expanded to include lowering the silica limit for all miners, but it stalled repeatedly during the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump.
In interviews, agency leaders during the Clinton and Obama administrations described a mix of politics, industry opposition and competing priorities that hindered progress on a silica rule. Both said they prioritized a separate rule to regulate overall dust levels in coal mines, which also took several years to complete and was completed in 2014.
“I’m sorry we haven’t done a lot of things, and silica 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 planned to draw on the work of OSHA, which also faced long delays before releasing its 2016 silica rule. “But the clock has run out on our administration,” he said.
Meanwhile, after years of declining rates of black lung, caused by breathing coal and silica dust, rates of severe forms of the disease have increased. In the 1990s, less than 1 percent of miners in the central Appalachians who worked at least 25 years underground had this advanced stage of the disease. In 2015, the number increased to 5 percent.
Due to changes in mining practices, workers cut more rock, producing more silica dust. The effects began to show up in chest X-rays and in 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 of all those responsible for preventing this serious disease,” a group of government researchers. wrote in a medical journal in 2014.
Although the rule issued Tuesday reinforces the limit recommended in 1974, some miner safety advocates worry that its benefits will be diminished by lax enforcement. The regulations largely leave it up to mining companies to collect samples that show they are in compliance, despite evidence of past gamesmanship and fraud. Miners described being pressured to place sampling devices in areas with less dust than where they actually worked, leading to artificially low results.
Mr. Williamson said his agency protects miners who blow the whistle on unsafe conditions and works with the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges if they learn of sampling fraud.
Industry groups, meanwhile, argued after the rule was proposed that it was too restrictive. They asked the agency to reduce sampling requirements and allow more flexibility in strategies for reducing dust levels.
The provisions remained largely unchanged in the final rule.
Companies that mine materials other than coal have expressed particular concern about the cost of a new program that requires them to provide free periodic medical exams to workers. There is already a similar program in coal mining.
Mr. Williamson defended the program as a key way for miners to monitor their health and for researchers to monitor disease.
The rule’s effectiveness may not be clear for years, because lung disease can take time to develop. said Mr. McAteer and Mr. Main was disappointed by the recent resurgence of the disease and expressed regret that they had not implemented the silica rule.
“We could have done more,” Mr. Main said. “I wish we had done more.”
