CHARLESTON, W.Va. — For more than a quarter-century, government efforts to end deadly black lung disease have hit various brick walls, built by opposition from one side or the other.
Industry lobbyists object that tougher dust limits and more rigorous sampling requirements go too far. Labor leaders complain those same proposals are far too weak.
Miners are left with the same system that experts have agreed hasn't worked for decades. And thousands of those miners have paid with their health or their lives.
"We can't get a regulation out to save our souls," said former federal Mine Safety and Health Administration staffer Celeste Monforton, who now studies workplace health issues and advocates for workers and their families.
Take the case of the Obama administration's MSHA chief, Joe Main.
About a year into his tenure as the nation's top mine safety regulator, Main announced an ambitious plan he said was aimed at ending black lung.
Main proposed to tighten the legal limit on dust that causes black lung, to require more accurate continuous personal dust monitors, and to reform sampling methods and enforcement of dust limits.
"I hope the miners and the mining community embrace this approach," Main, assistant labor secretary for MSHA, told reporters in October 2010. "It is the right thing to do."
A decade earlier, Main was director of safety for the United Mine Workers union when the Clinton administration announced its plan to end black lung. It included a government takeover of dust monitoring and similar changes to sampling techniques, but no tightening of the dust limit.
Main said the Clinton proposal didn't go far enough. In particular, the UMW was upset that the government monitoring would involve fewer samples, because of budget and staffing constraints at the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. Main urged MSHA to scrap the proposal and start over.