The Center for Public Integrity

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Across the Appalachian coalfields these days, it's hard to go anywhere without hearing about what mining lobbyists and political leaders call the Obama administration's "war on coal."

Radio ads blare the message of lost jobs and stalled permits. Lawmakers propose measures to block U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air pollution rules. Industry lobby groups and state officials pursue lawsuits to stop new water quality guidance on mountaintop removal mining.

Seldom mentioned by coal industry advocates is a little-noticed move by their allies in Congress to delay — and potentially end altogether — another Obama effort, this one aimed at saving the lives of thousands of coal miners.

It happened in mid-December 2011, in a legislative maneuver that got little media attention. The tactic and its potential impacts certainly avoided the sort of outcry that has come each time the EPA proposed new restrictions on mountaintop removal mining or the disposal of toxic coal ash.

Lawmakers added language to a Department of Labor budget bill that barred the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration from implementing or enforcing a proposal to reduce miners' exposure to the coal dust that causes deadly black lung disease.

A House Appropriations Committee summary listed the black lung language among several provisions "to reduce government overreach, rein in excessive regulation, and help foster a good economic environment for job growth."

Buried in the 165-page legislation, the measure demanded an audit of MSHA data showing black lung still exists, and an assessment of the agency's methodology in writing its proposal.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office was ordered to complete that study within 240 days. MSHA can't act on the rule until after that deadline expires on Aug. 19. A GAO spokesman said the agency is on track to issue its report sometime in August.

PRESTONSBURG, Ky. — Ray Marcum bears the marks of a bygone era of coal mining. At 83, his voice is raspy, his eastern Kentucky accent thick and his forearms leathery. A black pouch of Stoker’s 24C chewing tobacco pokes out of the back pocket of his jeans. “I started chewing in the mines to keep the coal dust out of my mouth,” he says.

Plenty of that dust still found its way to his lungs. For the past 30 years, he’s gotten a monthly check to compensate him for the disease that steals his breath — the old bane of miners known as black lung.

In mid-century, when Marcum worked, dust filled the mines, largely uncontrolled. Almost half of miners who worked at least 25 years contracted the disease. Amid strikes throughout the West Virginia coalfields, Congress made a promise in 1969: Mining companies would have to keep dust levels down, and black lung would be virtually eradicated.

Marcum doesn’t have to look far to see that hasn’t happened. There’s his middle son, Donald, who skipped his senior year of high school to enter the mines here near the West Virginia border. At 51, he’s had eight pieces of his lungs removed, and he sometimes has trouble making it through a prayer when he’s filling in as a preacher at Solid Rock Baptist Church.

There’s James, the youngest, who passed on college to enter the mines. At 50, his ability to breathe is rapidly declining, and his doctor has already discussed hooking him up to an oxygen tank part-time.

Both began working in the late 1970s — years after dust rules took effect — and both began having symptoms in their 30s. Donald now has the most severe, fastest-progressing form of the disease, known as complicated coal workers’ pneumoconiosis. James and the oldest Marcum son, Thomas, 59, have a simpler form, but James has reached the worst stage and is deteriorating.

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.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Evidence from the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster investigation shows not only that black lung is back, but also one reason the deadly disease is again on the rise.

Falsification of the dust sampling used to enforce federal black lung protections was common at Upper Big Branch, according to miners who worked at the Massey Energy operation.

To measure coal dust that causes black lung, some miners wear sampling devices commonly called dust pumps. In order to ensure accurate monitoring, it's important that miners work in the same areas and do the same jobs they would normally do when not wearing the pumps.

But Mike Kimblinger, a construction foreman who worked at Upper Big Branch for more than 14 years, told federal and state investigators that wasn't the way it worked.

"I was told to stay away from the dust and not do certain things while I was wearing the dust pump," Kimblinger said in sworn testimony. He said such instructions to miners were common at Upper Big Branch, and were given by top mine managers.

Former MSHA chief Davitt McAteer led a team of investigators who conducted an independent probe of the April 5, 2010, explosion that killed 29 miners at Upper Big Branch.

McAteer and his team obtained autopsy reports for the miners who died, and had a black lung expert examine them for evidence of the disease. Of the 24 victims with sufficient lung tissue for the analysis, 17 of them — or 71 percent — were found to have black lung.

This compares to the national black lung rate among miners of 3.2 percent, and the West Virginia rate of 7.6 percent, the McAteer report noted.

"At least four of the 17 worked almost exclusively at UBB," the report said. "All but one of the 17 victims with [black lung] began working in the mines after the 2.0 milligram coal mine dust limit was put in effect in 1973."

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Laboring in the blackberry fields of central Arkansas, the 18-year-old Mexican immigrant suddenly turned ill. Her nose began to bleed, her skin developed a rash, and she vomited.

The doctor told her it was most likely flu or bacterial infection, but farmworker Tania Banda-Rodriguez suspected pesticides. Under federal law, growers must promptly report the chemicals they spray.

It took the worker, and a Tennessee legal services lawyer helping her, six months to learn precisely what chemical doused those blackberry fields. The company ignored her requests for the information. The Arkansas State Plant Board initially refused to provide records to her lawyer, saying it didn’t respond to out-of-state requests. An Arkansas inspector, dispatched after the complaint, didn’t initially discern what pesticides were used the day the worker became ill, records show.

When answers finally arrived — the fungicide was Switch 62.5WG, a chemical that can irritate the eyes and skin — Banda-Rodriguez had already left Arkansas to follow the season to Virginia and ultimately returned to Mexico. She never learned whether the pesticide sickened her.

The episode is as telling a snapshot today as it was six years ago for one of America’s most grueling and lowest-paying vocations. Pesticides can endanger farmworkers, but thin layers of government protect them and no one knows the full scope of the environmental perils in the fields.

The Environmental Protection Agency administers a Worker Protection Standard meant to regulate pesticides and protect workers and handlers. Yet the agency maintains no comprehensive database to track pesticide exposure incidents nationwide.

Two weeks after a Center for Public Integrity story highlighted concerns about alleged quotas imposed on federal workplace safety inspectors, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has pared its inspection goal for the year.

OSHA had established a target of 42,250 inspections nationwide for fiscal year 2012, which ends Sept. 30. An OSHA spokesman confirmed Wednesday that the new goal is 41,000 inspections.

The revision was made primarily because the agency has been conducting "more complex, time consuming" inspections this year, the spokesman wrote in an email.

OSHA told the Center it sets goals, not quotas. But some former agency managers said that inspectors who fail to "make their numbers" face repercussions from their bosses.

On May 21, the Center published a story about a 2009 explosion at a U.S. Steel plant near Pittsburgh that killed Nick Revetta, a 32-year-old contract laborer. The OSHA inspector who led the accident investigation complained that he was unable to do a thorough job because of de facto quotas imposed by his supervisors. U.S. Steel, which has denied wrongdoing, was not cited in the case.

At 58, retired machinist Bruce Revers is tethered to his oxygen machines — a wall unit when he’s at home, a portable tank when he’s out. The simple act of walking to the curb to pick up his newspaper is a grind.

“This is a hell of a thing to live with,” Revers, of Orange, Calif., said of his worsening lung disease. “There’s nothing I can do without my air.”

His undoing was beryllium, a light and versatile metal to which he was exposed in a Southern California factory that makes high-tech ceramics for the space, defense and automotive industries. His bosses tried to keep the place clean and well-ventilated, Revers says, and he wore a respirator to shield his lungs from the fine metallic dust. Nonetheless, he was diagnosed with chronic beryllium disease in 2009.

He will not recover.

The federal standard in place to protect workers like Revers from beryllium is based on an Atomic Energy Commission calculation crafted by an industrial hygienist and a physician in the back of a taxi in 1949. For the last 12 years, an effort to update that standard has been mired in delay. A plan to address another toxic hazard — silica, a mineral that also damages the lungs — has been tied up even longer: 15 years.

The sluggishness is symptomatic of a bigger problem: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s inability to act with urgency on well-known workplace hazards.

Beryllium, used in everything from missiles to golf clubs, threatens as many as 134,000 workers in the United States, according to government estimates. Silica, pulverized and inhaled by construction workers, foundry workers and miners, threatens more than 2 million. Obsolete exposure limits, dating to the early 1970s, are on the books for both substances.

GALLATIN, Tenn. — Small fires were a part of the job at the Hoeganaes Corp. metal powder plant 30 miles northeast of Nashville. By early 2011, some workers later told investigators, they had become practiced in beating down the flames with gloved hands or a fire extinguisher.

The company’s own product fueled the fires. Scrap metal rolls into the rust-colored plant on the town’s industrial periphery and is melted, atomized and dried into a fine iron powder sold to makers of car parts. Sometimes, powder leaked from equipment and coated ledges and rafters. Under the right conditions, it smoldered.

Wiley Sherburne, a 42-year-old plant electrician, sometimes told his wife how this dust piled up everywhere, she recalled. On quieter weekend shifts, he said he could hear the telltale popping sound of dust sparking when it touched live electricity.

In the early morning of January 31, 2011, Sherburne was called to check out a malfunctioning bucket elevator that totes dust through the plant. Near his feet, electrical wires lay exposed. When the machine restarted, the jolt knocked dust into the air. A spark — likely from the exposed wires, investigators later concluded — turned the dust cloud into a ball of flame that engulfed Sherburne and a co-worker.

“He’s burned over 95 percent of his body,” doctors told Sherburne’s wife, Chris, when she arrived at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s burn unit. “He’s not going to live.” Her husband died two days later.