This week on Inside Appalachia, black lung disease is back. In fact, it never went away. Now, younger and younger miners are living with a particularly nasty form of black lung disease. Regulators and the coal industry have known about the problem for decades — but they’ve been slow to respond. One reporter asks, “What would happen if thousands of workers in any other industry got sick and died just because of where they worked?”
Black lung disease is back. In fact, it never went away. Now, younger and younger miners are living with a particularly nasty form of black lung disease.
Regulators and the coal industry have known about the problem for decades — but they’ve been slow to respond.
One reporter asks, “What would happen if thousands of workers in any other industry got sick and died just because of where they worked?”
This week, we’re talking about the black lung epidemic, Inside Appalachia.
In This Episode:
Looking Back At The Rise of Advanced Black Lung Cases Rising
The blackened lungs of a coal miner who received a transplant at age 60.
Credit: Mine Safety and Health Administration
Advanced black lung is rampant across the coal-producing regions of central Appalachia, in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia.
This is different from simple black lung, which is debilitating, but advanced black lung is known as progressive massive fibrosis. It’s the result of miners digging at increasingly thin coal seams. To get at the coal, they cut into quartz, which creates silica dust.
Breathing the mix of silica and coal dust is much more destructive and like simple black lung, there is no cure.
Advanced black lung has been documented for decades, but it’s getting new attention from federal officials.
As part of our special program, we aired a 2018 NPR segment with Howard Berkes, where he met with dozens of Appalachian miners with advanced black lung disease.
Federal Regulators Are Crafting New Rules
Most coal production has been declining for years, but the metallurgical coal industry has been ramping up production to meet global demand. With increased demand, experts predict more cases of black lung. After years of inaction, though, federal officials are addressing the issue.
Over the summer, the Mine Safety and Health Administration proposed a rule intended to protect coal miners from exposure to silica dust. By the time the comment period closed in September, the draft rule had attracted 157 comments.
Mason Adams spoke with Berkes about what they found.
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by John Hurlbut and Jorma Kaukonen, Tim Bing, June Carter Cash and Steve Earle.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
Miners are suffering from an advanced version of black lung disease known as progressive massive fibrosis. It’s the result of digging at increasingly thin coal seams. That means they’re also cutting into quartz, which creates silica dust. Advanced black lung results from breathing in that blend of silica and coal dust.
Updated on Oct. 10, 2023 at 11:30 a.m.
This story originally aired in the Oct. 8, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.
The coal-producing regions of central Appalachia are at the center of an epidemic of advanced black lung cases among coal miners. New reporting by a retired NPR reporter has shown how federal officials underestimated the sheer number of cases across West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, and now regulators seem to be responding.
Miners are suffering from an advanced version of black lung disease known as progressive massive fibrosis.
It’s the result of digging at increasingly thin coal seams. That means they’re also cutting into quartz, which creates silica dust.
Advanced black lung results from breathing in that blend of silica and coal dust.
He worked with NPR and the PBS series Frontline, and spent more than a year investigating fears that federal regulators and mining companies were failing to protect coal miners from toxic dust.
He and his team obtained documents and data showing federal mine safety officials had evidence of the danger dating back more than 20 years, but never addressed it.
Howard Berkes spent 38 years as an NPR Correspondent. His investigative reporting exposed an epidemic of advanced black lung disease affecting thousands of coal miners, and decades of failure of federal regulators to take steps to prevent it.
Credit: Wanda Gayle
In 2018, Berkes reported that more than 2,000 miners were dying of illness related to that toxic dust. Since that story aired, at least four of the miners in it who appeared have died, and at least two have received double-lung transplants. Danny Smith, who was prominently featured, is being assessed for a double-lung transplant.
Danny Smith spent just 12 years mining coal in eastern Kentucky and was diagnosed with the advanced stage of black lung disease at 39. Both are shocking numbers because it used to take decades of mining for coal miners much older to get as sick as this.
Credit: Elaine McMillion Sheldon/PBS Frontline
Lately, the metallurgical coal industry has been ramping up production to meet global demand, and experts predict even more advanced black lung cases will appear. After years of inaction, though, federal officials are addressing the issue.
Over the summer, the Mine Safety and Health Administration proposed a rule intended to protect coal miners from exposure to silica dust. By the time the comment period closed in September, the draft rule had attracted 157 comments.
Now, Berkes is part of a new investigation into advanced black lung cases that was co-published by Public Health Watch, Louisville Public Media and Mountain State Spotlight. Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with Berkes about what his team found.
The New Beginnings Pulmonary Rehab Clinic in South Williamson, Kentucky, features photos of coal miners with advanced black lung disease, including those who have not survived.
Credit: Elaine McMillion Sheldon/PBS Frontline
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Adams: So your work in the past, your investigations have in the past have seemed to have resulted in some action. Now MSHA has proposed some new regulations for monitoring silica dust.
Berkes: Yeah, MSHA has taken two very significant steps in this proposed rule. One is to make the exposure limit for silica dust twice as tough as it has been. That was recommended by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health back in 1974, and it was recommended again by the Labor Department’s own mine dust advisory committee in 1996.
It’s taken all these years for MSHA to finally adopt what has been long recommended, this tougher limit to exposure to silica dust. That’s a major, major improvement. The second thing that they did is that they decided to regulate overexposure to silica dust directly. In the past, they applied a complicated formula: If a mining company had too much silica dust, then the mining company had to lower the amount of overall mine dust, coal dust and silica dust in the air. That was supposed to bring down the silica dust exposure to an acceptable level. But it’s not a one-to-one relationship.
What we found in our previous investigation was 9,000 overexposures to silica dust, even after the mining companies responded to the regulation that was in effect at the time. So now MSHA is directly regulating silica dust. There can be citations and fines associated with exceeding the silica dust level, that has never happened in the past. So those are two very promising elements of this proposed rule.
This slogan appeared in a Department of Labor document warning about silica dust exposure in workplaces, including mines, in 1997, 26 years before the Mine Safety and Health Administration proposed tougher restrictions on exposure to silica dust.
Credit: Mine Safety and Health Administration
Adams: There have also been some criticisms of the proposed rule as well.
Berkes: Yeah, mostly on enforcement and oversight. There really is no regular oversight built into the rule. The rule requires mining companies to conduct an enormous amount of sampling of dust, and to record the results of those samples. If they show that there’s overexposure to silica dust, the rule requires that the mining companies then make changes in the way they’re mining so that the silica dust is reduced. There are various things that can be done: they can increase the ventilation, they can make sure that their water sprays on the mining machines are working properly. Those are two key elements in managing dust in coal mines. They can slow down the mining machines and not mine so quickly. They can stop mining a seam that has so much quartz in it. Those are all things that mining companies are required to do once there’s excessive dust. And while they’re doing those things, they’re allowed to continue to mine.
They’re allowed to let miners continue to work in what are dangerous levels of dust. But miners must wear respirators; that has its own set of problems. We’ve interviewed dozens and dozens of miners since 2016, and they all complain about the dust masks not working properly clogging up, inhibiting their breathing, getting too hot, inhibiting their ability to communicate with fellow miners in a very dangerous environment.
There are new helmets out that are very effective for protecting miners from dust, but they can block vision and can block communication in ways that can become dangerous in a coal mine. The main problem with all of this is that MSHA is not going to be watching all the time. Mine inspectors only go into coal mines four times a year, and they’ll do their own sampling when they’re in there. They can ask to see the results of the sampling the mining companies have done. But what this means is that most of the time, there will be no Mine Safety and Health Administration oversight and enforcement of this new rule. It’ll be up to the mining companies. And as coal miner after coal miner after coal miner who we’ve interviewed over the years will tell you, some mining companies have conducted fraudulent sampling over the years. As recently as last year, there was a criminal prosecution in Kentucky for fraudulent dust sampling.
A display at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown, West Virginia shows how much damage results from exposure to coal and silica dust.
Credit: Howard Berkes/NPR
Adams: MSHA has been collecting comments on these proposed rules and they’ve been hearing from miners and advocates in the coal industry. By the time this segment airs, that comment period will have come to a close. But in the last few days, Public Health Watch has published a new investigation with Louisville Public Media and Mountain State Spotlight that calls into question some of MSHA’s projections on which it’s basing this rule. Can you tell us a little bit about that investigation and what your team found?
Berkes: Sure. One of the things that really struck me in the very extensive and dense document that MSHA has produced to justify what it wants to do, is they project how many lives will be saved, and how much disease will be avoided if this new rule is permitted to take effect. What really shocked me was that the projection for coal mines was 63 deaths avoided over 60 years — a little more than one a year — and 244 cases of black lung disease avoided over 60 years. That just doesn’t make sense, given how much disease has actually occurred, which MSHA never mentions in its document. And so we calculated how much disease has occurred by continuing our survey of black lung clinics — both independent clinics and clinics that are funded by the federal government.
What we found, which MSHA doesn’t mention, is that in just the last five years, there have been 1,500 new cases of progressive massive fibrosis, the advanced stage of black lung disease, as reported by these clinics. The total since 2010, since that’s as far back as we go in our survey of clinics, is over 4,000 cases of this horrific, fatal disease. There is no cure. We also, by the way, looked at how many excessive exposures there have been in coal mines in recent years. At the new limit — say the new limit was in place since 2016 — we found over 5,000 excessive exposures at the new limit.
So what these numbers sort of provide is a sense of how serious this situation is, how much over exposure continues to occur, and how much disease continues to occur. That’s not in this proposed rule making. In fact, the numbers presented for silica dust exposure since 2016 by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, they just have numbers from 2016 to 2021. They don’t report how many excessive exposures there were in this document. They report that there were 93 percent of exposures that were within the limit. Well, that sounds like a great number, 93 percent. It sounds like, “Oh, things aren’t so bad.” But that other 7 percent represents more than 5,000 excessive exposures. And because this is such a toxic substance, that’s a lot of potential disease and death. You got to understand that for proposed rule making that this process involves.
Federal Mine Safety Chief Christopher Williamson addresses a crowd gathered in Arlington, Virginia, on Aug. 3, 2023, for a public hearing on proposed silica dust regulations. Williamson is the first mine safety chief to directly address overexposure to toxic silica dust.
Credit: Justin Hicks/Louisville Public Media
So right now, it’s proposed, you mentioned that there’s this comment period that has taken place, that the industry and the public and mine safety advocates and miners get to comment on it. Before there’s a final rule, the Department of Labor has to approve whatever the final rule might be. The Office of Management and Budget has to approve this final rule. We’ve got an election year coming up. There’s often sensitivity from the White House and the Office of Management and Budget on anything that might make voters not vote for candidates that the administration supports or might not vote for the president again, if there’s something in this that offends them.
I’ve seen this happen in the past, where regulatory action was stalled in order to hold off until after an election. There may be other reasons that there could be concerns or objections, budget-wise or otherwise, from the impact on the industry. So it’s important, if you’re going to state your case, to state it as strongly as possible. This rule making does not state that case as strongly as possible. There may be lawsuits from the mining industry over this. So it’s puzzling to me why they didn’t do that. When we asked the Mine Safety Administration, they said, “The comment period exists so that people can tell us what we might need to do better. And this will be one of the things that we consider if people comment on this.
Adams: It’s mind-blowing to think that this represents thousands of people. And behind each of these numbers is a human being. You’ve interviewed dozens of these miners. What have you taken away from those interviews that’s not necessarily reflected in the data?
Berkes: I want to point out that every one of those miners had progressive massive fibrosis. We interviewed miners who had the worst stage of disease. One of the things they all talked about was what their prospects were for the future. Many of them watched fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers die of black lung disease, and so they know what they face. This is a tragedy that strikes generations and families: Fathers that won’t see their kids grow up. Fathers that won’t see their daughters at their weddings, won’t see high school graduations. And actually, it’s not just men, there are women miners with this disease as well.
The tragic nature of this is just so astounding and moving and deep. When you talk to a miner with severe disease at advanced stages, they can hardly get a sentence out without coughing or without having to pause for very deep breaths. A miner in my story, Danny Smith, who was diagnosed at 39, he’s 51. Now, he has his grave site picked out. I tried to call him in the last couple of weeks, and his breathing is so labored, he said he can’t get through a phone call. So we were communicating by text message.
Lungs riddled with fibrotic tissue from complicated black lung disease are displayed in the office of radiologist Dr. Brandon Crum in Pikeville, Kentucky.
Credit: Elaine McMillion Sheldon/PBS Frontline
Danny was featured in our 2018 story. We’ve been in communication since then. And he’s in terrible shape, and it’s so bad. He loved coal mining, but it’s so bad. He said now he wishes he never stepped foot in the mine. And this was a job he loved. It was a job that made a good life for him and his daughters. He’s a single parent. And there’s an enormous amount of regret, of buying into this bargain of a great life for mining coal. You know, part of what I don’t understand is, in any other workplace in our country, if you had thousands and thousands of people who were sick and dying from a disease, there would be outreach, and there would be response, and there would be response quicker than what has come.
I don’t know why people don’t seem to care about coal miners. There are 40,000 coal miners still working today. I don’t know what it takes to get a response that gets this going in a way that really protects and helps coal miners. But they are people like you and me who have done a job to make lives better for their families. They’re caught up in this whole thing and it’s killing a lot of them.
Retired coal miner Roy Keith undergoes a spirometry test at the New River Health Clinic in Oak Hill, West Virginia as part of the process of measuring lung capacity and diagnosing the onset of black lung disease.
Credit: Allen Siegler/Mountain State Spotlight
Adams: Howard Berkes, thank you for your important work on this topic. This is an important subject that has such a deep, deep impact here in central Appalachia. Thanks for coming on Inside Appalachia and speaking with us about it.
Berkes: Always a pleasure to be with you.
A statue at the courthouse in Grundy, Virginia, honors the coal miners of Buchanan County.
MSHA responded with a statement that said the agency was considering “suggestions that the [proposed rule] underestimates the benefit” as it develops a final version of the rule.
***Editor’s Note: The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration collected 157 comments on its proposed silica dust rule. A previous version of this story misstated the number of comments the agency received.
Federal health researchers are visiting health clinics and medical schools in the Appalachian coalfields to recruit allies in the fight a resurgence of black lung disease. The worst form of the disease may affect as much as 5 percent of experienced working miners in the region, and the researchers fear that rate could be even higher among retired miners.
Medical students filled an auditorium at the University of Pikeville, Kentucky, to hear the latest on this scourge of coal communities, a disease many think should be history by now.
“If we come to your town there’s generally something bad going on there,” said Dr. Scott Laney, an epidemiologist with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH. He was part of a research team that identified a resurgence in the worst form of black lung disease in a study published late last year.
Pike County, Kentucky, Laney said, is “at the epicenter of one of the largest industrial medicine disasters that the United States has ever seen.”
Laney and his colleague Dr. David Blackley got word that a clinic here in Pike County had identified more cases of the advanced form of black lung than a national screening program had seen nationwide.
“We found only a few dozen complicated cases of black lung in the last several years,” Blackley said of the screening program. “But just in the last year-and-a-half, at one clinic in Pikeville, we saw 60 cases.”
Credit Howard Berkes / NPR
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NPR
Mackie Branham views a lung X-ray with Dr. James Brandon Crum, who was among the first physicians to note an uptick in black lung diagnoses.
In December, NPR and the ReSource obtained records from several black lung health clinics in the region, and found another 962 incidents of severe black lung. Blackley and Laney have been reaching out to clinics, hoping to create a more comprehensive count. Recently they visited facilities in Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky to raise awareness in the local medical field, and also to find and encourage new collaborations.
“Many people think, ‘Oh, black lung, isn’t that something that went away in the 1970s?’ ” Blackley said. “So we really try to emphasize that this this is something that’s real, something that’s ongoing, and should be recognized as the tragedy that it is.”
The researchers only found out about the resurgence once they connected with a local physician, Dr. Brandon Crum, who told them about the new cases at his clinic in Pikeville. Crum said what’s troubling isn’t just the number of new black lung patients, it’s how quickly he’s seeing the disease progress in young miners.
“Being from a mining family and a miner myself, the thought was it would occur in your 70s and your 80s,” Crum said. “But with this new form, this aggressive form of the disease, we’re seeing it attack younger and younger miners with shorter durations of mining.”
Crum said he’s seen the worst form of black lung disease in miners who’ve spent as few as seven years working in coal mines. Crum and the federal researchers said that indicates how much work remains to be done.
“We plan on working on this issue for the foreseeable future, for many many years, until it’s remedied,” Blackley said.
Last week, a bipartisan group of legislators sent a letter to president Trump requesting $3.3 million in additional funding for black lung health clinics facing this resurgence in black lung disease.
Two years ago, an NPR investigation found that Jim Justice was among the top delinquent mine owners in the country, owing millions in federal mine safety fines.
NPR’s Howard Berkes decided to follow up on those findings and see just how far the Justice companies had come. What he found was not just that Justice now owed more money in fines than any other operator in the country, but that he also owed millions in federal, state and local taxes as well.
“Two years ago, his chief operating officer said that Justice would pay off his penalties, that times had been tough in the coal industry, but that he always paid his debts and he would pay these,” Berkes said in an interview with West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
“What we found was instead of that, there was actually a million dollars more in new violations and new delinquencies that had occurred since we first contacted the Justice companies two years ago.”
Those delinquent mine safety fines are not owed at mines located in West Virginia, but Justice is on a payment plan to pay off the debts in other states, like Kentucky.
What Berkes did find in West Virginia, though, was that Justice owes more than $3 million in unpaid severance taxes, the tax paid on coal as it’s mined. Those are the same taxes that West Virginia budget officials say are drastically decreasing with the decline in the coal industry, causing budgetary issues for the state.
“The total is over $3 million for Justice mining companies [in 2013 and 2014],” Berkes said, “and that is about 43 percent of the unpaid severance taxes for all of West Virginia for those years combined.”
Along with the severance taxes owed in West Virginia and delinquent mine safety penalties, Justice mining companies owe nearly $5.4 million in county taxes in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
Berkes also confirmed that Justice has never paid two of his largest promised charitable contributions, $25 million to the Boy Scouts in West Virginia and $10 million to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
“The explanation we got from the campaign was that tough times for coal made it difficult for him to follow through with his charitable contributions, but that he intended to do so eventually,” Berkes said, however, Berkes was not able to get a comment from the campaign about the delinquent severance taxes.
This morning, the Justice campaign released a statement from Bill Shelton, an attorney for the Justice companies:
“Unlike the coal companies that filed for bankruptcy and walked away from their obligations, the Justice Companies are being responsible and following the agreed upon payment plan. I’ve dealt with these issues many times during my legal career, and the Justice Companies are taking the proper steps to make good on all MSHA commitments. To imply anything beyond that is purely for political reasons and ignores the facts.”
Perfect for your Thanksgiving road-trip: Fifty-one minutes of some great Appalachian stories, including: NPR’s mine safety investigation continues. Where is the the mine with the highest delinquent fines in the U.S.? What happens when mines don’t pay their fines? And an update from the Appalachian Project, and how a financial adviser in Johnson City, TN decided to begin recording oral histories across Appalachia. These stories and more, in this week’s episode of Inside Appalachia.
Last week we heard two reports from a joint investigation on the mining industry by NPR and Mine Safety and Health News.The investigation found that mining companies and contractors owe nearly 70 million dollars to the government for violating federal health and safety laws. But the mines’ owners have been able to stay in business and continue to extract coal. Where is the mine with the highest delinquent fines in the U.S.? For that, reporter Anna Boiko-Weyrauch takes us to Kentucky.
What happens when mines don’t pay their fines? Now abig, bureaucratic failure with real implications for the people who work in mines. Turns out the federal mine safety agency has not collected millions of dollars in penalties for safety violations in the nation’s mines. NPR’s investigative series found that during the time period when mining companies were delinquent in their payments, they committed 130,000 additional violations. NPR’s Howard Berkes examines one last question. Since fines are supposed to deter unsafe practices, what can be done to make delinquent mine owners pay up?
What’s in a Name? This town in Appalachia gets its name from a frightening creek that almost swept two travelers underwater. Is it Hell for Certain, KY, Difficult, Tennessee or Deadly, Pennsylvania?
Appalachian Project Update: Shane Simmons began researching Appalachian towns as he began working on an oral history project earlier this year. In February, he and his friend Jason Barton began The Appalachian project almost on a whim, when they decided to take a camcorder as they drove across the southern Appalachian mountains on a road trip. We heard from Shane earlier this summer as he and Jason were just getting started. Recently, Shane talked to Roxy Todd about how he and Jason have each put a few thousand miles on their cars. They’ve also both interviewed dozens of people across Appalachia, including 14-year-old Willow Osborne. (facebook.com/AppalachianProject)
Finding the Funds to Start a Business in Kentucky: There is funding and assistance available for people who want to grow their own small business, but do enough people know where to find the help when they need it? And how many people want the help that’s out there? This story is from an ongoing series produced by WMMT radio called Making Connections News, which covers examples of the possibilities and challenges we face in rebuilding the Appalachian economy. In this report, producer Sylvia Ryerson tells about some of the resources available for people who want to start a small business in Kentucky. November 29th is the deadline for people in KY to apply for small business funding through www.kybixinfo.com.
Exploring what it takes to revitalize southern West Virginia’s Economy: This fall, a West Virginia State Senate Panel began looking at the SOAR program in KY for inspiration as it explores ways to help jumpstart the economy in the coalfields of southern West Virginia. The initiative is called the Southern Coalfields Organizing and Revitalizing the Economy initiative, or SCORE.
Rufous Hummingbird in Pennsylvania: Real live hummingbirds are braving the cold and snow in growing numbers in late autumn and early winter in our region. Especially a rust-colored bird known as the Rufous Hummingbird. Back in November 1990, National Aviary ornithologist Bob Mulvihill caught the first Rufous Hummingbird that any researcher had documented in the state. From the Allegheny Front’s Bird Files, Mulvihill has more on the Rufous Hummingbird.
Credit Geoff Malosh
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With its aerial maneuverability and speed, the Rufous Hummingbird is a match for intruders hundreds of times its size.
Music in today’s show was provided by Andy Agnew Jr., The Black Twig Pickers, Stacy Grub and Alan Johnston with Montcoal, West Virginia, Annie Patterson who sang “The L and N Don’t Stop Here anymore”, written by Jean Richie, and Andrea Tomasi with “Falcon Song”.
Another West Virginia coal miner died this week, the fifth death this year. It’s a tough reality in the coalfields where families regularly pray that loved ones will come home from a day’s work, as they have for decades.
As incidents are reported, media outlets often share the amount of citations or delinquent fines of the mine where the accident occurred. But to what end?
A recent investigative report has uncovered that some coal companies are working the system to avoid paying fines. The report also finds a connection between skirted financial penalties and injured coal miners: mines with more delinquent fines also have higher rates of injured workers.
NPR and Mine Safety and Health News sifted through citations, and documents for more than a year to find the connections.
In an interview with West Virginia Public Broadcasting, NPR’s Howard Berkes shared thoughts on mine safety, the development of the investigation, and the impact of the report.
What are the consequences of those numbers to miners?
What happens when these mines get away without paying?
What happens to mines?
How many miners are injured?
What’s the miner’s rate for delinquent vs. non-delinquent?
“Those sounded like really great questions,” Berkes said, “but boy were they hard to answer.” Berkes said he and Hickory-Smith talked about doing this report for two years. He said it was only possible with help of an intern from the University of Missouri, Anna Boiko-Weyrauch, who knew how to mine the raw data. It was was a complex process.
Each delinquent penalty has a different start date, Berkes point out. Finding answers took sifting through thousands of start dates.
Berekes says the investigation found that most mines were paying their fines.
So why weren’t the other mines paying?
“Mining companies that don’t want to pay, don’t have to, and nothing much happens to them,” Berkes said.
Berkes said basically, there are two reasons why the small percentage doesn’t pay up:
MSHA doesn’t have the authority to shut down a mine simply because they don’t pay fines.
It’s a lot of work to establish the amount of assets a mine has in order to seize them to satisfy a court order.
What about the small companies that say they can’t afford to pay?
This report examined top six delinquent mining companies to find out how much coal they mined and how much it was worth. Of $721 million in profits, those companies owed about $14.7 million. Many of the delinquent mines are small, often referred to as ‘punch hole’ or ‘dog hole’ mines.
“I understand it can be tough to operate a punch hole mine but a fine is part of your obligation,” Berkes said. “It’s part of your obligation as a mine owner to operate a mine, and you’re supposed to pay it. Our figures indicate that some of these mines could have paid anyway.”
Will this change anything?
After 29 men died in an explosion at Upper Big Branch, Congress failed to pass meaningful legislation. Representative George Miller introduced a bill that would create a deadline for operators to pay fines, but it hasn’t gone anywhere.
“If Congress couldn’t pass meaningful mine safety legislation after that disaster I don’t think this [report] will move them either,” Berkes said.
