As expected, the new MSHA rule lowers the maximum exposure to 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air during an eight-hour shift. The current limit is 100 micrograms per cubic meter.
The rule will take effect on June 17. Coal producers will have 12 months to comply. Metal and nonmetal mine operators will have 24 months.
Respirable crystalline silica is a carcinogen. It can cause lung disease, silicosis, lung cancer, progressive massive fibrosis and kidney disease. Coal dust containing silica dust has been shown to increase the severity of black lung cases and affect miners in their 30s and 40s.
The silica dust problem is thought to be caused by the mechanization of mining, especially in central Appalachia. Large machines grind through larger volumes of rock to maximize coal production.
Mine operators are supposed to ventilate mine work areas to lower the concentration of coal and rock dust, as well as methane.
Studies have shown in recent years that 1 in 5 miners in central Appalachia has black lung.
An investigation of the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster in Raleigh County found that 17 of the 24 miners whose lung tissue could be sampled showed signs of black lung disease. A total of 29 miners died in the explosion, caused by a mixture of methane and coal dust.
MSHA rolled out the silica dust rule at an event Tuesday morning in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
U.S. senators from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, including Sen. Joe Manchin, praised the rule, though they had previously criticized the agency for delays to its implementation.
Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy, was convicted of violating federal mine safety law in a 2016 trial. Twenty-nine miners at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine were killed in 2010.
Convicted coal executive Don Blankenship has filed to run for U.S. Senate – as a Democrat.
The filing appeared Friday on the West Virginia Secretary of State’s website.
Blankenship tried unsuccessfully to appeal his conviction. He served a year in prison. He ran for U.S. Senate as a Republican in 2018 and for president in 2020 on the Constitution Party ticket.
Two other Democrats have filed to run this year to succeed U.S. Sen Joe Manchin, who’s not seeking re-election. They are Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott and Marine Corps veteran Zach Shrewsbury.
The winner will face either Republican Gov. Jim Justice or Republican Rep. Alex Mooney in November.
A play about the victims of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster and their families will debut in West Virginia next month.
A play about the victims of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster and their families will debut in West Virginia next month.
It’s been 12 years since 29 men died in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. Theatre West Virginia arranged to bring the show to Beckley at the Woodrow Wilson High School auditorium for one night at no charge.
“Coal Country” just ended a run off Broadway in New York City. May 9, 2022, will be the first time the play is performed in West Virginia.
“People will have an opportunity without having to travel to New York City to be able to see this,” said Scott Hill, executive director of Theatre West Virginia,. “We’re going to bring this to Beckley and, and hopefully people will appreciate what we’re trying to do.”
The show’s composer, multiple Grammy winning singer-songwriter Steve Earle will perform music for the show. Hill hasn’t seen the play, but he’s listened to it on Audible.
“It’s very moving. And it’s very disturbing at some points,” Hill said. “There is a villain. It’s not necessarily a story. It’s a telling of the truth. It was a terrible thing. And you would hope that we would learn from it. I don’t know if we are but you would hope we at least have an opportunity to learn from it.”
Hill says this particular play just seems right to be performed in Raleigh County.
“I told the producers when they first called about they wanted to bring ‘Coal Country’ to Beckley or to somewhere in West Virginia,” Hill said. “I said, ‘Well, you know, there’s a reason you could take it to Charleston, I could understand that or Princeton … but this is our story here in southern West Virginia. If you look at a map and see where I’m sitting right now, I can be to that mine and 20 minutes, right there where it was. So this is our story. And I think it’s only right that we have the opportunity to tell it.”
The show is told through the voices of survivors and family members. The lines were collected in dozens of in person interviews.
“Each family was impacted differently,” Hill said. “It makes you think, what would happen if the main breadwinner of our house left? Or what happens if my husband or wife would leave? Or how would I feel if it was my son or my grandson or grandfather? How would you feel and it just really brings out emotion. It’s an emotional play. It’s an emotional piece of art.”
The play will be at the Woodrow Wilson High School Auditorium in Beckley on Monday, May 9 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at Theatre West Virginia’s website.
A ceremony was held at noon at the memorial in Raleigh County to the 29 mine workers who lost their lives on April 5, 2010.
The families of the miners killed in the Upper Big Branch disaster marked its 12th anniversary on Tuesday.
A ceremony was held at noon at the memorial in Raleigh County to the 29 mine workers who lost their lives on April 5, 2010.
Investigators found that a buildup of methane and coal dust contributed to the fatal explosion.
Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship was convicted in 2015 of violating federal mine safety law. He was sentenced to a year in prison and paid a $250,000 fine. In December, a federal appeals court denied Blankenship’s bid to have his conviction overturned.
In 2011, Alpha Natural Resources, which acquired Massey, paid a $210 million settlement that included compensation for the miners’ families, fines and safety upgrades.
Coal mine fatalities have declined sharply in recent years with a decline in coal production.
Five mine workers have been killed on the job this year, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration, following 10 fatalities in 2021 and five in 2020.
On April 5, 2010, the day after Easter, a series of explosions rocked the Upper Big Branch mine near Montcoal in Raleigh County.
Twenty-nine men died, making it West Virginia’s worst mining disaster since 78 miners were killed at Farmington in 1968.
After the Upper Big Branch explosion, an independent investigation determined that sparks from a longwall miner had ignited a pocket of methane, setting off a chain of explosions that surged more than two miles through the mine.
The panel concluded that the explosions could have been prevented and that systems designed to protect the miners had failed. The report found that the mine’s owner, Massey Energy, had operated its mines in a “profoundly reckless manner.” The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration reached similar conclusions, blaming the deaths on an “intentional and aggressive” effort by Massey to ignore safety rules.
The criticism of Massey eventually led to the resignation of company president, Don Blankenship. In 2016, Blankenship was sentenced to one year in prison for conspiring to willfully violate mine safety standards, largely in connection with the Upper Big Branch Disaster.
The actors deliver their lines from a sparse stage — just a few benches around them and 29 modest lights above. For the most part they speak directly to the audience, sharing memories of the lives of husbands, sons, fathers and nephews, some of the 29 men who died on April 5, 2010, when an explosion ripped through the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia.
It’s a powerful performance, made even more so by the realization that nearly all of the actors’ dialogue is drawn directly from court transcripts and hours of interviews with about a half dozen people who lived through that tragic day and the many long days that followed.
“Coal Country,” which opened in New York’s storiedPublic Theater, introduced New York theater-goers to the real lives of families affected by the tragedy.
The coronavirus pandemic forced the early closure of the play. But shortly after its opening I visited the playwrights, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, at their Brooklyn home to learn more about their approach to documentary theater. The wife-and-husband writing duo say they hope their work will help urban audiences better understand life in the real coal country, where people have long sacrificed to help build and power America’s cities.
Credit Joan Marcus / The Public Theater
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The Public Theater
Jessica Blank, Erik Jensen and Steve Earle in rehearsal.
Blank explained that the work starts with outreach to potential subjects, a delicate job given the grief and need for privacy among family members. At first, Blank said, she wondered if she would get people to agree to talk. They were not returning her calls.
“I finally figured out after a couple of weeks of this, I said, ‘You know, I think that this is a community where you have to show your face,’” she said. “Just getting a phone message from some person in New York being like, ‘Hey, I’m doing a project, do you want to talk to us?’ That isn’t going to do the trick.”
So in April, 2016, she traveled to a Charleston, West Virginia, courthouse. She sat with family members of victims as Massey Energy’s CEO Don Blankenship was sentenced for conspiracy to violate mine safety rules.
“And then I think what happened is that word got around that we were okay,” she said. “Because then we started sitting down with more and more folks.”
Blank and Jensen recorded hours of interviews during extended visits with people who had worked in the Upper Big Branch Mine and who had lost family members there. Despite being long-time New Yorkers they found an instant bond with the West Virginia families they met.
“I’m from the rural Midwest, and, you know, grew up in a small town,” Jensen said. “And so like, I immediately related to people kind of on that level.”
“Every experience we had sitting with every person we sat down with was incredibly powerful and incredibly eye opening and incredibly moving,” Blank said. She recounted learning details about long-wall mining — something she’d never heard of before — and the way that long traditions of union mining gave way in West Virginia over the past couple of decades.
“And we learned a lot about humanity, as we often do, when we do this kind of project,” she said.
Blank and Jensen have the very married couple’s habit of finishing each other’s sentences and picking up on their spouse’s thoughts. Jensen continued with the thread Blank had started.
“My thing about it was, I learned a lot about grief.” He said that during the course of the project he lost both his father and uncle. His own grief helped him relate to what people in the West Virginia community were experiencing.
“I think that was when I finally understood what we were writing. Because I multiply that by 29 and, my heart couldn’t take it,” he said. “I finally understood what it was like to be in that community, and it broke my heart open.
“And thank God for Steve’s music,” he added. “Because his songs address grief in such a beautiful way.”
Greek Chorus Of One
“Steve” is singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who sat in on some of the interviews and wrote songs which he performs to accompany the play. “Steve, to me, is the heir to Woody Guthrie,” Jensen said. “He tells real stories with his songs, you know, stories of the heart.”
Credit Joan Marcus / The Public Theater
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The Public Theater
Steve Earle performs during “Coal Country.”
“Coal Country” is not a musical. The characters rarely sing and the songs do not propel the narrative, as in a musical. Rather, Earle sits on stage with a guitar or banjo and listens intently to the actors, then adds a song that might echo a characters’ loss or hint at deeper themes. Jensen described his role as akin to a Greek chorus of one.
“He’s there to kind of hold down the play and to orient us when we need it, or to, to break our hearts when we need that.”
In a reworking of the traditional ballad of John Henry, for example, Earle weaves in allusions to the decline of union representation among miners.
The Union come and tried to make a stand
West Virginia miners voted union to a man
You wouldn’t know it now but that was then
The Union come and tried to make a stand
And in the lovely, simple “The Mountain” (a song he first recorded with the Del McCoury Band in 1999) Earle sums up the conflicted feelings of people who are both tied to the natural world and to an industry that wreaks great natural destruction.
I was born on this mountain, this mountain’s my home
She holds me and keeps me from worry and woe
Well, they took everything that she gave, now they’re gone
But i’ll die on this mountain, this mountain’s my home
Earle is pulling together several of the songs from “Coal Country” into a new album, “Ghosts of West Virginia,” which is scheduled for release in May.
Bridging Divides
I grew up in West Virginia, and my family roots there go back several generations. As with many West Virginia natives, I greet any outsider’s depiction of the place and its people with a degree of wariness. We’ve been burned more than a few times by hurtful stereotypes, even by those who meant well.
That is perhaps why I was surprised at my very emotional response to “Coal Country.”
[At the time I saw it, the coronavirus threat was just beginning to emerge in public awareness to the degree that I knew not to touch my face. Reader, it is hard to avoid touching your face while weeping.]
It is, of course, deeply emotional content to begin with. This is, after all, the story of one of the worst mining tragedies in recent history. But beyond that I was struck by, and grateful for, the simple details about West Virginians that Blank and Jensen recognized and relayed to their New York audience.
Their commitment to deep listening brought some deep truths to the stage.
“I think it’s our job in making this kind of work,” Blank said. “Find the people who lived that story, sit down with them, and then get out of the way.”
It occurred to me, watching their play in an audience mostly made up of New Yorkers, that this is an opportunity to perhaps help overcome, in some small way, the great divide between urban and rural America.
“Well I certainly hope,” Blank started. “It would be a privilege,” Jensen finished.
“This is a really big blind spot in communities that I move in, where people are so conscious about their politics,” Blank continued. “The things that people say sometimes about the rural working class — otherwise, really thoughtful people — are shocking to me. And I think it’s a really big blind spot that mostly comes from not having any contact with folks who come from a really different place and a really different lifestyle.”
“People have dignity, people have history,” Jensen said. “And whether you’re pro-coal or against coal, coal miners helped build this country, and they should be treated as such.”
“Built these buildings here,” Blank interjected, gesturing at the street scene outside the window.
“And right now what they’re doing isthey’re blocking trains with their bodies in order to get their benefits or in order to get their last paycheck,” Jensen said. “And I just think workers should be treated better than that.”
