Published: January 7, 2019 |

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13 years since the sago mine disaster took the life of 12 coal miners, the industry continues to reflect on how to better protect their workers.

Michael McCawley, an associate professor at the WVU School of Public Health who’s done research with the mining industry for decades, says tragedies like Sago and Farmington before it inspired him to do more.

“In 1968 when I saw the Farmington disaster happen, I was just completely shocked, I said this seems like something that I would like to do something about,” said McCawley

Part of that call to action resulted in the passage new dust regulations, since that exposure is what leads to significant health problems such as black lung.

“We went from two milligrams of dust per cubic meter of hair down to 1.5 millimeters of dust per cubic meter of hair, and even at 1.5 they’re still under the compliance level,”

In recent years, the industry has developed devices that can almost instantaneously read dust levels. The hope is that these devices help create cleaner working environments.

“They can also take certain precautions about adjusting perhaps some of the engineering control technology to take care of the dust levels and try to take them down,”

However, despite these stricter regulations and advanced technology, black lung still persisted.

“Doing health surveillance of miners across the county the government has found that there’s an uptick in the worst form of black lung,”

While researchers are not yet certain on the cause of this uptick, one major theory is the impact of slope mining and the amount of exposure that causes.

“With the slope, you are cutting as you go, working through it, so the miners are in that dust,” “And the rock they are cutting through, may be higher in silicone, and that’s our suspicion,”

McCawley says to combat this rise we need to continue to monitor our technology.

“With any new piece of technology, we need to learn how to best use that and best interpret it’s results,”

McCawley also stresses the importance of educating our miners.

“Being able to do better training among the miners, make sure the miners really understand the risk behind the dust,”

And while we have moved forward in many ways since the sago mining disaster, moving forward, McCawley hopes for a black lung free future.

“We all want to put black lung behind us, we want that to be something that you read about in a history book somewhere but that you never experienced or that you never saw someone experience,”

Source: WDTV

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