[Senate Hearing 118-334]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 118-334
DIGGING DEEPER FOR HEALTH
AND SAFETY: EXAMINING NEW
STANDARDS AND PRACTICES
IN MINING
=======================================================================
HEARING
[before the]
SUBCOMMITTEE ON EMPLOYMENT
AND WORKPLACE SAFETY
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION,
LABOR, AND PENSIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
----------
MAY 22, 2024
----------
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
DIGGING DEEPER FOR HEALTH AND SAFETY: EXAMINING NEW
STANDARDS AND PRACTICES IN MINING
______
S. Hrg. 118-334
DIGGING DEEPER FOR HEALTH
AND SAFETY: EXAMINING NEW
STANDARDS AND PRACTICES
IN MINING
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE SAFETY
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION,
LABOR, AND PENSIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
ON
EXAMINING NEW STANDARDS AND PRACTICES IN MINING, FOCUSING ON HEALTH AND
SAFETY
__________
MAY 22, 2024
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions
GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov
_______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
55-878PDF WASHINGTON : 2024
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS
BERNIE SANDERS (I), Vermont, Chairman
PATTY MURRAY, Washington BILL CASSIDY, M.D., Louisiana,
ROBERT P. CASEY, JR., Pennsylvania Ranking Member
TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin RAND PAUL, Kentucky
CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
TIM KAINE, Virginia LISA MURKOWSKI, Alaska
MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire MIKE BRAUN, Indiana
TINA SMITH, Minnesota ROGER MARSHALL, M.D., Kansas
BEN RAY LUJAN, New Mexico MITT ROMNEY, Utah
JOHN HICKENLOOPER, Colorado TOMMY TUBERVILLE, Alabama
ED MARKEY, Massachusetts MARKWAYNE MULLIN, Oklahoma
TED BUDD, North Carolina
Warren Gunnels, Majority Staff Director
Bill Dauster, Majority Deputy Staff Director
Amanda Lincoln, Minority Staff Director
Danielle Janowski, Minority Deputy Staff Director
------
SUBCOMMITTEE ON EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE SAFETY
JOHN HICKENLOOPER, Colorado, Chairman
ROBERT P. CASEY, JR., Pennsylvania MIKE BRAUN, Indiana
TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin ROGER MARSHALL, M.D., Kansas
TIM KAINE, Virginia MITT ROMNEY, Utah
BEN RAY LUJAN, New Mexico TOMMY TUBERVILLE, Alabama
ED MARKEY, Massachusetts TED BUDD, North Carolina
BERNIE SANDERS (I), Vermont, (ex BILL CASSIDY, M.D., Louisiana, (ex
officio) officio)
C O N T E N T S
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STATEMENTS
WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2024
Page
Subcommittee Members
Hickenlooper, Hon. John, Chairman, Subcommittee on Employment and
Workplace Safety, Opening statement............................ 1
Braun, Hon. Mike, Ranking Member, U.S. Senator from the State of
Indiana, Opening statement..................................... 2
Witnesses
Brown Barnes, Cindy, Managing Director, Education, Workforce, and
Income Security, Government Accountability Office, Washington,
DC............................................................. 5
Prepared statement........................................... 6
Harris, Drew, M.D., Associate Professor of Medicine, University
of Virginia and Medical Director, Stone Mountain Black Lung
Program, St. Charles and Vansant, VA........................... 16
Prepared statement........................................... 18
Roberts, Cecil E., President, United Mine Workers of America,
Triangle, VA................................................... 22
Prepared statement........................................... 24
Schafrik, Steven, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Graduate Studies,
Mining Engineering, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY...... 31
Prepared statement........................................... 32
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Statements, articles, publications, letters, etc.
Roberts, Cecil E.:...............................................
Additional testimony and material submitted for the Record... 54
DIGGING DEEPER FOR HEALTH
AND SAFETY: EXAMINING NEW
STANDARDS AND PRACTICES
IN MINING
----------
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety,
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:30 p.m., in
room 430, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. John
Hickenlooper, Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Hickenlooper [presiding], Casey, Kaine,
Lujan, and Braun.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HICKENLOOPER
Senator Hickenlooper. Let's try that again. This will
happen to each of you, I guarantee you, over the course of--or
one of you at least. The Subcommittee on Employment and
Workplace Safety will come to order.
Today, we are here for an important discussion about mining
health, mining safety. Ranking Member Braun and I will each
give an opening statement, then we will introduce the
witnesses. After the witnesses give their testimony, Senators
will have 5 minutes for a round of questions.
We have for long--for a long time, we have relied on our
miners to help us keep the lights on, and we owe it to them to
make sure that they have a safe and healthy workplace. And that
is why we are here today, to talk about what is needed to best
protect our miners, both today and in the future.
For generations, we have relied on resources like coal,
uranium, copper to fuel our economy, to run electrical
generators, to support infrastructure and power--not just
manufacturing but all aspects of our society.
We know that the work to extract these resources could be
dangerous without good and consistent safety measures in place.
Thousands of miners have contracted and died from preventable
diseases like black lung and silicosis.
Our miners deserve safety protection in their workforce and
their workplace, just like any other job. Our Country, I think,
is at the cusp of, I call it a great transition. We are gearing
up for a clean energy economy to help secure energy
independence and to address climate change in a pragmatic and
real way.
As we make this new transition, I think it is an exciting
time. We have to make sure that miners are not left behind.
These workers are going to be as important, probably more
important than they ever have been.
We are going to need critical minerals like cobalt and
graphite to build electric vehicles, to build wind turbines,
and to support nuclear power, but we are going to have to work
and fast for some of these minerals we currently don't have
close to enough for what we anticipate will need. For others,
our processing options are too long.
Our supply chains are too concentrated, really. We need to
strike the right balance to procure these important resources
responsibly and protect both our communities and our workers.
That means ensuring health and safety standards and supporting
new mining safety technologies.
We need to build trust and strengthen workforce pipelines
for the mining industry all together. Now, we can do this by
taking steps to proactively protect our miners and making sure
that the mines that we create are safer, safer than they have
ever been. And these actions should look like mitigating
exposure to the irritants that cause preventable mining
illnesses like black lung and silicosis.
What start out as irritants, over a period of year, lead to
these insidious diseases. We need to make sure that Federal
benefits, like those available under the Black Lung Benefits
Program and the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, are
available to the workers who need them.
We should be exploring how we can make sure that workplace
safety resources, like real time dust sampling technologies,
are accessible to workers and employers around the country. I
appreciate Ranking Member Braun for working with us to host
this hearing.
I also want to thank Senators Kaine and Casey for their
collaboration on this issue that they both have worked on so
hard, and both know so well. In many cases, their constituents
have been side by side with them.
With that, I will recognize Ranking Member Braun for his
opening statement and to introduce our first witness.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR BRAUN
Senator Braun. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and the witnesses
here today. With today's hearing, we are looking at a
profession that is tremendously beneficial to our society, but
one that is not without risks and hazards for those who work in
and around it.
My home State of Indiana is one of the top coal producing
states in the country. I understand the importance of ensuring
working conditions for American miners that are safe and as
healthy as they can be.
In the past, I have been proud to champion mining
legislation that became law with Senator Casey, the Stream Act,
which addressed the safety and environmental hazards of
abandoned mine lands.
This bill made it easier for states to maintain treatment
systems for the release of highly acidic water from abandoned
mines, which pose a threat to those that work and live around
those areas.
Black lung disease also poses a significant threat to those
in the mining industry. In 1969, Congress passed legislation to
provide compensation for miners suffering from black lung
disease and later established the Black Lung Disability Trust
Fund.
This fund pays out benefits to coal workers and their
families in the unfortunate cases when they become afflicted
with the disease. In Indiana, there were nearly 19,000 black
lung compensation claims filed in Fiscal Year 2023, and that
number is significantly higher in places like Kentucky and West
Virginia.
It is important that this fund remain financially stable to
provide for affected miners and their families. In the past,
this fund has been grossly mismanaged where its total
liabilities exceeded its assets by billions of dollars. It is
no good. It is not going to be there for the people that need
it.
Following recommendations from the GAO, past
administrations have taken concrete steps to enhance oversight
and improve the trust fund's financial position. Unfortunately,
those efforts have run into hurdles in recent years.
This is simply unacceptable, and vigorous oversight from
Congress is needed to ensure that this fund is properly
administered and remains solvent in the long run. I look
forward to hearing the perspective of our witnesses and giving
these issues that are critically important for miners in the
coal industry the attention they deserve with this hearing.
Move to witness introduction. I will start or you----
Senator Hickenlooper. Please begin.
Senator Braun. I would like to introduce Mrs. Cindy Brown
Barnes, who serves as Director of the Government Accountability
Office's Education, Workforce, and Income Security team.
Mrs. Brown Barnes has over 30 years of service performing
financial, forensic, and performance audits of Federal agencies
and programs. We welcome her expertise to this panel. Thank you
for being here. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Hickenlooper. Now I have great pleasure in turning
it over to Senator Kaine to introduce our next witness, Dr.
Drew Harris.
Senator Kaine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member
Braun. And it is great to welcome all the witnesses.
Even though I am not charged with introducing Cecil
Roberts, I just have to say that there is not a better labor
leader in this country not only today but during the history of
the labor movement than my friend Cecil Roberts, and I am so
glad you are here with us.
Now, my job is to introduce a great Virginian, Drew Harris.
Dr. Drew Harris is the Medical Director of the Black Lung
Program at Stone Mountain Health Services, which is a federally
qualified health center in Southwest Virginia.
It is the only FQHC that has a black lung clinic in the
Commonwealth of Virginia, and it is the largest in the country
with about 2,000 coal miners seen there annually. As Medical
Director, Dr. Harris provides medical and--medical legal
consultations and oversees the Pulmonary Function Lab and the
Pulmonary Rehabilitation Program.
Dr. Harris also serves as the Associate Program Director in
the University of Virginia's Internal Medicine Residency
Program. He founded and directs the Health Equity, Advocacy,
and Leadership Track Program and coordinates community partner
medicine programs in collaboration with community partners
including the Charlottesville Free Clinic and The Haven, which
is a homeless shelter and resource center.
He teaches UVA residents seminars on physician advocacy,
black lung disease, rural health, and a practical approach to
the social drivers of health. He is also the co-principal
investigator on a research study that brings seven black lung
clinics around the country together to better understand the
mental health of coal miners.
He is the first editor in chief of a publication called
Chest Advocates, focusing on practical approach to physician
advocacy in the pulmonary space. I am so grateful for the work
that he does, and I am so grateful, Dr. Harris, that you are
joining us today.
Senator Hickenlooper. Thank you. And now I will have the
responsibility and the opportunity to introduce I would say not
just one of the great leaders in organized labor, but
certainly--perhaps the greatest leader, how is that? Yes, I
can't let him outdo me.
[Laughter.]
Senator Hickenlooper. Mr. Cecil Roberts is the President of
the United Mine Workers of America. And having been a coal
miner himself, President Roberts has an extensive background
with the mining industry.
He helps the union's more than 50,000 members navigate
Federal and statewide mining benefits programs while advocating
for health and safety reforms. He is also on top of a level of
detail that most leaders don't. He has chastised me at one
point when we first met about not having gotten a tour of the
Ludlow site.
Luckily I was back on my toes and could quote back to him
Ron Chernow's book, Titan, how the Ludlow massacre in Colorado
actually transformed the Rockefeller family from being titans
and magnets, worried about their business, into focusing
completely on creating a foundation that could make the world a
better place.
It is unfortunate it takes sometimes a tragedy to create
that--act as that kind of a catalyst. Then I also have a
great--I can't--I won't be able to put on quite the
superlatives just because I haven't been challenged by another
Senator, but we are very grateful to have Doctor Steve Schafrik
here.
He is the Associate Professor and Director of Graduate
Studies in the Mining Engineering Department at the University
of Kentucky, one of the great schools around mining technology
and mining education in the country.
There, he leads research about mining technologies,
including mine automation, ventilation, and mine dust
filtering, obviously which all have an efficiency aspect, but a
real bearing on the health of the miners.
Anyway, why don't we go down and start with Ms. Barnes, and
you can give your opening testimony, and we will go down in
order.
STATEMENT OF CINDY BROWN BARNES, MANAGING DIRECTOR, EDUCATION,
WORKFORCE, AND INCOME SECURITY, GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY
OFFICE, WASHINGTON, DC
Ms. Barnes. Chairman Hickenlooper, Ranking Member Braun,
and Members of the Subcommittee, I am pleased to be here today
to discuss, one, the serious financial challenges facing the
Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.
Two, GAO's prior recommendations concerning the Department
of Labor's limited oversight of coal mine operators' self-
insurance. And three, updated actions that the Department has
taken to improve oversight of self-insurance and implement our
recommendations.
My testimony is based primarily on GAO reports from 2018
through 2021. The Black Lung Benefits Program provides cash and
medical assistance to coal miners who are disabled due to black
lung disease.
Over 23,000 beneficiaries received benefits during Fiscal
Year 2023. Black lung benefits are generally paid by liable
coal mine operators. Operators may purchase commercial
insurance or self-insure to cover the benefits.
The Federal Government's Black Lung Disability Trust Fund
pays benefits when no responsible mine operator can be
identified, or the liable mine operator doesn't pay, such as in
the case of a bankruptcy.
Our domestic coal tax is a primary source of revenue. This
brings me to my three discussion points. First, the trust fund
has serious financial challenges, with expenditures
consistently exceeding revenue, especially its debt and
interest repayments.
Consequently, the trust has borrowed from the Treasury
almost every year since 1979. In Fiscal Year 2023, the trust
fund had to borrow $2.7 billion to cover its expenses, and
based on Department of Labor's projection, the trust debt could
exceed $13 billion by 2050.
Compounding these challenges, coal operated bankruptcies
have further strained the trust fund. We previously reported
that bankruptcies between 2014 and 2016 of self-insured
operators led to the transfer of $865 million and benefit
responsibility to the trust.
Since then, at least five more self-insured operators have
filed for bankruptcy. Making things worse, there has been an
increased occurrence in the number of miners contracting the
most severe form of black lung, likely leading to increased
future liabilities.
Now, on to my second point. In response to the department's
limited oversight of coal mine operator insurance, we made two
priority recommendations for Labor to, one, develop procedures
for self-insurance renewal that clarify how long an operator is
authorized to self-insure, as well as when the self-insurance
authority would not be renewed.
Two, that they developed procedures for self-insured
operator appeals. Both of these recommendations remain open.
Now for my third point, when we testified in February 2020, we
noted that the Department of Labor had begun implementing a new
process for self-insurance that, if implemented effectively,
might have helped address past deficiencies and our
recommendations.
That didn't happen. DOL said their ability to resolve
appeals was hindered by the COVID-19 pandemic, as they and coal
operators adjusted to different working conditions and also
experienced challenges in processing documentation.
As a result, the department suspended its reviews of
operator appeals. However, in January 2023, the department
issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that would, among other
things, require all self-insured coal mine operators to post
security to cover at least a 120 percent of their total
estimated current and future liabilities.
The Department of Labor is also proposing changes to the
self-insurance application, the renewal, and the appeals
processes. Labor submitted its final draft rule to OMB for
review earlier this month.
The department's rulemaking effort, once completed, and if
implemented effectively, may address our open recommendations.
Given the dire situation facing the trust fund, we reiterate
the need for the Department of Labor to complete action on its
proposed rule, address our priority recommendations, and
effectively oversee the program.
This completes my prepared statement. I will be happy to
entertain and look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Barnes follows.]
prepared statement of cindy brown barnes
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Senator Hickenlooper. Thank you.
Dr. Harris.
STATEMENT OF DREW HARRIS, M.D., ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF
MEDICINE, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA AND MEDICAL DIRECTOR, STONE
MOUNTAIN BLACK LUNG PROGRAM, ST. CHARLES AND VANSANT, VA
Dr. Harris. Chairman Hickenlooper, Ranking Member Braun,
Senator Casey, and Senator Kaine, I appreciate the opportunity
to talk today, and I am going to start off by sharing the story
of one of my patients. And Paul is 62. He is a father and a
grandfather, and in his 20's, he worked for 8 years underground
in a coal mine in Eastern Kentucky.
He worked until a roof collapsed and crushed him, and he
was no longer able to work, and he became a church pastor. And
about 10 years ago, he started to develop shortness of breath.
And he was evaluated, diagnosed with black lung with an X-ray
and pulmonary function tests at my clinic.
About 5 years ago, the symptoms progressed, and he felt
difficulty occasionally even finishing his church sermons. And
he applied three times for black lung benefits, but was denied
benefits each time, despite imaging and a lung biopsy showing
that his lungs were full of coal and rock dust.
Paul's story is similar to countless other miners that I
care for and illustrate three main points that I want to
illustrate today. The first is that rates of severe black lung
are at near historical highs in central Appalachia. The second
point is that we should be using additional existing tools to
improve the early detection and diagnosis of black lung.
The third is that the black lung benefits process is
frustrating for nearly all coal miners, and the Black Lung
Benefits Improvement Act would be a big step in the right
direction. So first, Paul is not alone and is in fact part of a
much larger problem.
Earlier this year, my colleagues and I published in JAMA,
the Journal of the American Medical Association, a publication
describing over a thousand coal miners who in the last 5 years
were diagnosed with progressive massive fibrosis, which is the
most severe form of black lung.
We are seeing a huge resurgence of severe black lung, which
is an entirely preventable disease. And like Paul, many of
these miners were young when they got diagnosed and they only
worked a short tenure in the mines.
My second point is that better early detection of black
lung is possible and key to preventing severe disease, and I
have two suggestions for improving black lung diagnosis and
detection. The first is we should be screening all miners with
a special breathing test called diffusing capacity.
This is cheap, widely available, and measures how well the
lungs perform, and an impaired diffusing capacity can be an
early warning signal for black lung. The second is that we
should be utilizing CT scans for especially high risk miners to
diagnose disease. We know that CT scans are more sensitive than
X-rays for early detection.
Perhaps Paul's disease would have been diagnosed earlier if
he were offered a CT scan or a diffusion test during his coal
mining career. And if so, perhaps he could have requested a
transfer to a less dusty position and may not be struggling to
breathe today.
My last point is that the black lung benefits system, as
currently designed, now does not work for miners like Paul and
a fix is needed now. Coal miners with severe black lung fight
for more than their breath, they fight for their livelihood.
The Federal Black Lung Benefits Program provides health
insurance and a small monthly stipend to the minority of miners
that prove they are sick enough to meet a disability standard,
and this is almost always a long and difficult process. Paul
didn't qualify for benefits until I published his story in a
medical journal, which was submitted along with this fourth
application.
It shouldn't have taken Paul 6 years, three rejected
claims, a lung biopsy, and a publication in the Lancet to get
Paul qualified, or many other miners like Paul that should be
qualified. And my patients who eventually do receive benefits
are receiving a small stipend that is not even indexed to
inflation.
The Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act would improve this
process in several ways. Importantly, it would improve accuracy
in diagnosis of progressive massive fibrosis by incorporating
the better imaging that we get from a CT scan in miners that
have abnormal X-rays.
This Act would also increase benefits by indexing the
benefits to inflation. But as you all know, a version of this
Act has been proposed for nearly a decade and has not yet
passed. And while it is too late for Paul to benefit from these
proposed changes, many in his church congregation and his
community could still be helped by these changes.
Nationally, there are many thousands of miners with
devastating black lung that desperately need this help. Thank
you for taking this black lung crisis seriously by having me
here to speak with you today, and I hope that you will consider
the improved early detection of black lung methods that we
talked about, and not delay the passage of the Black Lung
Benefits Improvement Act.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Harris follows.]
prepared statement of drew harris
Chairman Hickenlooper, Ranking Member Braun, and Members of the
Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. The
opinions expressed in this testimony are solely my own and do not
necessarily reflect those of the University of Virginia or Stone
Mountain Health Services.
I am a pulmonologist and the medical director of the Black Lung
Program at Stone Mountain, a federally Qualified Health Center in
Southwest Virginia. Stone Mountain is the largest black lung clinic in
the Nation--we see about 2,000 coal miners each year. Most of these
miners are no longer working.
I'd like to start off by sharing the story of one of my patients.
Paul is a charming 62-year-old family man who just this week welcomed
to the world his 6th grandkid. Paul worked for 8 years underground as a
roof bolter in eastern Kentucky before a mine caved in and crushed him.
No longer able to work underground, Paul now pastors a church. For
years, he has struggled to keep up with his grandkids, and sometimes
has difficulty finishing his sermons due to his trouble breathing.
Despite his severe lung disease with lung biopsies indisputably showing
silica and coal dust, he was denied benefits 3 times before I met him.
Paul's story is similar to countless other miners and illustrates 3
main points I want to get across today:
(1) The rates of severe black lung are at near-historical highs
in Central Appalachia.
(2) We should start using additional, existing tools to improve
early detection of disease.
(3) The black lung benefits process is frustrating for nearly
all coal miners. The 2023 Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act
would be a big step in the right direction.
First: Paul is not alone, and is in fact part of a larger problem.
Earlier this year, my colleagues and I published a report in JAMA, the
Journal of the American Medical Association describing over 1,000
miners who, in the last 5 years, were newly diagnosed with the most
severe form of black lung: progressive massive fibrosis (PMF). Like
Paul, many of these miners are young and worked short tenures in
mining. \1\ A previous large study of former U.S. miners applying for
Federal Black Lung Program benefits shows that the proportion of miners
with PMF has significantly increased since the 1990's with the highest
rates of disease seen in Central Appalachia. \2\ The figure below from
this study (Almberg ET al.) shows the percentage of claimants with PMF
in Virginia has rapidly increased in the last 2 decades to a rate
greater than 10 percent. This bears repeating: in Virginia more than 1
out of 10 miners applying for Federal black lung benefits have the most
advanced stage of black lung. Even in actively working miners, rates of
black lung including PMF are still unacceptably high. In a study of
miners participating in the Coal Worker's Health Surveillance Program
from 2014-2022, 331 (8.5 percent) of miners from Central Appalachia had
evidence of black lung--with 52 (1.3 percent) showing evidence of
progressive massive fibrosis. \3\
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\1\ Harris DA, Almberg KA, Blackley DJ ET al. JAMA 2024 331 (5).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38175652/.
\2\ Almberg KA, Halldin CN, Blackley DJ ET al. Ann ATS 2018
December; 15 (12). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30114941/.
\3\ Hall NB, Reynolds L, Blackley ET al. JOEM 2024 66 (2). https:/
/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37907411/.
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.epsMy second point: Better early detection of black lung is
possible and is key to preventing severe disease. Voluntary
participation in respiratory health screening for coal miners, as part
of the NIOSH Coal Worker's Health Surveillance Program (CWHSP), is not
working as it is intended. Only about 1 in 3 working miners participate
in this voluntary program. But even more concerning, the participation
rates are lowest in Central Appalachia--where the black lung disease
rates and severity are the highest. Hall ET al. noted that while
Central Appalachia accounted for 40 percent-45 percent of U.S. coal
mining employment annually from 2014 to 2021, only 21.9 percent of
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CWHSP participants worked in Central Appalachia.
This lack of participation in the CWHSP has significant health
consequences. 39 percent of miners with disabling pneumoconiosis did
not participate in the CWHSP during their working careers. \4\ Earlier
disease detection might have allowed many of these miners to reduce
their subsequent dust exposures and prevent the development of severe
disease.
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\4\ Almberg KS, Cohen RA, Blackley DJ, ET al. Linking compensation
and health surveillance data sets to improve knowledge of U.S. coal
miners' health. J Occup Environ Med 2017;59:930-934. https://
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5710793/.
There are many barriers to participation in the CWHSP including
stigma, fear and financial disincentives (such job loss and inability
to find additional employment). These barriers are challenging to
address, especially as studies of miners have highlighted that for many
miners, providing for their family is paramount, even at the cost of
their own health. \5\
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\5\ Reynolds LE, Blackley DJ, Colinet JF, ET al. Work practices
and respiratory health status of Appalachian coal miners with
progressive massive fibrosis. J Occup Environ Med 2018;60:e575-e581.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6607434/.
To stop this crisis of black lung that is ongoing in the U.S., we
need to work to both improve participation in the CWHSP and to improve
screening tools used in the CWHSP to better identify early disease in
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working miners. I have three suggestions in this regard:
(1) Reduce the financial disincentive to participate in the
CHWSP. Working miners can apply for Federal black lung benefits
even while they are working. If they are found to have severe
enough disease to meet the disability criteria and are awarded
benefits, they can immediately start receiving part of their
benefit, even while continuing to work in the mines: a health
insurance benefit. However, working miners cannot receive
another critical component of this benefit: a monthly stipend
associated with the black lung benefits program until after
they stop working. This represents a departure from the
original congressional intent under the Black Lung Benefits
Act, which long allowed miners with PMF to draw full medical
and monetary benefits. If the Department of Labor would once
again allow miners to draw the monetary benefit during their
working years, it is likely that many miners would seek earlier
health screening.
(2) We should be screening all miners with a breathing test
called ``diffusion capacity.'' Diffusion capacity is cheap,
widely available and measures how well the lungs perform. An
impaired diffusing capacity can be an early warning signal for
black lung. \6\, \7\
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\6\ Carta P, Aru G, Barbieri MT, ET al. Occupational and
environmental medicine. 1996;53(5):312- 319. https://
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8673178/.
\7\ Wang X, Yu IT, Wong TW, ET al. Am J Ind Med. 1999;35(2):124-
131. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9894535/.
(3) We should utilize CT scans for screening especially high-
risk miners, like Paul. We know that the rates of rapidly
progressive and severe disease are highest in certain
geographic regions. One study of CWHSP-participating miners, in
which 84 percent worked in Central Appalachia, highlights how
rapidly severe black lung can develop in high-risk miners: 17
percent of miners progressed from a normal chest X-ray to PMF
(the most severe type of black lung) in less than 10 years. \8\
These miners are at increased risk for rapidly progressive
disease largely because of where they work--central Appalachia,
where exposure to toxic silica dust in thin seam mines is known
to be the highest.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ Laney AS, Blackley DJ, Halldin C. OEM 2017 Jul 74 (7). https:/
/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28408654/.
We also know that specific job types in coal mines also leads
to increased risk of PMF due to increased silica dust
exposures. Miners working at the mine face, in jobs like roof
bolting or operating a continuous miner, face an increased risk
of severe disease. \9\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\9\ Zell-Baran L, Go LHT, Sarver E ET al. J OEM 2023 65 (4).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36730599/.
We know who is at the highest risk for rapidly progressive and
severe black lung disease. If we are truly committed to ending
the countless preventable deaths that are devastating the
coalfield communities in America, then we need to utilize the
most sensitive tools to identify early disease in the highest
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
risk miners.
CT scans are more sensitive test than X-rays for early
detection of disease in both silica \10\ and coal mine dust
\11\ exposed workers. When coal miners are screened by X-rays,
early diagnoses of occupational lung disease will be missed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ Hoy RF, Dimitriadis C, Abramson M ET al. OEM. 2023 80 (8).
https://oem.bmj.com/content/80/8/439.
\11\ Savranlar A, Altin R, Mahmutyazicioglu ET al. Eur J Radiology
2004 51 (2). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15246524/.
There are challenges in utilizing CT scans at a population
level for surveillance in occupational lung disease. In the
U.S., there is a formal certification program (e.g. NIOSH B-
reader) \12\ and classification system (e.g. The International
Labor Organization ILO classification of radiographs) \13\ to
categorize abnormalities on chest X-rays. Similar programs do
not yet exist in the U.S. for CT scans. But the key word here
is: yet. Outside of the U.S., surveillance and screening
programs in other countries are beginning to pivot toward
utilizing CT scans in this context. \14\ We should be leading
the world in innovative solutions in occupational health
disease prevention and early detection, not following in the
footsteps of other countries while American coal miners are
suffering.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\12\ The ILO Classification System: https://www.ilo.org/resource/
ilo-international-classification-radiographs-pneumoconioses-1.
\13\ CDC/NIOSH's B-reader Program: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/
2019-111/default.html.
\14\ Tamura T, Suganuma N, Hering KG ET al. Ind Health 2015 53
(3). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4463184/.
Perhaps Paul's disease would have been recognized earlier if he
had been offered a CT scan or a diffusion test during his coal
mining career. If so, he could have requested a job transfer to
a less dusty position and may not be struggling to breathe
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
today.
My last point: The black lung benefit system, as currently designed
does not work for miners like Paul and a fix is needed now. Coal miners
with severe black lung fight for more than their breath. They fight for
their livelihood. The Federal black lung benefits program provides
health insurance and a small monthly stipend to the minority of miners
who can prove they are sick enough to meet a disability standard. This
is almost always a long and difficult process.
Paul didn't qualify for benefits until a he had a CT scan, a lung
biopsy and his story published in a medical journal. \15\ His published
story, including images of his lung masses and lung biopsy (image
below) showing lungs full of coal and rock dust, was submitted along
with his 4th, finally successful application. It shouldn't take 6 years
and a publication in the Lancet to get Paul, or many other miners like
Paul, awarded benefits.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\15\ Harris DA, Willis JA, Tomann. The Lancet 2020, 395(10234).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32359461/.
The 2023 Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act would improve this
process in several ways. One key mechanism is by improved accuracy in
diagnosing progressive massive fibrosis by strategically incorporating
the better imaging obtained by CT scans in miners with specific
abnormalities seen on their X-rays. CT scans are more accurate at
identifying PMF than X-rays, and for miners with known black lung on X-
rays, we should be utilizing the better test (CT scans) to confirm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
whether or not PMF is present.
However, as you know, a version of Black Lung Benefits Improvement
Act has been proposed for nearly a decade. While we wait, my patients
who do receive benefits are receiving a small stipend that is not
indexed to inflation. And those who are sick-but-not-yet-qualified are
often frustrated by conflicting X-ray results that leads to years-long
disputes.
While it is too late for Paul to benefit from these proposed
changes, many in his church congregation and his community could still
be helped by these changes, and nationally there are thousands of
miners that desperately need this help. Thank you for taking this black
lung crisis seriously by having me here to speak with you today. I hope
that you will consider ways to improve early detection of black lung
and no longer delay the passing of the Black Lung Benefits Improvement
Act.
GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT
Senator Hickenlooper. Thank you, Dr. Harris.
Mr. Roberts.
STATEMENT OF CECIL E. ROBERTS, PRESIDENT, UNITED MINE WORKERS
OF AMERICA, TRIANGLE, VA
Mr. Roberts. Thank you very much. I hit talk--there it
goes. Thank you very much, Chairman Hickenlooper, and Ranking
Member Braun, and my friends, Senator Casey and Kaine. I have
worked for many years--with these two for many years to make
miners' live better, whether it is defending their pensions and
their health care, making the mines safer, and most recently,
this issue of black lung.
I am a coal miner. My father was a coal miner. My
grandfathers were coal miners. My great grandfathers were coal
miners. Unfortunately, I never met either one of my
grandfathers. Both of them were killed in the coal mines before
I was born, and I had to depend on stories about their lives to
get to know them and appreciate what they did when they were
alive. And they died very young in the coal mines.
But that is a story you can hear anywhere you want to hear
it in the coalfields of this country. I have testified over and
over and over again here, not in this room per se, but here in
Congress. Starting in 2003, and two other times, particularly
about the black lung problem and what it does to miners, and
what we need to do.
I want to follow-up on what the doctor said here, if he
doesn't mind. There are thousands of polls out there. And the
most sincere--excuse me, the most dangerous type of black lung
is progressive massive fibrosis that the doctor alluded to.
We all understand something, if you contract this, you are
going to die. And the average lifespan once you contract this
form of black lung is 3 years. That is the average lifespan of
somebody who contracts this. And this is happening in too large
of numbers. And we know where it is.
We know, everybody in here knows where it is. It is in
Eastern Kentucky, Southern West Virginia, and Southwestern
Virginia. And we testified to this in 2019, and we pleaded with
the Congress of the United states to do something about this.
And recently, we did have a victory. And that was for the first
time we promulgated a rule dealing with silica.
This form of black lung is caused by silica. So how in the
world did we get an area of the country where all these cases
are originating in young miners? We are not talking about
people who have spent 20 years in coal mines. We are talking
about miners who spent 3 years in the coal mines.
We are talking about people in their 30's. And the news
media is starting to pick up. And there has been a series--that
voted to this problem of young people choking to death and
dying because they went to work. So, my position has been, and
our union's position is, if we know what is causing this and we
know where it is, why do we continue on? But I want to point
something out, if I might.
I don't mean to be too aggressive about this, but somebody
has got to be. This is the story of this industry. And I have
said repeatedly that most coal companies try to do the right
thing, but we have to come to grips with some reality here.
Some do not. It is like saying, everybody who drives on the
road, drives safely, and we know that is not true.
We also know that people commit crimes. It would be like
saying we don't need to police anymore because everything is
resolved. But it took a 100 years, a 100 years before the first
law was ever passed by the U.S. Government that protected the
working coal miner--100 years.
It was in 1969, and that wouldn't have happened had not we
had an explosion in Northern West Virginia that the entire
nation watched on television. And then we created the Black
Lung Program with that law, and we said for the first time, for
the first time ever, we recognized black lung as an
occupational illness.
We never did that before. And the truth of the matter is,
this industry claimed that there is no such thing as black lung
or pneumoconiosis until 1969. That is a fact. And they also
said, if you make us abide by these laws you are passing, we
are going to go out of business and go bankrupt.
That wasn't true. And we have lived with these laws for a
long time now. But now we have this. If you think it is bad,
tough to work in a coal mine, get sick. Get pneumoconiosis and
try to get benefits. And here is the problem, we have rich
people, we have lawyers saying that I am not sick, and we have
me or another coal miner trying to hire a local guy to
represent me.
That is not fair. It is not balanced. People are sick. They
are out working, and they should be recognized for that. And
they should not have to live on $700 something dollar or die.
And that is the way the program works.
It is unfair. It needs to be made more fair. And that is
coming from the heart of a coal miner who has seen too many
people die from this.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Roberts follows.]
prepared statement of cecil roberts
Good morning, Chairman Hickenlooper; Ranking Member Braun and the
Members of the Committee on Education, and Labor in attendance today.
My name is Cecil E. Roberts, International President of the United Mine
Workers of America (``UMWA''). In that capacity, I represent the
largest unionized group of active and retired coal miners in North
America. However, today, Mr. Chairman, I come before the Members of
this distinguished Committee as the representative of every coal miner
in this Nation, whether an active dues-paying member, a retiree of the
UMWA, or a coal miner who is working in the industry and has not yet
joined the ranks of the Union. In short, I am here to be the voice of
the miners who have risked their lives and health to energize and build
this Nation, no matter where they live and no matter their affiliation
with organized labor.
This Committee plays an important role in addressing employees'
health and safety. I would like to express my particular appreciation
to the leadership of this Committee for your efforts directed at
protecting and enhancing the health and safety of coal miners
throughout the Nation. Your continued attention is critical to dealing
with the challenges that all too often prevent some miners from being
able to go home safely at the end of their shift. After all, going to
work, whether as a coal miner or other worker, should be a means for
earning a paycheck and providing for your family, not a roll of the
dice about whether you will live to see another day.
The testimony I will present to this Committee today will outline
the struggles coal miners face every day in this country. These
struggles exist not just for miners who are actively employed in the
industry but also for those who have left the mines, whether they
retire after years of hard work in dusty and dangerous conditions or
are forced from their jobs by occupational injury or illness. I will
focus my testimony on the specific topic of this very important
hearing: the effects of Coal Workers' Pneumoconiosis (``CWP'' or
``Black Lung disease'') on the lives of America's coal miners.
According to data from the Center for Disease Control (``CDC''),
the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (``NIOSH''),
the Mine Safety and Health Administration (``MSHA'' or ``Agency''), and
a host of independent studies, the highest concentration of these
historic increases in the disease are occurring in the central
Appalachian Region of the United States. This area includes all or
parts of Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.
As you may know, this is not the first time I have come to Capitol
Hill to speak on behalf of coal miners regarding the dangers of Black
Lung disease. Studies have consistently shown there has been an
alarming resurgence in the number of Black Lung cases, including the
most severe form of the disease known as Progressive Massive Fibrosis
(``PMF''). I have been here before to discuss that risk.
This is not a new or unprecedented danger in the Nation's
coalfields. We know this disease, we know what causes it, and we know
how to prevent it. The industry and the Federal Government have known
for years of this resurgence. I have testified in the past about the
failures of MSHA's dust control rules and policies. I have testified
before about the nefarious methods that operators have used to
circumvent mandatory dust monitoring. The UMWA has recommended methods
and ways of improving the sampling system and that might have helped
head off this resurgence.
However, it was not until recently that the Mine Safety and Health
Administration (MSHA), under its current leadership, took meaningful
steps to protect miners from silica dust and Black Lung disease. First,
in June 2022, the Agency launched its Silica Enforcement Initiative
(SEI). The SEI increased silica sampling and fast-tracked the
deployment of significant measures to slow, stop, and reverse the
escalating rates of extreme overexposure to silica dust, especially at
thin-seam coal mines where sandstone exposure is most pronounced. Then,
in April 2024, building on that record of innovation and success, MSHA
published a historic final rule placing an enforceable limit on
respirable silica dust in America's mines. While we believe it could be
further improved to better protect miners, we believe that rule will
set us on the path to achieving our goal of ending this debilitating
lung disease among mine workers.
If you hear me say something that I have already raised in May,
2003 (the first time I testified before a congressional Committee on
this issue), July, 2010, March, 2012, or then again in June 2019,
consider it an indictment of the government's failure to take seriously
the known threat of Black Lung disease. Know that I repeat myself today
because, since May 2003, over 20,000 miners have died in this country
from Black Lung. And if Congress again fails to act, that number is
expected to skyrocket in the coming decades. Those are deaths we know
how to prevent, but this body has not taken the action needed to do so.
I will not stop repeating these truths until Congress listens.
The Union would argue that the seeds of the recent wave of Black
Lung were sown by the actions of Federal agencies and coal operators
whose primary job is to protect the health and safety of the Nation's
miners. This epidemic was further propagated by medical and legal
professionals who profited from the misery of those miners unfortunate
enough to contract this horrible disease. The fact is, Mr. Chairman,
Black Lung is a preventable occupational disease that would have been
eradicated from the industry years ago, but for the greed of the
industry and the failings of those who are charged to protect the
Nation's miners.
Previous Congressional Hearings
On July 13, 2010, and again on March 27, 2012, I came before the
House Committee on Education and Labor and the House Committee on
Education and the Workforce, respectively, to discuss the disaster at
Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine South (``Upper Big Branch'' or
``UBB'') in Montcoal, Raleigh County, West Virginia (attachments 1-2).
While the overriding context of that testimony dealt with the events
leading up to the mine explosion and its aftermath, the information I
submitted and the testimony I gave predicted that if action was not
taken by Congress and MSHA, we would witness the Black Lung crisis we
are discussing today.
The Union has been raising the concerns routinely for years. I have
enclosed the past several years of the UMW Journal (attachments 3-12),
the official publication of the Union, that chronicles the Union's
continual attempts to bring these problems to the forefront of public
debate. However, like so many other efforts to protect workers, the
legitimate warnings about Black Lung the Union has raised have not been
heeded.
The conditions in the Upper Big Branch mine, specifically the
amount of coal dust that exploded and killed 29 miners, present a
microcosm of the dust problem that has haunted the industry for almost
two centuries. While the UBB disaster could still provide fodder for
hundreds of congressional hearings, what is important to the topic we
are here to discuss today is that the thick layers of coal dust that
filled the entries of the UBB were not restricted only to the mine
surfaces. This respirable and deadly dust also lined the lungs of the
workers at that operation, slowly but surely killing the miners. In my
2012 testimony, I specifically referred to the fact that autopsies
performed on the miners killed at UBB showed the majority of them had
some level of Black Lung Disease. This is true of some of the youngest
miners who lost their lives in the disaster.
Further, the report issued by the Union after the disaster,
``Industrial Homicide,'' (attachment 13) stated, ``The fact that miners
worked in such a dusty atmosphere offers great insight into the
prevalence of Black Lung disease in many of the miners killed in the
disaster. Of the 24 miners, between the ages of 24 and 61 whose lungs
could be examined during autopsy, 17 miners or 71 percent, showed some
stage of Black Lung.'' With respect to the mining practices at UBB, the
report noted that the practice of running the long-wall shearer without
the required water sprays amounted to, `` . . . reckless disregard for
the law . . . And over the long term, exposure to uncontrolled coal
mine dust greatly increases miners' chances of contracting Black Lung
disease.''
Mr. Chairman, the UBB disaster occurred on April 5, 2010. It is not
ancient history. More importantly, based on the information that is
available, it is clear that this type of illegal activity on the part
of many coal operators were and still are accepted practices in the
industry. There is a clear and uninterrupted pattern of behavior on the
part of the coal industry that runs back to the earliest days of the
Respirable Dust Sampling Program. Tragically, even the spotlight shone
on the issue by martyrs of UBB could not put an end to the industry's
reckless behavior.
After the Diagnosis
For most miners who have contracted Black Lung, the difficult and
deadly process is only just beginning. The reality is that rather than
accept the responsibility for their actions and seek to compensate
disabled miners and mitigate the effect of the disease, coal operators
and others do everything in their power to shirk that responsibility.
It is not confined to dust sampling and Black Lung. I could fill the
congressional record with stories of operators disclaiming
responsibility for anything and everything that happens to miners they
are charged to protect. But when it comes to Black Lung, it seems that
the excuses and evasions never end. Too many operators will stop at
nothing to avoid paying for Black Lung benefits. It's a sad situation
that just keeps playing out over and over again.
There are countless stories of miners who have contracted the most
severe form of Black Lung disease, PMF, but were unable to receive the
benefits they were owed. These miners are examined by medical experts
from the U.S. Department of Labor and their own doctor to confirm their
worst fears only to see their employer contest their eligibility in
administrative proceedings, sometimes for decades. The truth is that,
almost without exception and despite overwhelming evidence supporting
the miner, coal operators still refuse to recognize the miners'
disability. The premise behind the operator's decision to deny benefits
is simple: The delaying effort allows them to rely on time and money,
two things most miners with the disease don't have. The immorality of
their actions is also simple: it is reprehensible.
The expense of pursuing the claim can cost the miner tens of
thousands of dollars they do not have and most lawyers familiar with
the Black Lung legal system know the return on their investment in time
and research is meager at best. So, after an initial filing and a
series of hearings before an administrative law judge, most miners
cannot afford to continue the fight. The case is dropped, the company
wins and the miner suffers in obscurity until the disease causes their
lungs to fill with liquid and they drown.
Perhaps one reason the company wins so many Black Lung claims is a
rule employed by the Department of Labor's Administrative Law Judges
(``ALJs''), and the Benefits Review Board that oversees those ALJs,
that denies benefits when the evidence supporting and the evidence
refuting a claimant's Black Lung diagnosis is equal. Under the
adversarial system created to administer the Black Lung Benefits Act,
claimants and their former employers will each submit a certain number
of X-ray readings, a certain number of spirometry and blood gas
results, and a certain number of medical reports to prove their case.
The miners will present evidence showing they have Black Lung and
are disabled. Operators will present evidence showing they are not sick
or are not disabled. As I will discuss later, the evidence presented by
operators is sometimes inaccurate or downright fraudulent. Nonetheless,
it is easy for an ALJ to look at the submitted evidence, determine that
all the doctors involved have equally impressive credentials, and
decide the evidence is equal. And, finding the evidence is ``in
equipoise'' those ALJs then deny the claim. In short, if an ALJ cannot
or will not make up his or her mind about the existence of disabling
Black Lung, the miner pays the price.
Under the current circumstances, should a miner have enough
resources and find an attorney willing to accept and stick with their
case to continue the fight for benefits, the employer's legal team
relies on the passage of time to settle the case. Miners with PMF have
a limited time left on this earth. Through court hearings, delays,
appeals, and any number of stalling tactics, the miners' time is slowly
drained away as the case languishes in the system. Ultimately, the
miner will suffocate and die. But, for the mine operator and his legal
team, the case is over and no benefits are paid. It's a win for them no
matter what the cost in human tragedy!
Unfortunately, the truth about these despicable tactics by mine
operators and the law firms they hire with the profits from the miners'
labor is that they work.
Legislative Reforms to the Black Lung Benefits Program are Needed
The UMWA is grateful to Senators Casey, Kaine, Brown, Manchin,
Fetterman, Warner, and Warren for reintroducing the Black Lung Benefits
Improvement Act (S. 3304). Although the last formal Senate hearing on
Black Lung was held in July 2014, I would be remiss if I did not note
that there has been important legislative action over the past 10
years, especially with regard to permanently restoring the Black Lung
excise tax to fund the Trust Fund, increased appropriations for Black
Lung clinics, and a boost in funding to cut the backlog on claims
before Administrative Law Judges.
The Black Lung Benefits Act Claims Process is Both Adversarial and
Daunting
The Black Lung benefits adjudication process is an adversarial
system. An adversarial system only works to deliver justice, however,
when both parties to the dispute have an equal opportunity to
participate.
Coal operators have leveraged their formidable legal resources and
medical experts to frequently overwhelm the capacity of disabled miners
and their families to secure benefits to which they are otherwise
entitled.
Governmental and journalistic investigations have identified
numerous impediments to claimants' ability to obtain Black Lung
benefits, including:
Challenges in obtaining legal representation and
developing medical evidence to support a miner's claim;
Obstacles to fair adjudication of claims because of
dubious strategies employed by coal operators' lawyers and
experts; and
Bureaucratic delays in the processing of claims
applications.
Expanding Availability of Legal Representation for Miners in Claims
Process
A 2009 GAO report (Attachment 14) about the Black Lung program
found that securing representation is a significant challenge for many
Black Lung claimants and that ``claimants' lack of representation,
particularly in the early stages of a claim,'' is ``a significant
barrier to successful claims.'' DOL's Office of Administrative Law
Judges (OALJ) confirmed ``that few attorneys will represent Black Lung
claimants and that lack of legal representation limits OALJ's ability
to process cases quickly.''
DOL data continue to bear this out more than a decade later. In the
last 10 years, most claimants have lacked attorney representation at
the District Director level. The rate of attorney representation has
fluctuated from a low of 25 percent in 2013 to a high of 47 percent in
2019. Although lay representation has increased at the District
Director level in recent years following an increase in funding for
Black Lung clinics, fully 36 percent of claimants lacked attorney or
lay representation in 2023. There is a good reason there is such a
small pool of attorneys willing to take on these difficult cases.
The nub of the problem was explained in GAO's 2009 report:
``[A]ttorneys are not inclined to take claimants' cases due to
a low probability of success . . . and the process can be
lengthy and costly. For example, one attorney told us that it
has taken as long as 15 years from the start of a Black Lung
case to receive compensation for working on it. Because
claimants lack financial resources for evidence development and
DOL's payment of claimant attorneys' fees is contingent on the
success of cases, claimant attorneys bear much of the legal
costs during the litigation of claimants' cases.''
In BLBA cases, a claimant may not be charged a fee by an attorney,
and fees are not paid by the operator (or Trust Fund) unless Black Lung
benefits are awarded. Disputes over attorney fees usually require a
separate round of litigation. To incentivize more attorneys to take on
Black Lung cases, the Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act creates a
reimbursement mechanism where an attorney could be awarded a partial
fee through the Trust Fund if they are successful at various stages in
the claim proceedings (up to a maximum of $4,500), and then that
payment from the Trust Fund would eventually be paid back by the
operator if the award is upheld. Attorneys may also seek reimbursement
of up to $1,500 at each level for medical costs. This applies if the
claims take longer than 2 years to finalize.
Securing Sufficient Medical Evidence to Establish Entitlement to
Benefits
Miners' challenges in obtaining counsel are intertwined with their
difficulty in developing the medical evidence needed to support a
claim. This issue is particularly acute at the earliest stages of the
claims process. Both GAO and the DOL Inspector General (DOL-IG) have
urged DOL to assist claimants in securing better quality medical
evidence, because this speeds up cases, reduces appeals, and improves
fairness.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning series of investigative reports in 2013
(Attachment 15) by the Center for Public Integrity (the Center),
coupled with reporting by NPR, ABC News, the Charleston Gazette, and
others, uncovered patterns of deception, suppression of evidence, and
willful distortion of diagnostic tests by coal operators' counsel and
medical experts aimed at preventing miners and their survivors from
obtaining the benefits to which they were rightfully entitled.
Radiologists working at Johns Hopkins Medical produced reports
``almost unwaveringly negative for Black Lung,'' but one expert in
particular, Dr. Paul Wheeler, was ``the leader and most productive
reader for decades.'' The Center found that, in more than 3,400 X-ray
readings involving more than 1,500 cases, Dr. Wheeler had never once
interpreted an X-ray as positive for complicated pneumoconiosis,
preferring instead to apply his own idiosyncratic criteria which were
``at odds with positions taken by government research agencies,
textbooks, peer-reviewed scientific literature, and the opinions of
many doctors who specialize in detecting the disease, including the
Chair of the American College of Radiology's task force on Black Lung.
Following this report, Johns Hopkins Medical permanently shut down
the program. But Hopkins never released its internal review which led
to this closure.
In the span of 13 years alone, miners lost more than 800 cases in
which doctors found severe Black Lung while Dr. Wheeler offered a
contrary opinion. Ultimately, DOL notified approximately 1,100 miners
that their claims may have been wrongfully denied because of Dr.
Wheeler's involvement.
Unsurprisingly, the problem of dubious medical evidence polluting
the claims process was not remedied merely by closing the mill at Johns
Hopkins. Academic studies have found consistent bias in medical
opinions proffered by physicians hired by coal operators. The
researchers identified 55 operator-hired B-readers who provided
negative readings in more than 99 percent of their assignments.
``Although the radiograph data ended in 2013,'' the researchers point
out, ``nearly all the physicians are still classifying radiographs
today, and many of these cases are still pending.''
In 2014, DOL sought to address this imbalance by providing
additional assistance to miners who met the criteria for the 15-year
presumption under the law. In addition to the legally mandated DOL
medical examination, DOL also provided claimants with access to a
supplemental medical opinion from the DOL-approved medical examiner
after evidence contrary to a preliminary finding supporting benefits
entitlement was submitted for consideration by the responsible
operator. Prior to this, DOL only funded one medical opinion to miners.
This additional medical opinion involving evidence supplied by mine
operators not only assisted miners and improved the quality of
decisions, but even reduced the need for so many appeals.
However, this DOL initiative is too limited. It needs to be
expanded to cover claimants who do not meet the requirement of 15 years
of underground coal employment, as we know many miners are getting
Black Lung diseases at an earlier age and with shorter tenure due to,
in part, increased silica exposures. If necessary, Congress should
legislate this expanded medical review.
Increasing Benefit Levels and Adjustments for Inflation
Benefit levels under this law are woefully insufficient. The
monthly benefit, which is pegged to 37.5 percent of GS-2, Step 1 pay
schedule, is a meager $772.60 per month and is adjusted upwards with
dependents--plus medical benefits for the related medical condition.
This merits re-examination.
Further, because the monthly cash benefits are pegged to the
Federal employees' pay scale, any Federal employee pay freeze means
that miners and their surviving dependents do not receive a cost-of-
living adjustment. As you may recall, in response to the budget deficit
and political pressures, a Federal pay freeze was implemented for
fiscal years 2011 through 2013. And Federal pay increases fell short in
fiscal years 2014 and 2015. It was not until 2016 that the Federal
Government reinstated full cost of living increases. These political
choices have permanently sliced benefits for disabled coal miners.
Congress needs to legislate a catchup adjustment and establish reforms
to peg the annual cost of living adjustments to the consumer price
index--not Federal employee pay adjustments.
Finally, preventable delays in claims processing need to be
addressed. One of these is the process for verification of employment.
According to the DOL-IG, DOL still uses a manual, paper-based system to
request employment records from the Social Security Administration
(SSA) ``because it does not have the statutory authority to directly
access SSA's data base.'' That outdated mode of communication adds time
to the Black Lung claims process.
Summary of Key Reforms
We are pleased the Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act contains a
number of these reforms and note that the House Committee on Education
and Labor marked up similar legislation in the last Congress. The UMWA
urges the Senate to prioritize legislation that:
Increases miners' benefits and ensures benefits are
adjusted for inflation to benefits from losing value during any
future government employee pay freeze.
Speeds benefits by authorizing DOL to get employment
and earnings verification for miners from the IRS. Enables more
miners to get legal representation and assistance in securing
medical evidence.
Expands DOL's program to provide supplemental medical
opinions by DOL medical examiners.
Expands access to CT scans to assist in the diagnosis
of Black Lung disease when a conventional lung X-ray fails to
provide a definitive image for diagnosing complicated
pneumoconiosis.
Increases the authorization of funding levels for
Black Lung Clinics.
Ensures accountability for operator misconduct in the
claims process.
Trust Fund Solvency and Self Insurance
The purpose of the Trust Fund and the Black Lung Benefits Revenue
Act of 1977 was to ensure that coal mine operators, or the coal
industry, will fully bear the cost of Black Lung disease for the
present time and in the future.
As such, benefits are to be paid by ``Responsible Operators'' or
their commercial insurers. If a mine operator is self-insured and
declares bankruptcy or ceases business operations, the Black Lung
Disability Trust Fund (Trust Fund) assumes responsibility for paying
benefits to these miners. The Trust Fund, which currently pays benefits
to 52 percent of all finalized claims, is financed through an excise
tax on coal that is mined and sold domestically. Exported coal is
excluded from the excise tax. Today, the Trust Fund is $6.4 billion in
debt.
We commend the Senate for permanently restoring the Black Lung
Excise Tax rate as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. This
was essential to prevent the Trust Fund from going even deeper into red
ink, as was projected by the Government Accountability Office.
However, given the already dropping production and utilization of
coal domestically, we believe it is time to examine extending the tax
to exported coal. The U.S. Energy Information Agency predicts that coal
utilization for domestic power generation will drop to near zero by
2050. The only significant market remaining at that point will be
exported coal. However, there will be no income to the Trust Fund from
the production of that coal. The Fund's deficit will never be wiped
from the books without extending the tax to exported coal.
DOL Rule to Reform Operator Self Insurance is Languishing and Must be
Issued
While coal production is declining, and excise tax revenues along
with it, it is imperative to protect the Trust Fund from additional
liabilities due to self-insured operators failing to maintain adequate
collateral. According to a 2021 GAO report (Attachment 16), roughly $1
billion in undercollateralized Black Lung liability was shifted into
the Trust Fund in recent years. In some cases, large operators reserved
as little as 3 percent of their current and future Black Lung liability
when they filed for bankruptcy.
According to DOL, the risk of more red ink in the Trust Fund is
growing: self-insured operators have reported $700 million in current
and projected Black Lung liabilities with only $120 million on deposit
with DOL. In the event of future bankruptcies, under-collateralization
of these liabilities would increase the Trust Fund's indebtedness.
The good news is that the Biden administration has proposed to plug
this leaky bucket through a proposed rule that would set a minimum
collateral level of 120 percent of current and future Black Lung
liabilities.
We think this is a reasonable approach because it mirrors the self-
insurance rules that are implemented by many state workers'
compensation programs.
I should be clear here, not all self-insured operators are failing
to put up sufficient collateral. But by compelling self-insured
operators to fully internalize the costs of current and future Black
Lung liabilities as part of the cost of production, the proposed rule
eliminates the unfair windfall that accrues to those operators who fail
to fully secure such claims, while potentially incentivizing operators
to reduce the incidence of Black Lung.
The UMWA has joined with a number of groups and Members of Congress
in supporting this proposal. Although the comment period on this rule
closed over a year ago, progress on getting it finalized has been far
too slow. Earlier this month, the Department of Labor sent a final
version to the Office of Management and Budget for its review
(Attachment 17). We urge the Administration not to let this rule
languish any longer, because what we have learned is that whenever
there is a bankruptcy, there is a real risk that self-insured operators
will shift unfunded liabilities to the Trust Fund and drive up the
mountain of red ink.
While the Trust Fund can continue to borrow from the Treasury to
cover benefits and administrative costs, at some point the red ink
reaches a tipping point that jeopardizes the Trust Fund's solvency. In
1981, certain interests used a rising tide of red ink enact cuts in
benefit eligibility. It took 30 years to reverse those cuts as part of
the Affordable Care Act in 2010, but it left thousands of miners and
their survivors without recourse in the interim.
It is past time for DOL to move forward on this rule, as this
problem has been festering at great expense to the Trust Fund for over
a decade.
Closing Remarks
The sad fact is, no matter how far we seem to come in this country,
whether it is advances in science, technology, medicine, or a host of
other subjects, some things never seem to change. I suppose many
industries deny the problems they cause, but some of the people who own
and operate coal mines can be the worst. They argue that they should be
allowed to make as much money as possible on their investment without
government interference. Then, when their actions cause major economic,
environmental or health problems, they want the government to force
taxpayers to bail them out. They want to keep their profits private but
socialize their losses. It is time Congress held these businesses
responsible to pay for their misdeeds, not the American taxpayer.
Statistics from the mining industry offer dramatic proof that
improved laws and regulations make a huge difference in workers'
safety. We recently celebrated the 45th anniversary of the mining
industry's key legislation, the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act
of 1969. In the 40 years before that landmark legislation, an average
of 803 miners were killed in coal mines each year; and in the 40 years
since it was enacted an average of 83 miners were killed.
While these numbers prove beyond a doubt that strong laws make a
huge difference, more must be done. We are here today to talk about
what could and should be done to change a system that still allows
miners and other workers to die at work or as a result of their work,
whether from preventable occupational illnesses or from avoidable work-
site tragedies.
Unless operators do what the law requires of them each and every
day--not just when a government inspector is physically onsite--miners
will continue to be exposed to needless hazards to their health and
safety. Too many will be injured, too many will be made sick, and too
many will pay the ultimate price with their life.
These challenges have persisted for decades, if not longer. I have
been here repeatedly, and my predecessors before me, to complain about
the terrible conditions miners endure when operators don't follow the
law and miners are killed as a result.
Turning to the factors that adversely impact miners' health and
safety, we must start by looking at the operators and their mines.
First and foremost, it is every operator's responsibility to provide a
safe and healthy workplace. Many try to do that. Yet too many do not.
Corners are frequently cut, which means that miners' health and safety
get sacrificed.
Operators who invest in equipment and training to make a mine safer
should not have to compete against those who refuse to make these
needed investments. In the end, it's miners who pay the price when
operators do not adhere to what the law requires. But so long as there
are good paying jobs in mining, there will be workers willing to take
the work hoping and praying they will be the lucky ones. Working in
America in the 21st Century should not require such a gamble. And
unless operators start running their mines consistent with what the law
requires, we will continue to witness miners dying.
The Union and coal miners have hailed MSHA for releasing its new
silica rule as the dawn of a new day in improving coal mine health and
safety. We have seen some improvements, but we still have a long way to
go. MSHA should be given additional funding and resources to enhance
its ability to enforce the law.
I believe that the facts that have been laid out at this hearing
and the facts that have been available in the public domain for decades
are sufficient to demand action by this Committee and ultimately by the
entire U.S. Congress. There is no longer an alternative, and there can
no longer be excuses. The carnage in the coalfields from this
preventable disease must stop.
Mr. Chairman I would like to take this opportunity to thank you,
Ranking Member Braun, and the entire Committee for allowing me the
opportunity to testify at this extremely important hearing. The
nation's miners are some of the hardest working, dedicated, and
patriotic people in this country. They have made great sacrifices to
protect and energize the Nation. They are willing to continue providing
whatever is necessary to keep our Nation strong and moving forward.
They would simply request that their sacrifice be rewarded with a long
retirement, not cut short because of Black Lung disease. Mr. Chairman,
the miners have waited for congressional action far too long. Thank
you.
______
Senator Hickenlooper. Thank you, Mr. Roberts.
Dr. Schafrik.
STATEMENT OF STEVEN SCHAFRIK, PH.D., ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF
GRADUATE STUDIES, MINING ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY,
LEXINGTON, KY
Mr. Schafrik. I would like to thank the Subcommittee of the
U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
for the opportunity to discuss important topics for miners
safety. Your staff has been excellent, and I hope to continue
to work together with them.
My career as a researcher has been working on the difficult
challenges that face the mining industry. The main goal of this
work has been to create solutions that help the miner work in a
safe, healthy, and productive environment.
In our industry, the details matter and every side is as
varied as the Earth's crust, but I am going to be talking in
general terms. Extracting useful minerals involves breaking,
moving, and, or processing tons of rock.
Making a rock or anything smaller generates dust. Dust
generation, characterization, monitoring, and suppression are
all important topics with a wealth of information, and my
written testimony discusses them in more detail than I will
today. Thus, monitoring the laboratory and in the field are
very different.
We have excellent tools for research lab experiments but
not so many to use in the field. NIOSH's mining division has
developed several technologies for monitoring and evaluation of
dust, like the fast method for silica exposure in coal mines,
and the CPDM for real--which is a real time tool for overall
dust exposure.
What we lack is a real time tool for all miners,
specifically for silica exposure. It would help if it were OSHA
compliant too. NIOSH has been soliciting for such a device to
be developed for the last few years in anticipation of the
silica rule.
These projects have had mixed results, but I believe that
we can get there with an effort similar to the one put forth on
the communication and tracking problem. In my work, I want to
get the dust out of the air.
In a NIOSH funded effort, we investigated the impingement
screen on flooded bed scrubbers used in underground coal mines
because the screen can be clogged, making it less effective. We
have developed a field trial--and field trialed a maintenance
free screen to replace it.
Our field trials met airflow requirements and were well
received by the workers but had disappointing cleaning results.
We are currently working with Virginia Tech and the NIOSH
Pittsburgh Mining Research Division to improve the design.
We have also developed a radical style of filter that is
based on a filter type used in automotive spray boots and is
extremely difficult to clog. This shows great results in the
lab and can be used as a standalone area filter.
I am working with an international manufacturer to make a
prototype in trial at most likely in South Africa. I think this
kind of filter would be useful for off-earth mining and
exploration applications, where dust impacts on the machines
and astronauts can be easily overlooked. In this industry, if
it is easy to do, it has already been done.
The only way to keep us--keep up is to increase our
technology, which means more engineers. The technology
developed in the mines is important to many other industries,
as our products. Modern mining machines resemble robots much
more than shovels.
They rely on the expertise of the worker to operate safely
and efficiently. But we have the mineral resources. And thanks
to efforts by NIOSH and SME, we also have the educational
expertise. But we lack the public will to encourage highly
talented engineering students to pursue a career in the mining
industry.
The rhetoric around the mining industry is pushing away
talent. The No. 1 question I get from parents of prospective
engineering students is, will we still have mines in 5 years?
It is not just parents asking that. It is executives at major
technology companies too. To meet the challenges of the day, we
need more engineers working together on the dust problems.
Those engineers need to have a deep understanding of the
processes from the mine face to the load out, and the
particular needs in each place. They need to have--they need to
take a risk based approach to solve this as efficiently as
possible.
Inefficiencies at the beginning of the production chain
affect everyone in society. I thank you for your time and
attention, and I am looking forward to some questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Schafrik follows.]
prepared statement of steven schafrik
I'd like to thank this Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on
Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, and the Subcommittee for the
opportunity to discuss this important topic of miner safety.
I am an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for
Mining Engineering and a Faculty Fellow of the James B. Beam Institute
for Kentucky Spirits at the University of Kentucky. I currently teach
circuits, programming, mine design, ventilation, and automation at the
undergraduate and graduate levels. My research is in automation,
communication, ventilation, and training. I have two patents for dust
filtering technologies. I am the founding Secretary/Treasurer of the
Eastern Collegiate Mine Rescue Organization and the faculty advisor for
the University of Kentucky RescUKats. I am very active in our
professional society, the Society for Mining Metallurgy and
Exploration, where I am currently the Chair of the Coal and Energy
Division.
Much of this work has been developed under several CDC NIOSH
contracts. The views and data are from me and in no way represent the
views or opinions of the CDC, NIOSH, or any of its employees.
Much of the work described here was performed by nearly a dozen
researchers at the University of Kentucky, Virginia Tech, particularly
Dr. Emily Sarver; Penn State, particularly Dr. Ashish Kumar; and
Missouri University of Science and Technology, particularly Dr. Guang
Xu. Much of the testimony I will be describing and generalizing about
mining technology, and there will always be exceptions to my comments.
My comments are aimed at a general audience and not at specific mines
or specific mining operations.
Sources and Characterization of Dust
There are various sources of dust in mining operations. Mining
operations, by definition, extract minerals from the earth's crust for
society to use. These minerals are used for anything from cosmetics to
electric power to the metals that make up every piece of electronics.
It is a truism that if something is not grown, then it has to be mined.
Even though some of the things that are grown don't need to be mined,
the tools that we use in order to harvest things that are grown are
mined.
Most mining operations involve breaking stones using explosives or
mechanical means to extract valuable minerals. These minerals are then
used to produce items that are bought and sold every day. Mining is the
beginning of the value chain for every product in society.
When a rock or any rigid body is broken, it creates dust, even if
it's something that is cut. Cutting things with lasers, saws, and
everything else will still create dust. The particular size and
chemical makeup of the dust determine its health effects. Not all dust
is created equally.
Mining operations have their own characteristics. Most of the
mining operations in the United States are surface mines. Most of the
mines in the United States are classified as metal/non-metal (M/NM),
which means they produce a commodity other than coal. Most mines
operate by what we think of as the classic mining cycle. That is, they
drill holes and load those holes with explosives to provide the energy
to break the rock. This leaves them with a pile of rocks that should be
suitable for loading into a haulage system. They are hauled to a
location and dumped in that location, and the production cycle
continues. The rock is then processed. It is either sold as-is, crushed
to smaller sizes, and/or processed in a mineral processing plant and
then sold.
Dust from drilling is well known to the general public. Drilling
was one of the most dangerous occupations when mechanization was first
introduced into the mining and tunneling industries. The Hawk's Nest
tunnel construction in West Virginia famously accounted for hundreds of
cases of silicosis. This construction was before the adoption of the
Jack Leg Drill, which was a step change in the safety of the miners.
Most corporate mining operations today will use remote drilling
machines that move the worker even further away from the drilling
operation. The reduction of dust from drilling is a success in the
mining industry, with the techniques adopted anywhere else where rock
and concrete are drilled.
During loading, dust can be disturbed and created from the rocks
running against each other. This process is done by machines where the
operator is in the cabin and away from the digging. They are loading
haul trucks, or equivalent, that are similarly operated from a cabin.
Hauling can create dust from the trucks themselves or whatever haulage
is used, stirring the dust up from the road or disturbing it in the
loaded material. There are ways that we handle that with water sprays,
and dumping creates dust, but this is also an activity where there's
generally not a human being around. They will employ a negative
pressure system and or water sprays in dust-related operations.
Surface coal mines in the United States operate in much the same
manner as surface M/NM mines. However, the hard rock above the coal
seam requires hard digging, while the softer coal is generally not
blasted but is directly dug. Underground coal mining and soft rocks,
such as trona, can be mechanically mined using a continuous mining
machine or, under the right circumstances, using a long-wall system. In
these mining methods, the rock is broken with a mechanical drum with
cutting heads on it. The drilling, blasting, and loading are all done
by mechanical means within the machines. The cutting heads come around,
make contact with the mineral, break it away from the earth's crust,
and knock it down into some form of gathering system. On a continuous
mining machine, gathering arms move around and pull the broken ore into
the machine's body. It's loaded onto a conveyor belt and can be loaded
onto a shuttle car or similar haulage system and taken to a dump, moves
the material onto a conveyor belt, and takes it outside.
In a long-wall system, the conveyor belt is called a pan line, and
it runs underneath the long-wall shearer's head. The shearer is two
drums with cutting heads that move back and forth across a face of
coal. The coal face is typically between 800 and 1,500 feet wide,
depending on the geologic and economic conditions. Coal and the rocks
around it are cut and dropped directly onto a set of conveyor belts to
take it outside. It's a very highly productive means of mining.
With all kinds of mining, we have modeled the material that we are
mining, but no model is perfect. The geological conditions will dictate
how much out-of-seam material will be mined. Material that is not
economical to sell is not desirable to mine, although in some cases it
must be mined in order to fit equipment and people into the underground
opening. In surface mines, the material that overlays the ore body
generally must be moved or disturbed to get to the ore body.
Focusing on underground coal, the high-quality thick seam coal
deposits are being mined out. A lot of economical coal seams are
thinner than in the past. Sometimes, the coal is not as thick as the
cutting head, and often, especially in central Appalachian coals, the
rock surrounding the coal must be taken. That rock can be the source of
silica dust or the nature of how the coal was formed, which made it
contain silica. What we've seen in dust characterization studies,
especially those that were done at Virginia Tech under Dr. Sarver, is
that it doesn't necessarily depend on how much out-of-seam material is
being mined. It may just depend on the mineralogy of what is being
mined. In the case of Central Appalachian coals, there's mineralogical
evidence that more silicates and silicon dust are generated even when
the mining height is predominantly in the coal. This same trend has not
been found outside of the Central Appalachian coals. The study looked
at more than 20 room and pillar coal mines both inside of Central
Appalachia and outside of Central Appalachia.
Dust Exposure Reduction and Mitigation
We've been producing dust in mines for thousands of years and have
determined many different ways to deal with that dust. Personal dust
masks that are both passive and active will not be discussed, I will
focus on engineering and administrative controls and not personal
protective equipment. The first and simplest way is to inject water at
the cutting or dust generation point. In the drills, dust is generated
at the end of the cutting tool. There's a water stream that captures
the dust. This traps the dust the second that it's made. That's been a
highly effective method. In fact, that technique was the innovation in
the Jack-leg drill mentioned above. This can commonly be seen on
construction sites where water is injected immediately to capture the
dust.
The U.S. Bureau of Mines did a lot of work optimizing the angle of
attack for mechanical breakage to reduce the amount of dust generated.
Common in underground working is having a lot of airflow and keeping
flow away from the workers. When the dust is created is blown away from
where people are located.
In many mines, the best way to keep the workers away from the dust
is to keep them in enclosed cabins. They may be in a heavily dusted
machine, but they do not experience any dust because their cabin is
enclosed, and these machines often have various filtering techniques
for the cabin air.
There is a type of continuous miner that injects water at the point
of cutting, called a wet head. In some mines, water spray bars behind
the cutting head knock down the dust. Coal and clays are hydrophobic
and are not as easily mixed with water. It's common in underground coal
to filter or scrub the air after the mechanical cutting. These devices
are called flooded bed scrubbers on continuous mining machines or
scrubbers, and I'll be talking about those more later.
Another fairly new technique in the industry, but it's not uncommon
is air curtains. These can generally be found on drills, such as the
roof bolting machine, and haulage like shuttle cars. These are jets of
filtered air blowing down around where a worker is working, keeping
dust from encountering that person's work area.
This is very similar to the air curtains found in grocery stores
between refrigerated sections and the rest of the store. These are
needed where you cannot put that operator into an enclosed cabin
because of the job's nature or the mine opening's size.
Dust is generated from explosions both on the surface and
underground. Time and distance are taken away from those explosions,
reducing the dust exposure for the workers. Areas that are blasted must
be inspected before workers are allowed to enter them and that has kept
the dust exposure down as well.
Automation as a dust control technique is gaining more acceptance
and will be discussed later.
Novel Approaches to Dust Capture
The continuous miner scrubbers have somewhere between 60 and 90
percent dust reduction, although they have a maintenance issue where
the impingement screen is prone to clogging. The way that these systems
work is they have a shroud over the continuous mining machine that is
behind the cutting head. Dust is generated by the cutting head passes
over the shroud. Inside the scrubber, there's a fan pulling air into
the shroud. That air is assumed to be dust-laden and goes through an
impingement screen. That screen filters out the large materials. A
water spray sprays water onto that screen, keeping it flooded with
water. The air then enters the dust box and is treated with water. The
dust box feeds into a demister device that pulls the water and dust
from the air trapping it in a sump before it's ejected from the
scrubber. The demister is thought to be responsible for most of the air
cleaning.
Part of my work has been improving the impingement screen to reduce
the amount of maintenance necessary by the workers. That research aims
to test a maintenance-free flooded bed scrubber screen that would be
acceptable for use in underground coal mining applications. This
research had many challenges. The first challenge was creating a
maintenance-free screen that won't clog and has the same air resistance
as the existing screen. This way, no modification is needed to use it.
We want a worker to pull the existing screen out and put in a new
screen design. Another challenge is actually measuring the
effectiveness because as you can imagine, this is all taking place in a
part of the mine not well disposed to sensitive scientific equipment.
It's in permissible areas, which means that you have strict
restrictions on the type of electronic equipment that can be used. You
also move a lot of rock, which is detrimental to scientific equipment.
I'm going to be discussing work done at the University of Kentucky.
Aaron Noble at Virginia Tech took another approach, funded by the Alpha
Foundation.
We started with an idea, and then we did a variety of computational
fluid dynamics (CFD) to test how the idea would work and optimize it as
best we could in simulation. We know that there are constraints to the
software. Physical prototypes were manufactured and tested in a
controlled lab environment and also in a dust gallery that we have at
the University of Kentucky, which lets us work in a less controlled
laboratory setting. This was an iterative process of testing and CFD,
we generated several different generations of these screens. We were
working with the manufacturer, Komatsu, to be sure that the screens
would not harm scrubbers deployed in the field.
As part of this research, we found three mines willing to test the
prototype screens in various ways. It's important to note that in these
tests, dust was sampled in areas, not on workers. The workers were
positioned away from the machines to reduce their potential exposure to
dust. Because we were testing the safety device, we needed to ensure
the workers were protected.
We used the Personal Dust Monitor (CPDM), which was critically
important in these tests. There are just a few minutes of delay in the
dust concentration, so you can see your exposure more or less
immediately. It was originally designed as a research tool by NIOSH and
is now used as an enforcement tool.
The design of our maintenance-free screens creates a torturous path
for the air to flow through plates. Instead of going through a mesh
where it can randomly hit a mesh screen, it's forced to make sharp
turns. The larger, heavier particles won't be able to take the turn,
will hit the plate, and be captured because they lose their momentum.
Working with Komatsu we did a variety of different testing on our
screens and compared them to the existing screens that can be purchased
today. In an example test, when it's clean using the existing screen a
particular scrubber is flowing about 6,500 cubic feet per minute (CFM)
and when it's dirty it's flowing about 5,500 CFM. The screen that we
manufactured for Mine A was able to flow a little closer to 6,500 CFM
and when it was dirty it was flowing 5,900 CFM. The screen that we
manufactured for Mine B was running 6500 when it was clean, and the
screen that we manufactured for Mine C was running 7,800 when it was
clean and 7,200 CFM when it was dirty. It's important to note that the
screens that we manufactured will clean themselves, and so even though
the dirty flow decreases, it will increase again while running.
The mines took their existing screen and checked the airflow
through it and checked the screen that we manufactured. In all cases,
we were able to meet the project's first goal, which was to have no
airflow difference. In all cases, there is a 1 percent or less airflow
difference, within the measurement error range. Mine A&B only tested
the screens for one cut, but mine C tested the screen on 13 cuts, seven
of them with the new screen and six with the fiber screens. They found
that, when loaded, the maintenance-free screen will allow 11 percent
more air through the scrubber than the current screen. That's
consistent with the lab testing that was done at Komatsu.
They liked the improved airflow, and that improved the visibility
for the continuous minor operator while he was operating the machine.
They knew that more air was being pulled into the scrubber.
Unfortunately, it resulted in 53 percent more dust being measured
downwind, which means that the screen is causing a change to the
scrubber system, making it less efficient overall at reducing the dust
amount despite having more air going through it.
We decided to take the prototypes and bring them back to the lab.
While we were doing the work in the field, the NIOSH Pittsburgh Mine
Research Division built a scrubber set up with the help of Komatsu.
They have started instrumenting it so that they can do much more
detailed work on the internal workings of the scrubber system. It had
previously been thought that most of the dust collection was being done
inside of the demister and not at the impingement screen. But our
results show that may not be the case. The NIOSH setup has already been
used to test the Virginia Tech vibrating screen from Dr. Noble's
research, which will require a major change to the scrubber design.
Dr. Sarver's Virginia Tech research group is using NIOSH's lab to
investigate our maintenance-free screen. Their preliminary results have
shown similar results to our lab results. It's important to note that
our lab results and their preliminary results are currently at lower
air flows than scrubbers at the mines. This work is ongoing and is
difficult because of the nature of the measurement devices. They are
not designed to work at the high flows that are seen in mining machines
and in most underground coal mines. Instrumentation work is ongoing to
find the point that the maintenance-free screen changes the
effectiveness of the scrubber. My hypothesis is that the maintenance-
free screen is capturing the water from the water spray and choking the
demister. We may need to change the spray nozzle to one that is
emitting smaller water particles. All of this is being investigated
right now and we just don't have, we just don't have results on it at
this time.
Scrubber systems are not the only and best solution. Also, running
more air through the scrubber is not always the best solution if the
air is dirty. In previous work, we've seen that the running air through
the scrubber can actually cause other problems because what it can tend
to do is it can pull the fresh air coming in that is intended to get
the dust and gas away from the continuous mining machine and pull it
into the scrubber. Because the scrubber is creating so much negative
pressure, it's pulling the clean air through before it can get dirty or
mix with the gases being emitted.
Potentially, flooded bed scrubbers are not the best technology.
Researchers prior to me at the University of Kentucky looked at a
machine called the Vortecone. Most notably it's used in paint spray
booths in auto automobile manufacturing in order to capture the spray
particles out of the air. In the Vortecone, air is drawn through the
system, accelerated, and spun. The heavier particles tend to move
closer to the wall of the Vortecone. When they make contact with the
wall, they become captured because there's also a water jacket that is
introduced, creating a thin film of water all along the wall of these
types of filters. Effectively, dirty air and clean water enter with
air, and dirty water leaves with a very high cleaning efficiency. The
Vortecone has a high resistance to airflow and will take a lot of
energy to achieve the airflows that are necessary in mining conditions.
More power is not always available for airflow because the motors on
the fans and the fans themselves can be loud.
This device is good at cleaning but not ideal for underground
mining conditions or machines. We performed CFD development on these
devices and physical testing to understand the cleaning mechanism and
to adopt it to a horizontal orientation. We created a physical
prototype and tested it in our lab and found that we were able to get
better cleaning efficiency than the original as well as were able to
drop the resistance to flow to approximately 10 percent of the
Vortecone resistance. This allows the horizontal version, the
Hortecone, to achieve the airflows necessary in mining conditions. We
are investigating developing a standalone version of the Horticone
specifically for mines in South Africa.
There are tradeoffs in all the mitigation work. You want to clear
all of the air in the area, but you don't want the maintenance of the
filters to be constant. If it's too much, it won't be done.
The only way to find the balance, which will be site-specific, is
to deploy good monitoring technology. There's a lot of monitor
monitoring technology that has been developed. Much of the work that
has been described thus far, all of the in mine testing and dust
gallery testing, was done with real time dust accumulation that's
reported by the CPDM.
Dust Monitoring
In laboratory testing, we use devices such as the TSI DustTrak
that give excellent repeatable results. Those and others like it are
excellent devices, but they can only work on extremely low flows of air
compared to what we need in the mining industry. That is why we must do
area sampling when developing dust mitigation technologies. Doing
direct sampling of the air stream is difficult and introduces errors
with the machines that are available to us to use. We cannot sample the
air while it's not flowing, the point of the sample is to see how much
and the size of the dust in the air.
Especially in coal mining operations, mines move a tremendous
amount of air. It is not uncommon for a coal mine to move more than a
million CFM of air at the main fan. To put that in perspective, a
typical bathroom fan and a house is somewhere around 200 to 800 CFM and
a typical 2,000 square foot house will have an air conditioner fan on
it that runs somewhere between 4,000 to 6,000 CFM.
Underground M/NM can be running very significant CFM at their main
fan, but because these openings are so large, it can appear underground
as if it is stagnant or quiescent flow. To put that in perspective, the
average coal mine opening cannot exceed 20 feet wide and 3-8 feet high.
In the United States, a 10-foot-high coal seam is very high and very
unusual in modern times. At 10 feet of height and 20 feet wide the area
is 200 square feet. In stone operations, they can be anywhere from 20
to 80 feet wide in their opening and 20 to 120 feet tall. At 40 feet
wide and 60 feet high, the cross-sectional area is 2,400 square feet,
or 12 times more than the coal mine. An order of magnitude larger areas
inside of stone operations and although they can have a good amount of
air going through them, you won't notice it because the cross-sectional
area is so much bigger.
It's also important to note that dust isn't only present
underground, it is also present in surface mines and it's also present
in the plant. When we're talking about dust and dust mitigation, we
need to make sure that we are looking beyond just what is going on in
underground coal mines and looking at the surface and plant operators.
There has been a lot of research and evaluations of enclosed cabins
and clean areas of plants. There are different air intake systems that
are available on drill rigs and other places where lots of dust is
being generated. We have water trucks in order to reduce dust along
hall roads. There has been a lot of work and also a lot of things with
the air curtains in the surface operations and plant operations that
have dramatically decreased dust exposure outside of the underground
environment.
For silica in particular, it's important that the silica risk for a
site be evaluated because this risk is going to be site-specific. Rocks
in the Earth's crust are not homogeneous, they are not the same
everywhere. A particular kind of deposit or mineral mineralogy in one
location will have big differences from another. Those differences can
be from the way that it was deposited or what rocks are around it. The
dust constituency must be present in the rock to be present in the air.
There are a lot of current silica measuring technologies, such as
the Field Analysis of Silica Tool (FAST) from NIOSH, which is fast and
accurate. They tell you about the worker's exposure, but it's after the
fact. Many of these systems have been developed for specific mineralogy
and dust constituencies and should not be universal. Many methods rely
on personal dust pumps that are widely available and used in dust
sampling for M/NM mines. However, in coal mines the CPDM has mainly
been used in place of the pumps.
Several projects, such as NIOSH's Helmet-Cam project, can be used
in surface operations and mostly in M/NM operations. The Helmet-Cam
monitors what the person is doing and monitors their dust and noise
exposure. When the dust is post-processed and contains higher exposure
than expected the video can be investigated to determine the source.
That project has been popular with several different M/NM operations,
but it is not widely used and can't be used underground or in
underground coal. It would be much more valuable if it gave real-time
data to the worker.
For at least the past 4 years, NIOSH's Broad Agency Announcements
have been soliciting proposals to develop something that is similar to
the CPDM but for silica dust. That effort has had some promising
results and some difficulties. In my understanding of that effort, I
think these difficulties can be engineered out, but it will require
more than the NIOSH can do with that funding mechanism. I was very
involved in the development and deployment of the communication and
tracking systems that were required by the MINER Act. That effort was a
huge effort for the industry, pulling in many new people and
technologies into the coal mines and resulting in some very successful
communication and tracking equipment. I think that the difficulties, as
I understand them, encountered by NIOSH in the FAST and vendors such as
Ring IR and ThermoFisher can be engineered out if they have sufficient
funding and backing.
Automation
I consider automation a means of dust mitigation and reduces dust
exposure for workers. Modern mines, right now today are highly
automated operations. Most of the mining machines that you see in
operation, especially in production operations, resemble robots more
than they resemble shovels and picks. These systems have a tremendous
amount of data logging on them for maintenance purposes and for
efficient use. A major component of efficient use is safe use. Reducing
dust improves the life of the machine and even highly automated
machines need to be run efficiently. Off-Earth mining operations are
projected to be highly automated and will encounter tremendous dust
issues. A lot of the lessons learned in terrestrial mines have
immediate relevance to NASA's moon missions and any mission to mine
asteroids.
We are at a point in the industry, underground, where we have a
fleet of highly automatable machines that are being operated by humans.
We have reliable communication and tracking information, and that's the
opportunity to automate those machines and turn them into remote
control or completely autonomous machines. One of the solutions we've
discussed is reducing workers' dust exposures to get them away from
where the dust is being generated. If you can make all the machines so
that they are or they can mostly work by themselves with a human
supervising them, then you can put that human into a place where
they'll be able to work in a protected environment. They would be more
readily able to work in a closed cab or away from where dust is being
generated or anywhere. It's not uncommon for a mining machine in
Kalgoorlie, Australia, to be operated by a human in Perth.
At the University of Kentucky, my research group has been doing
extensive work in automating underground coal mining machines. In our
work, we are moving the machine operator from being on the machine to
supervising it. The American coal miner's expertise is necessary for
the successful conduct of a mining operation. The expertise of
America's coal miners is the best in the world, and they are needed to
spot issues and keep everyone safe and working together.
In M/NM, the automation constraints are different. They don't have
the permissibility issues amongst other things. Also, coal mines are
constantly moving the area of the coal mine where the mine face is
located. In some mining techniques, you can keep the mine equipment in
place for a relatively long time. In a mining technique called block
caving, the draw points underneath the block cave will stay there for
months. Setting up autonomous pathways underneath the ore body is much
more like setting up a factory than setting up a mine. In those cases
where you have a fairly static mine opening and so you don't need
people working in that area.
You can travel around the world today and visit underground
autonomous mines where pretty much nobody is working underground.
There's definitely nobody working around the equipment except for
during maintenance or if there are any issues. But this is very
expensive, and it's really just for particular types of mine methods
and particular types of ore bodies. I don't think that these kinds of
completely automated operations will be widely distributed inside of
the industry.
I think that more we need to be looking at automation as being a
collaboration between humans and the mining machine robot.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we know that dust is generated at mining operations,
and it needs to be managed. Especially if the dust particle size is
small and the constituents of the dust are potentially harmful to
worker health. We don't have a good model for where the dust will go or
how far it will run in the airstream. Especially in the high-flow
airstreams that we have in various parts of the minerals industry.
Monitoring does exist, but the issue is when it comes to dust, not very
much dust monitoring is available in real-time. This is necessary to
give the worker the tools they need to make their own decisions about
their health.
Dust mitigation technologies exist and are always evolving. No dust
mitigation is perfect, especially when we generate a lot of dust at
scale. We've worked to reduce the maintenance for dust mitigation
technologies because that will keep them running as efficiently as
possible for as long as possible.
Using automated machines or more automated machines can reduce
exposure to dust, noise, and vibration. But automation can't always be
implemented; the skills and knowledge of the mine worker must still be
present in the system. Today, most mining machines are customized to
their locations, so particular autonomous machines are a lot more
expensive because they need additional engineering work before they can
be deployed.
Current Needs
The issues discussed highlight the current needs of the minerals
industry. It's clear, and it's been well documented several different
ways, that we don't have enough engineers going into the mines. This is
the fundamental problem that is shared by industry, academia, and
society as a whole. The products of the mines are the basis of the
economic activity because it's the beginning of the production chain.
Technology developed or adapted to the mines is important to many other
industries. The less that we are mining in the United States, the more
that we have to transport materials around the world, and the more that
material is produced in locations without our environmental, health,
and safety standards.
We have the mineral resources and education expertise, but we lack
the public will to encourage highly talented engineering students to
pursue a career in the mining industry. I meet with the parents and
with students to do quite a lot of recruiting into our discipline. I
teach an introductory freshman engineering class with approximately 150
students in two sections every fall. What I see in the incoming
engineering students is they want to solve the big problems. This is
what engineering students do, they want big problems.
They are directed to other engineering disciplines in other
industries. A lot of it's because of the rhetoric around the mining
industry. The No. 1 question I get from parents of prospective
engineering students is, ``Will we still have mines in 5 years?''
There's a fundamental misunderstanding of the importance of the
minerals industry. I think it has been an issue that we, as leaders in
society, can address. I've been addressing it by bringing mining
technology to other industries.
The mines and their conditions are as difficult and varied as the
Earth's crust. That level of challenge is the sort of thing that should
be attracting the top engineering talent. We should be saying you're
really smart, you need to go work in the mines. There is tremendous
opportunity for engineers in the mining industry. Everything in this
discussion around the dust problems is rife for engineering solutions.
We just need engineers to put existing solutions together in the right
way.
In terms of what needs to be done in the future, we need to have
more engineers working together on the dust problems. Those engineers
need to have a deep understanding of the processes from the mine face
to the load out, where customers' materials are loaded, and the
particular needs in each of those places. They need to take a risk-
based approach to all of the health and safety issues in that area and
make tools that match the problem so that we can solve these things as
efficiently as possible. Inefficiencies at the beginning of the
production chain go all the way through to everyone in society.
The solutions to dust problems in the mines will be direct and
immediate solutions in other industries. We are not the only industry
that turns big things into little things and creates dust. Our
solutions are the basis for others to learn from because we solve big
problems in this industry.
______
Senator Hickenlooper. Great. And thank all of you again for
being here. We really do appreciate it. I am going to be here
the whole time, so Senator Kaine, if you want to go ahead and
start with questions. Each of us is going to take 5 minutes of
questions. I will let it run over a little bit maybe, but I am
kind of a hard ass.
[Laughter.]
Senator Kaine. Dr. Harris, you talked about Paul. I have
been struck with what Cecil Roberts said that this is happening
to younger and younger people.
As I am out in the coalfields of Southwest Virginia meeting
with miners at the COMPAC office in Castlewood or others, I am
hearing these stories about the silica exposure getting people
diagnosed with black lung earlier and earlier. Is that what you
are seeing in your clinic as well?
Dr. Harris. Definitely. I think still the average age of
the person who gets diagnosed with progressive massive fibrosis
is older in our clinics from mostly seeing retired former
miners.
In the publication we just recently published in JAMA, I
think we had 75 miners that were in their 30's or 40's, which
is an outrageous number. I mean, it is 75 people that are in
the prime of their life that are getting this incurable,
potentially fatal disease.
Senator Kaine. What more can we do to promote early
detection?
Dr. Harris. Yes, I think that is a great question. I
alluded a little bit to what other tests we can potentially run
for early detection.
I want to, if it is Okay, circle back to talk about CT
scans for a little bit. It gets a little bit in the weeds, but
I think it is important to know that CT scans are a more
sensitive test than X-rays.
We know that through other occupations. In Australia, they
have screened thousands of people that are silica exposed, and
many of those folks had both X-rays and CTs. X-rays that look
normal. The CT are not normal. And so, we are missing things
when we just rely on X-rays.
The challenge for us is that we don't have a system like we
have for X-rays already set up. So, we have B Readers, which
are certified by NIOSH and trained to read these X-rays. We
have a classification system called the ILO System for X-rays.
We don't have that for CT scans in the U.S..
Internationally, there is a system that exists for CT scans. It
is just not widely utilized. And hardly anyone in the United
States is probably trained on it. And so, I don't think we are
ready to, from a population level, start with CT scans.
But I do think that since we know who are the highest risk
miners, and they are folks working in Central Appalachia, they
are folks working underground with the face, that we should
think about using CT scans to screen the folks that are highest
risk, even if we don't have the perfect tools to understand and
categorize it.
We can at least find the nodules. They are easy to see on
CT. So that is, I think, my biggest pitch for early detection.
Senator Kaine. I really appreciate that. And now President
Roberts in the time that I have been in the Senate, you have
gone to bat again and again and again to solve tough problems.
The miner retiree health care plan was on the verge of
going bust in 2017. And together with Senator Casey and others,
working with the UMW, your UMW members in camouflage shirts
pestering us until we got it right, we got that one fixed. And
then a couple of years later, it was the retiree pension plan
that was on the verge of collapsing.
Again, with great miner advocacy here and your leadership,
we got that fixed. And then the excise tax reverted back to an
insufficient level that was going to leave the fund even more
challenged, and we were able to work together to get that
fixed.
But every time you knock one down, there is another one
staring you in the face. I am happy about this silica standard.
I know Senator Casey and others really leaned hard on the
Administration to issue it.
A standard is great if it is implemented. What advice do
you have to us now that the standard is in place about what we
ought to be doing as Congress to make sure that this standard
gets implemented?
Mr. Roberts. Well, I was pleased to--sorry. I was pleased
to go to Pennsylvania with the Secretary of Labor and the
Assistant Secretary for MSHA to announce this rule.
I think the key here, it is a rule. I think it should be
the law because if we have a change in leadership at MSHA or
the Secretary of Labor, we might see this rule changed and we
will be right back where we were before the rule was
promulgated. So, I would urge consideration with respect to
that.
If it is a good rule, it should be a good law, because this
is something that is going to take silica out of the
atmosphere. I fully support what the medical professionals have
said about silica and testing for it, Okay--black lung testing
for it.
But there is nothing like eliminating the problem, so you
don't get sick. I hope the X-ray people--and they can't find a
single person in this country suffering from this disease. That
is what our goal should be here in the U.S. Congress and in our
union also. Because if you don't take the silica out of the
atmosphere, I don't see how we are going to save people's
lives.
We might catch this early, but here is our problem. The
coal industry has been shrinking. Young miners can't find jobs
in any other professions. So, one of the things that I would
advocate for is bringing some good paying union jobs to these
areas, so people don't have to depend on mining. I am a strong
advocate for this--mining as much coal as we can.
I have been very open about that and provide as many jobs
as possible. But one of the things that happens, a young man
with children will give up his health in order to support that
family. What we need to do is make that job he has in the mine
safe and healthy, and also find other places of employment in
these coalfield communities.
Everywhere I go--I am sorry, I am getting long winded here,
but everywhere I go somebody tells me, we want to address the
transition for you guys, but I never see it. I certainly don't
see enough of it.
What we need to do is find a way, in my opinion, to mine
coal cleanly and safely, and help and people be healthy when
they come home every night.
Senator Kaine. I was in Tazewell County this weekend down
near the Pocahontas area where there have been one massive
tragedy after the next over the course of history.
I was hearing the same message from folks, mine coal
safely. Help us diversify and find other opportunities. And I
am so glad that you mention that. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Hickenlooper. Thank you.
Senator Braun.
Senator Braun. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I had some
questions prepared but I always listen to the witnesses and try
to discern what the meat of this whole conversation ought to be
about.
I know in my own company many years ago, when you try to
take care of your employees, and that ounce of prevention being
worth a pound of cure. In this case, it sounds like it would be
even more than a pound of cure that you would save. Coal mining
has been around for so long.
I want to ask Mr. Roberts some simple questions. First, and
keep the answers fairly brief, because I think you can, with
your experience, tell me this. Is this an issue only in
underground mining, or is an issue on strip mining above ground
as well?
Mr. Roberts. It is found primarily in underground mining.
Just quickly, most of the easy coal, as they say back home, has
been mined.
Senator Braun. You got to go underground----
Mr. Roberts. Coal seams are shrinking--so you are banning
coal in a place about the height of this table. You can't do
that without taking a rock. When you start taking a rock so you
can mine, this coal, that is where you get to silica.
Senator Braun. You get that same type of dust floating
around in the air if it is above ground versus being
underground. So, it--do you get it in both methods?
Mr. Roberts. When you do surface mining, it has been my
experience and based on the knowledge that I have, is you don't
get the same amount of coal dust, nor do you get to rock silica
above ground.
Senator Braun. Then when it comes to silica versus regular
coal dust, is that confined just to that triangle down in
Appalachia or do you have that elsewhere?
Mr. Roberts. This would be like saying, where did the
disease breakout? And the disease in this instance is in that
geographic area. You could take it probably a 70 mile radius
there and you could identify where most of these cases are.
It is not to say that this couldn't happen, say, in
Northern West Virginia or in Pennsylvania, but the likelihood
of that is very remote because they are not mining to rock as
they mine to coal in those areas. They don't have----
Senator Braun. It depends on the geology of where you are
mining.
Mr. Roberts. Pretty much, yes.
Senator Braun. Okay. And then on something as clear as
silica versus coal dust, and one happening at an earlier age,
it seems like just taking and focusing on where the issue is or
where it is most dramatic, what has been done by Government and
companies to focus on something where it is surfacing so much
earlier in coal miners? What has been done?
Mr. Roberts. Let me give you an example of my frustrations,
if I might. I looked at my testimony. I have been doing this
for years here. The first time we talked about needing to do
something about black lung and in mentioning silica was in
2003.
20,000 miners have died from black lung since I gave their
testimony. So, we haven't done much of anything. We didn't even
have a rule about silica until a few weeks ago. So, to answer,
there is not a lot.
Senator Braun. Next questions will be for Dr. Harris and
Schafrik. When it comes to individual miners, do all seem to be
affected in the same way, or does it vary by miner? In other
words, if you are in a mine that has got poor ventilation and
doesn't do anything about it, is everyone there generally going
to come up with some issue, or is it different among miners?
Dr. Harris. I think it is a complicated answer. It depends.
I think, I have miners who have mined for four decades in low
coal underground and never got black lung. And so, it sort of
depends on what your body does to the dust it inhales.
You have an immune system that can kick out dust more
effectively in some people than others. I think it is--I don't
think we know enough to say who individually is at risk, but we
do know of risk factors of where they are working and what kind
of coal they are mining, and what their specific job tasks are.
The closer you are to the seams, the more rock you are
mining, the more dust exposure cumulatively over time, the
higher risk you are. But I don't think individual risk factors,
we have totally sorted out yet.
Senator Braun. Dr. Schafrik.
Mr. Schafrik. Yes, Senator. I am an engineering, mining
engineer, so I will yield to the medical discussion of that.
But I would also agree that it would most likely have a lot
to do with what their specific job was, what they were doing,
how much rock was being cut at the time that they were working
downwind from it, and what dust mitigation technologies of the
many that are available were being deployed at that site, and
if that site decided that they needed those or was told that
they need those.
There is a huge number of variables here to be able to
answer that question fully, so I would be more than happy to
answer it in more detail for you if you had some like specific
case that you were looking for.
Senator Braun. My simple observation would be, since there
is variability among miners and Mr. Roberts said it is
inherently kind of dangerous in some places, is that early
detection would seem to be the only way that you can kind of in
a fairly simple, broad way make sure you are getting at it
before it becomes incurable. So, I think that is where a lot of
attention and focus would need to be placed.
Mr. Roberts. Right. I don't--I wouldn't disagree with that,
but I would point out that if you are mining rock along with
the coal, you are creating coal dust and you are creating rock
dust. And that rock dust mixed with the coal dust is deadly.
Senator Braun. That would be the best prevention, is to
make sure you filter that all out in the first place.
Mr. Roberts. If you could. But I would just point out there
has quite frankly not been a great deal of effort put into that
until the silica rule was promulgated. That is the only step
that I have seen in the many years that we have been raising
this here in Congress.
Senator Braun. Thank you.
Senator Hickenlooper. Yes. And as the probably one of the
only former geologists in the room, it is interesting if you
look at the sedimentary environments by which rock, sedimentary
rocks get created.
You generally have shoreline features that have milk--clay
and sandstone, silica coming down, little critical particles of
quartz that becomes--that is sand. And then it gets mixed into
embayment where you have lots of lagoons and swamps. We have a
lot of carbon the leaves from trees and all that comes in and
that becomes coal.
Then the clay and the sand has different--they kind of
feather into each other. And in certain places where it is
dropping rapidly, you get huge, thick packages of coal. Other
places you get beaches.
You can see deserts or, become sort of big, thick packages
of rock. What is critical here is the fact that where miners
can make money best is where you have those thick packages of
what becomes coal or that organic material and not much of the
silica. But there has always some silica in there.
In other words, there is an inner fingering of the grains.
I think what Dr. Harris was describing was the--or actually, I
think Mr. Roberts was describing that the easy stuff is gone
and so now you are getting thinner packages of the coal itself.
And even that coal that you get is going to have some silica in
it.
It is obviously a problem that is not going to get--go
away. It is not going to get better.
Senator Casey.
Senator Casey. Mr. Chairman, thanks so much and I
appreciate you having this hearing along with the Ranking
Member. I want to welcome and thank our guests for their
testimony and the experience they bring to bear on these
subjects.
In particular, I want to thank President Roberts for his
work, his toil, and, dare I say, sweat on behalf of miners,
coal miners all these years. I wanted to start just with a
little background. I grew up and still live in Scranton,
Pennsylvania, which for a while was the anthracite capital of
the world, or pretty close to it, so-called hard coal.
For a while there, virtually every family had a coal miner
or more than one, generation after generation. I have had,
since my family emigrated from Ireland, one, two, three--three
generations of coal miners.
Then the fourth generation was my grandfather, Alphonsus L.
Casey--I wanted to just say his name in the hearing record. He
was a coal miner as a kid, really, from the age of 11 to 15--15
or 16, about 5 years from 1905 to 1910.
He was in the mines right around the time that Stephen
Crane, the great novelist of the Red Badge of Courage. He was
dead at the age of 28 but he wrote an essay about a miner near
Scranton, and he described it in the most haunting and horrific
way that only a coal miner would understand.
At one point, Crane wrote in the essay that before him
stretched and inscrutable darkness, a soundless place of
tangible loneliness. Then he went on to describe all the ways
someone could die in a mine. So, it is a haunting portrayal,
but obviously accurate for the late--I guess around the 1890's
when he wrote it.
Obviously we have made some good progress over the
generations since then, but this problem is still with us, the
black lung and the horrors that some families have experienced,
some miners have.
Dr. Harris, I was noting in your testimony about the
reality here of what this means. The debilitating nature of
these cases and how painful they are when someone is
experiencing black lung.
In your experience, do miners with the most serious black
lung disease always get the benefits they have earned? That is
kind of part one of the question. And part two is, what stands
in their way?
Dr. Harris. Thanks for that question. The short answer is
no, they don't always get the benefits they deserve. And I
think it is important to understand how long and painful the
process is for the miners.
I mean, the average case takes years to resolve and the
layers of appeal that happens goes on and on. From the
Department of Labor to the administrative law judge, to the
Benefits Review Board, to the District Court, it just goes on
and on and on, and it is super frustrating for people.
I think the biggest reason like claims are disputed is
whether or not complicated disease, whether or not progressive
massive fibrosis is present or not, which is usually one X-ray
opinion versus another X-ray opinion. And so, I think an
important way to improve that process is to utilize CT scans.
Inside the Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act, it
specifies if someone's X-ray is abnormal, we should be using CT
scans. And I think that would help tremendously to improve the
process. It is not going to help every miner. And I could name
a million examples--not a million.
I can name many examples of miners that I have cared for
that have really horrible, horrendously severe disease--
category B progressive massive fibrosis. Last week, I was
working on a case and his case has gone on for 5 years. He has
a mass that is five centimeters in his lung.
It is not subtle, and it has still taken 5 years to
resolve. And I think it eventually will resolve in his favor
because the evidence is indisputable, but it has taken a really
long time and so there are lots of challenges.
Senator Casey. I think there are a few diseases where
literally every breath you take, you can feel it. And
obviously, one of the many reasons why we have to pass the
Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act and to close loopholes--if
we pass that law, to close loopholes and order courts to award
benefits.
I wanted to conclude, and maybe I will submit this for the
record, but President Roberts, you talked about the silica
rule, and we are grateful for that, for the work on that. And
maybe I will just--I don't know if we have time for a question
or--what is the most important thing we could do here in the
Senate and in the House to ensure the coal miners affected by
black lung disease can easily access the disability benefits to
which they are entitled?
Mr. Roberts. Well, first of all, the system is grossly
unfair. And what the doctor said here has been our experience
too. And I think you should take a look at some of the things
that has happened along the way here.
We have had attorneys that withheld evidence that miners
had pneumoconiosis, and they did not inform the opposing
attorney that they had that. Those people have been sanctioned.
Then just go over to Johns Hopkins Hospital episode. I
think CBS did a story on this. They had a doctor there that was
well known that never, one time in his career found
pneumoconiosis in a miner's lungs.
Every time that he made a decision like that, the miner did
not get their benefits. So, there has got to be some way to
level the playing field. I would suggest just ask any attorney
in the coal fields if they want to be a black lung attorney and
see what they tell you. They can't afford to be a black lung
attorney.
Workers who are sick found themselves without
representation or depending on a law attorney that just wants
to be helpful to society--and there are some of those out
there. And I know that. But if you want to make a living as an
attorney, you don't want to be doing this.
We have got to figure out how we balance the playing field
here. But the most important thing we could do is not have
anybody else contract black lung. And if you think that can't
be done, that is not true.
We have heard for years that you couldn't make coal mines
safe, but we proved with the law that was passed in 1969 that
you could. Just look at the statistics of the 20 years, 10
years, 30 years, or 40 years before the law passed and see what
has happened to 40 years afterwards.
There are people walking around alive today that would have
been dead in 1970 if they didn't have this law to fall back on.
So, laws work, but you got to have laws that are enforced, and
people have to want to make those mines safer.
Let's just not have any more black lung cases. And we--
Congress has the power and ability to do that. That is a fact.
Senator Casey. Thank you.
Senator Hickenlooper. Senator Lujan.
Senator Lujan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you very
much for having this important hearing.
I very much appreciate in your opening remarks the
inclusion of your statement with the Radiation Exposure
Compensation Act as well. Thank you very much for that. To all
of our panelists, I want to thank you for being here today.
As I begin, I want to be abundantly clear that I am fully
supportive of working with my colleagues to improve all of the
environment associated with exposure to uranium--or pardon me,
to coal mine workers. There must be more that we can do,
whether it is adoption of technology, it is looking to make
sure people have those that can best represent them given all
that is going on.
Families deserve to heal for those that are still fighting
cancer. Now, what I want to use my time today is to bring some
attention to uranium mine workers as well.
New Mexico uranium mine workers who work beyond 1971 have
faced a huge injustice. They have no access to any programs in
the United States, even though Congress took action with the
leadership of Orrin Hatch once upon a time to provide
protection to uranium mine workers through 1971.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, enacted in 1990,
expanded in 2000, left outpost-71 uranium mine workers in New
Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota,
Washington, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Texas.
Due to their work and exposure to radioactive uranium in
the name of national security, mine workers are now struggling
and dying of lung cancer, lung and pulmonary fibrosis, and
other conditions.
The U.S. Government has left them to fend for themselves.
It created the uranium mining industry, but when the Government
stopped being the sole purchaser of uranium ore after 1971, it
left workers excluded from RECA even though they were working
alongside eligible workers.
Now, Dr. Harris, yes or no, is uranium ore exposure in 1971
associated with lung cancer, lung and pulmonary fibrosis,
silicosis, pneumoconiosis, and renal cancer?
Dr. Harris. Yes.
Senator Lujan. Is uranium ore exposure in 1972 associated
with lung cancer, lung and pulmonary fibrosis, silicosis,
pneumoconiosis--I pronounced it incorrectly--and renal cancer?
Dr. Harris. Yes. And I will--I can tell you that because
Dr. Akshay Sood, who is one of my mentors, did a study to
answer that question and looked specifically at lung disease
before and after December 31st, 1971, and found there is still
exceedingly high amounts of chronic lung disease after the 1972
cutoff, which is a bit arbitrary.
Senator Lujan. Is that consistent in 1990?
Dr. Harris. Yes, I don't know any data to suggest that
anything has improved dramatically in that time period.
Senator Lujan. To my colleagues, even though we have the
evidence, RECA excluded those who were exposed after 1971 and
experiencing the ever deepening damage of Government sanctioned
uranium mining.
Ciprano Lucero, who is from Grants, New Mexico, he began
working in the uranium mines back in April of 1977. Now, this
is a quote from Mr. Lucero. He said, ``the lunchroom where we
ate, lunch was covered in a fine layer of the yellowcake as
well, as that was the only place we had to sit and eat.
No matter how many times we wiped it down, the table and
chairs were always covered in the fine yellowcake.'' That is
the place that they designated for them to have a bite, which
was supposed to be one of the cleaner places.
He suffered from pulmonary fibrosis, sleep apnea, high
blood pressure, cognitive heart failure, kidney failure,
arthritis, and diabetes. He sadly died in 2020 at the age of
66. Now, Mr. Lucero died without his sacrifice recognized or
compensated by the U.S. Government. I have endless stories of
constituents, not just from New Mexico, from--through different
parts of America and I certainly hope that we can find a way to
take action.
To every one of my colleagues in the U.S. Senate that voted
yes to advance the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act
amendments to be part of the NDAA, and those of you who voted
yes to advance it as a standalone bill working with Senator
Josh Hawley, where we had 69 Senators show up and say, yes, we
can do better, it is now before the U.S. House of
Representatives.
This program expires on June 7th of this year. All we need
is a vote from Speaker Johnson. I am confident that we have the
votes to get this done there, and I just appreciate my
colleagues giving me another opportunity to raise this issue.
Now, to this hearing, Mr. Chairman, you can count on my
support to stand side by side with colleagues who are fighting
on behalf of uranium, of coal mine workers and their families,
and to make all of these environments safer.
I look forward to learning more from families all across
America and through New Mexico to make sure I am doing my part.
And I continually pray for your health and for your wellness,
and I hope that you will consider lifting your prayers up as
well for those families that we are fighting for within the
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act as well.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Hickenlooper. Thank you, Senator Lujan.
Why don't I let you ask your question and then I will ask
my questions.
Senator Braun. I think it has been a good conversation in
terms of understanding what we are up against, and I want to
ask this of Ms. Brown Barnes.
When it comes to the entity that financially should be in
good shape to handle this, and we are in an industry where we
know it has taken a lot of heat for many other reasons and it
has put it in financial distress, how does this all work itself
out, in your opinion, in the long run when you have a trust
fund that is being underfunded and you got liabilities that are
increasing.
How does that all work out, and at what point would
potential future liabilities make it impossible to dig out of
the hole we are in?
Ms. Barnes. Well, it isn't likely one solution. Congress
could forgive some of the interest in the debt in terms of the
borrowing that has been going on since 1979. There is also the
coal tax.
But one thing that the Department of Labor has projected is
the coal tax is enough, at least for this Fiscal Year, to be
able to meet the benefit liabilities, as well as the
administrative costs of administering the program, but it is
the debt servicing cost part of it that is--that is still
something that needs to be worked out.
In terms of overseeing a program, the Department of Labor
itself has to have some sustained focus and leadership
attention to looking at this, to overseeing the coal mine
operators, especially with regard to self-insurance and making
sure that they have the necessary collateral to be able to
cover not just the current benefits, but also the future
benefits.
Senator Braun. When you describe the fact that the debt
service is overwhelming, of course, that comes from running
annual deficits--it is a cumulative result of that. Our own
Federal Government is doing that now to the tune of almost
$0.30 on every $1.00 we spend. I am on the Budget Committee.
You talk about a distressing subject. Being there, and we
are trying to figure out what to do there to make this place
fund itself better. And this is the backstop for this trust
fund. So, there is a lot there that looks like is in peril.
One of those annual deficits been as a percentage of what
it should be to actually avoid the deficits in the first place?
In other words, how much are we missing the mark on the
average, say, percentage wise?
Did we start this back in 1979 when it was annually--
running deficits to where it wasn't funding--we weren't paying
enough into the fund to pay the benefits?
Ms. Barnes. It did start back in 1979 when we were doing
the borrowing from the Treasury, from the actual General Fund--
--
Senator Braun. That is when you had the shortfall. And has
it been every year since then?
Ms. Barnes. It has been just about every year Congress did
forgive some debt in 2008. It was about $6.5 billion. That did
help some. The coal tax has had some decreases and increases.
And so, that has changed over the years as well.
Senator Braun. That is likely to be less. Just looking at
where the country is going in general. So, what is the total
debt currently held by the Disability Trust Fund?
Ms. Barnes. Well, I know, in terms of at least speaking to
the borrowings, in 2023, there was a $2.7 billion that had to
be borrowed that totaled----
Senator Braun. That was an annual deficit that year?
Ms. Barnes. That was how much they had to borrow to even
cover all of the expenses, including the benefit payments and
administrative costs.
Senator Braun. Mr. Roberts.
Mr. Roberts. It is $6.4 billion.
Senator Braun. In total, the debt--?
Mr. Roberts. Yes, in total. I think so, yes----
Senator Braun. Okay. So, it looks like, with an industry
that is shrinking and maybe now new liabilities that are
arising, it has no way to currently pay for the benefits that
need to come from it. And the Federal Government is borrowing
$0.30 on every dollar.
We have got a predicament there and it is probably an issue
more broad than just this conversation. So, that ought to make
us all take pause on what we do to eventually solve this
problem.
Senator Hickenlooper. Rather sober--the entire discussion
is rather sober. Dr. Schafrik, the U.S. is on track to create
thousands of new mining jobs in the future. There will be
millions of new mining jobs worldwide as we transition to
different energy systems, more electric vehicles.
This great transition is going to move in various
directions, but they are all going to require more materials,
and we need to respond to health and safety best practices that
are responsive to this growth.
As we work to explore best practices, what lessons do you
think we can learn from our international partners? I know
Australia is a good example, but what is someplace that we
can--make sure that we our mines are as safe as they possibly
can be?
Mr. Schafrik. Yes, Senator, thank you. One of the issues
that we have in the United States is that we have several
different regulatory environments around workers. And MSHA has
their own set of regulations and OSHA has their set.
Now, this makes sense from a variety of points of view, but
it does cause issues when we are trying to both export and
import safety technology into the United States because a
technology--and we experience this quite a bit in the
communication tracking field. Technology that was perfectly
acceptable in say Europe, or in Australia, was not acceptable
for use in the United States.
Now, a lot of these get into details very, very quickly.
So, I would just, suffice it to say, for the higher level view
is that I think that we need to do a look at a lot of the
regulatory procedures. And I know that MSHA is not necessarily
happy with those either.
I think that we should look at these things and in the
detail and in particular sections of the regulations and say,
where are we building an impediment where we should be building
an incentive.
Senator Hickenlooper. Yes. Yes, thank you. I think that is
true. Ms. Brown Barnes, you contributed to a number of studies
about the Federal benefits program. What lessons do you learn
from our history in administering the black lung benefits
program that we can apply to other existing or future workers
compensation programs?
Ms. Barnes. Some of the key practices or leading principles
that we use when we are looking at other benefit programs is
the leadership focus and sustained attention on managing the
program. We also look at goals and performance, outcomes, and
having some key measures. It is also important to take a look
at the data.
Have some reliable data that you are analyzing and some
hard evidence there. We also look at the involvement of the key
stakeholders, the employees, those who are having those
experiences that you can talk to and learn from as well, just
to name a few of the practices.
Senator Hickenlooper. All right, I appreciate that. Thank
you. President Roberts, you have obviously had a long history
in the mining industry, not just as a miner yourself, but as
someone who has been supporting miners and making sure they get
the benefits and the health care that they need and deserve.
You have seen firsthand the benefits of previous mining
health and safety improvements--the 2009 dust rule that
everyone has referred to. And you have in many ways been at the
helm of addressing the efforts to pass remediation for black
lung, to make sure that the black lung benefits, Improvement
Act delivers.
How would you approach--and again, we are going to need
miners, not just in coal but in all different levels. How would
you approach encouraging a new generation of miners to join the
workforce, and how do we best support them?
Mr. Roberts. I don't believe that, at least at this time,
that we have a shortage of people willing to work in mining,
particularly if it is not coal mining.
We have people who are applying every day to be in a coal
mine, right. So, we know that people are hungry for employment.
And quite frankly, a coal miner working under UMW contract can
easily make $100,000 a year.
If we make those jobs safer and healthier, then we will
have plenty of people wanting those jobs. But I think we are
talking about the future here of different kinds of mining. I
think what we need to do is the opposite of what we did with
respect to coal mining.
We never worried--when I say we, I am talking about the
Government itself and all of us part of the Government one way
or the other, we never worried about, we need safety laws here,
we need laws to protect people's health, we need laws to
protect them from being killed, covered up, blown up, burn up,
and all that happens and has happened in the coal industry.
We need to look at that in the beginning, not at the end,
in which we seem to be doing with respect to coal mining.
Senator Hickenlooper. Right. Well, that is a good point.
Dr. Harris, in Colorado, we have got a long history of not just
coal mining but uranium mining as well. We are the proud home
to the hospital, National Jewish Health, which is the only HRSA
funded black lung clinic in our state, and it also does
radiation screening for former uranium miners.
As you have described, accessing timely screenings is a
vital part of disease prevention and management, and helps
miners, a, get the support they need quickly, but also, it
improves their eligibility for black lung benefits.
What would you say or what would you describe as specific
steps that we should take to make sure that timely information
and medical services can reach miners across the nation?
Dr. Harris. I think mining often happens in rural
communities, and accessing rural communities is challenging in
general. And I think the key is having local, regional people
that are experts.
I think for industries like uranium, there are very few
people who are experts in how to take care of someone with
uranium issues related--that cause health issues. Similar for
black lung.
I did my fellowship training in Connecticut and never once
saw a coal miner until I moved to Virginia. And so, a lot of
this is regional problems and we have to come up with ways to
have regional solutions.
I think the RECA clinics that do the uranium screening
should be expanded. And there is--they are going to get cutoff
when the RECA benefits expire because those are who are
eligible to be seen in those RECA clinics.
I think building on the expertise that already exists for
those clinics is critical. And I also think coming up with more
innovative ways to bring care to rural areas is important. And
so, we can learn from programs like the Co-Worker's Health
Surveillance Program, which has a mobile unit that does mobile
X-rays and mobile screening.
There is a program like that at the University of New
Mexico. I think having--we have the technology to do these
things. And to be able to take digital X-rays and to bring the
care locally to people.
The last point I will make is I work in Central Appalachia.
It is really hard to recruit doctors there. It is just hard.
And most of our new hires for providers are nurse practitioners
or physician assistants.
I think those folks are often coming from the communities
where they are serving. And to build some expertise into the
nurse practitioner. PA capacity locally is going to be key for
the future.
Senator Hickenlooper. Good points, each one of them.
Appreciate that. I don't know if anybody has anything left
unsaid that is boiling over, before I close the hearing. I
suspected Mr. Roberts might have a comment.
Mr. Roberts. This would be just one quick point. We have
focused on the most severe cases of pneumoconiosis here, but we
should not leave here thinking that coal dust doesn't kill coal
miners.
It just takes a longer time for a miner to die. And once
again, the ability to receive benefits in this program is so
unjustly--it is not administered unjustly. It is just unfair
because a coal miner who is sick and can't work is trying to
get benefits against an attorney just making $400,000 a year.
They have access to doctors from all over the United
States, and that coal miner doesn't have that. It is not a
level playing field, folks.
Senator Hickenlooper. Yes. Dr. Schafrik, are you going to
say something?
Mr. Schafrik. Yes, Senator. I just wanted to point out
that--because it hasn't--it is an important thing to keep in
mind with the new silica rule is that it applies to all miners.
That is not an underground coal, surface coal, coal only.
That is all miners. And there are miners everywhere in the
United States. And the vast majority of mines in the United
States are surface mines. The vast majority of mines in the
United States are not coal mines.
When we are considering a lot of these issues, I think that
we need to consider that it does impact the industry as a
whole. It doesn't just impact the underground coal miner.
Senator Hickenlooper. I couldn't agree more. And I think
that is a longer discussion even as we look at how many smaller
mines there are and how difficult is to get their not just
efficiency, but their health, safety, and precautionary methods
in place. Thank you all for not just being here, but for your
service in your lifetimes.
One of the saddest songs I know is called Dark as a
Dungeon, where it says--the end of the song says, where the
rain never falls, and the sun never shines. Where it is dark as
a dungeon, way down in the mine.
It is a challenge that I think we all share, and I think
that we can successfully address. But it is going to take
persistence and commitment from us in the Senate. But again,
appreciate all the commitment that you guys have displayed.
That is going to end our hearing today.
I would like to thank each of the Senators who came and
joined us. I would like to recognize and thank my Vice Chair,
Senator Braun, for his efforts. We thank each of our witnesses,
Ms. Brown Barnes, Dr. Harris, Mr. Roberts, Dr. Schafrik, for
your participation.
For any other Senators who couldn't get here watching from
their office, if any Senator wants to ask a question or an
additional question, questions for the record will be due in 10
business days, June 5th at 5.00 p.m. The Committee now stands
adjourned.
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[Whereupon, at 3:45 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]