By Chris Hamby
Center for Public Integrity

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

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

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

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

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

Men with lungs like the Marcums’ are not supposed to exist. In the hard-won 1969 law, Congress demanded that dust be controlled and new cases of disease be prevented. The idea was that, even if black lung didn’t disappear, there would be a small number of mild cases and virtually no one like Donald and James Marcum, said Dr. Donald Rasmussen, a pioneer in recognizing and diagnosing black lung.

“In 1969, I publicly proclaimed that the disease would go away before we learned more about it,” Rasmussen, now 84 and still diagnosing miners, said in a recent interview at his office in Beckley, W.Va. “I was dead wrong.”

Throughout the coalfields of Appalachia, in small community clinics and in government labs, it has become clear: Black lung is back.

'Should not be occurring'
The disease's resurgence represents a failure to deliver on a 40-year-old pledge to miners in which few are blameless, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and NPR has found. The system for monitoring dust levels is tailor-made for cheating, and mining companies haven’t been shy about doing so. Meanwhile, regulators often have neglected to enforce even these porous rules. Again and again, attempts at reform have failed.

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“I think any reasonable epidemiologist would have to consider this an epidemic,” said Scott Laney, a NIOSH epidemiologist. “All cases of (black lung) are preventable in this day and age, but these cases of (the most severe form) are just astounding … This is a rare disease that should not be occurring.”

The National Mining Association, the main trade group representing mining companies, disputes some of NIOSH’s data but agrees that black lung’s resurgence is a problem in need of attention. To the association, however, it is primarily a regional phenomenon of central Appalachia — one that doesn’t justify new national rules. What’s needed, the group says, is further study and better enforcement of current standards.

Researchers are struggling to explain what, after years of progress, has caused the backsliding and why black lung, traditionally viewed as an old man’s disease, is striking younger miners and robbing them of their breath faster and faster. They are trying to figure out why men like the Marcums are the new face of black lung.

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Read more here: http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/10/12646127-deadly-black-lung-surges-back-in-coal-country?lite

Paradise
John Prine

When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn

And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well I'm sorry my son but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

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Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man

When politicos of both parties talk about "clean coal," remember this article.

When politicos of both parties pander to Big Coal, remember this article.

Politicos’ reverence for coal is interest-based favoritism at its worst. Currently, coal provides a lot of the country’s electricity inexpensively, which is important. But it is also fantastically dirty, contributing mightily to global warming and pumping a noxious collection of chemicals into the ambient air that increases the incidence of heart attacks and respiratory illnesses. By comparison, natural gas, the most economical substitute, produces only half the greenhouse emissions and much less non-greenhouse pollution.

If “clean coal” is the energy of the future, it should prosper without special government help. A simple price on carbon emissions would reward the cheapest sources of clean energy. Such a policy would be “all of the above” in the sense that all technologies have an equal opportunity to compete, based on cost and cleanliness. If coal doesn’t want to play on that basis, it tells you something about how unattractive clean coal really is.

Last, what about enforcement of the law? Hmmm??? How many folks are being paid to look the other way while our fellow citizens smother to death?