Howard Berkes
speaker
259 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 9 Aug
Howard Berkes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We're going to die from it.
There's no cure for it.
I really appreciate being with you.
You know, it's actually still pretty common in coal country in Appalachia to hear about dads and grandfathers, uncles, friends who mined coal and then suffered and died from black lung disease.
It was typically an old miner's disease, and the deaths can be really horrific.
The lungs slowly build up with fibrotic tissue.
The affected portion of the lungs become hard, and eventually they no longer work.
It's often death by suffocation.
Back in 1969, 40,000 coal miners in West Virginia staged a wildcat strike over black lung disease, and that prompted Congress to enact a new mine safety law.
It put tough limits on exposure to coal dust, and it made a big difference.
The rate of black lung disease plunged 90% in the next couple of decades.
Actually, the year before, in 2010, there was this terrible coal mine explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia.
29 coal miners were killed.
It was catastrophic then.
Dozens of mine rescuers, EMTs, and ambulances were mobilized.
This was the worst mine disaster in 40 years.
A year later, in 2011, a report about the disaster was released, and it contained a one-page sidebar.
And that sidebar said that the autopsies on the miners who were killed in the explosion revealed an extraordinarily high rate of black lung disease,
One of the miners who died in the explosion was named Gary Wayne Quarles.
He was just 33 years old at the time.
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