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
And they obtained 30 years of sampling data going back to 1986.
Now, we cast a wider net and went to even more black lung clinics to get a more complete count of cases.
We were trying to definitively show how many dangerous silica dust exposures had occurred, what caused them, what the Mine Safety Agency did or not do in response, and how many more cases were out there.
Okay, stick with me here for a minute because it's a lot of numbers, but it shows how such important details were overlooked.
First, we documented another 1,000 cases of complicated black lung, with a total then of over 2,000 cases since 2010.
Second, we documented 21,000 instances of overexposure to silica dust since 1986, exposures that exceeded the federal health standard.
Third, we found that the agency's response to excessive silica dust exposures failed to lower the dust to safe levels close to 9,000 times.
Fourth, we obtained government documents that showed that the Mine Safety Agency had identified a cluster of advanced lung disease in coal miners back in 1996.
And officials at the time connected that cluster of disease to exposure to silica dust.
They even sent out warnings to the mining industry.
But nothing was done then or since to force protective action on silica dust.
more shock, more horror, and a rare acknowledgement by a former top official at the Mine Safety Agency.
Celeste Monfortin was a top aide in the agency during the Clinton administration in the 1990s.
Well, for one thing, they didn't look at their own data.
They also ignored repeated recommendations by NIOSH going back to 1974, which called for a silica exposure limit that was twice as tough.
That was also recommended by a special labor department commission on black lung in 1996.
This is a subject we could talk a lot about.
I'll just give you the highlights.
And it starts with a fundamental principle in workplace safety, which is companies are supposed to provide, first and foremost, a safe working environment.
They're not supposed to be able to get away with having an unsafe environment, providing some kind of protection, supplemental protection, it's called.
Showing 141–160 of 259 · page 8 of 13
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