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 in this case, with coal miners, we're talking about masks or respirators.
There's also a fraught history with the masks miners were issued in the past, including hundreds of lawsuits with settlements and multimillion-dollar verdicts.
And miners did not really like wearing these masks.
Some of the companies I worked for didn't have them at all, period.
Now, there are respirators and helmets available today that are more effective at screening out dust, but miners complain that they can limit vision or hearing or both.
That's not good in a dangerous work environment where it's critical to clearly communicate with coworkers and to see the movement of massive equipment around you.
So mines have massive fans that push through clean air that sweeps away coal and silica dust.
This robust ventilation is one thing that works if it's done right.
Mining machines also spray water as they cut into coal and rock that also tamps down dust if the sprays are working right.
The other thing mining companies can do is slow down the mining machines, which can result in less dust.
They could choose not to mine the thin seams with so much rock.
Of course, both of those options involve mining less coal and making less money.
Well, the Mine Safety and Health Administration is finally proposing to make the silica dust exposure limit twice as restrictive.
And it is proposing to directly regulate silica dust for the first time so that citations and fines are possible for exposing miners to dangerous levels of dust.
But the proposal appears to be weak on oversight and enforcement, on making sure that coal companies actually follow the regulations and actually protect miners.
And the agency does not include in this proposed regulation some of the key trends about complicated black lung that it has overlooked in the past.
It's not citing the data that shows thousands of continuing overexposures to silica dust.
It does incite the actual numbers of minors who are sick and dying from the disease.
These numbers are important because when agencies propose a new regulation, they have to sell it.
They have to sell it to the industry that's affected because they don't want to get sued and they don't want the industry to appeal to their friends in Congress to try to block it.
Showing 161–180 of 259 · page 9 of 13
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