zatezalo rhino

=<div>evil mofo?</div><div>
</div><div>epic fail 2 black lung see zat
<div></div><div>guk --> desmog 5/20</div><div>
</div><div>...fossil fuel companies have taken at least $50 million in taxpayer money they probably won’t have to pay back, according to a review of coronavirus aid meant for struggling small businesses by the investigative research group Documented and the Guardian.A total of $28 million is going to three coal mining companies, all with ties to Trump officials, bolstering a dying American industry and a fuel that scientists insist world leaders must shift away from to avoid the <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/20/the-climate-crisis-explained-in-10-charts" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">worst</a> of the climate crisis.The other $22 million is being paid out to oil and gas services and equipment providers and other firms that work with drillers and coal miners.Melinda Pierce, the legislative director for the Sierra Club, said: “The federal money Congress appropriated should be going to help small businesses and frontline workers struggling as a result of the pandemic, not the corporate polluters whose struggles are a result of failing business practices and existed long before COVID-19 entered the public lexicon.”More than 40 Democratic lawmakers have <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/492991-democrats-say-coronavirus-stimulus-should-not-bail-out-fossil-fuel?utm_campaign=Bailout&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=87229767&hsenc=p2ANqtz-T0usMF1JIzmKzk4V6u3gpSocO0p8_Z8R4nHhJJRsSDTiCqDZi4fHWH2Q-H2zOK-oLJ_8SgiC8DYAyd7_8zP4kz_P_9w&hsmi=87229767" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">argued</a> that fossil fuel companies should not get any assistance under the coronavirus aid package.Some Democrats have also warned the forgivable loans being made under Congress’ Paycheck Protection Program could be a transparency disaster.Banks and lending institutions are distributing the money, so the government says it cannot track recipients in real time. The loans revealed have been made public only through news reports and securities filings by publicly traded companies, although the Federal Reserve has <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/23/fed-to-disclose-bailouts-monthly-204953" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">committed</a> to issuing monthly reports.So far, it’s clear the program is not working as intended. The funds are aimed at helping small businesses to keep paying their employees and covering other recurring expenses during the economic downturn. But they have been exploited by large companies forced to return the money amid a public outcry, including the Los Angeles Lakers, Shake Shack, and Ruth’s Chris Steak House.The industry aid comes as the Trump administration is reportedly considering a broader <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-29/trump-said-to-be-briefed-on-emergency-aid-for-oil-industry?utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_content=politics&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-politics&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">bailout</a> for oil and gas corporations, which were <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/business/energy-environment/coronavirus-oil-companies-debt.html?utm_campaign=Bailout&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=87229767&hsenc=p2ANqtz-T0usMF1JIzmKzk4V6u3gpSocO0p8_Z8R4nHhJJRsSDTiCqDZi4fHWH2Q-H2zOK-oLJ_8SgiC8DYAyd7_8zP4kz_P_9w&hsmi=87229767" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">already under pressure</a> before the coronavirus and have watched oil prices <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/30/covid-19-crisis-demand-fossil-fuels-iea-renewable-electricity" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">nosedive</a> because of a global price war and low demand for gasoline. The U.S. government could make loans to oil and gas companies, essentially making taxpayers investors in the industry.The Federal Reserve on Thursday also announced changes to its lending rules that could help indebted petroleum firms.“The idea that oil workers are getting a paycheck is great,” said Jamie Henn, a spokesman for the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign who co-founded the environment group 350.org. “The worry is that the money’s going to the top and not going to filter down.”The $50 million already paid to fossil fuel companies is a small fraction of the the $2.1 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the Cares Act. But the total assistance to the industry is likely much larger than can currently be tallied and will continue to grow.Environmental advocates and oversight experts tracking the funds say it’s impossible to count how much of the money will assist fossil fuels, including because some firms provide services across multiple industries.“All of this is voluntary disclosures by the companies,” said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher with Documented. “No matter what, it’s going to be an incomplete picture of what’s going on.”Coleman said in many cases the fossil fuel companies getting aid have made bad investments and “now they’re going to come crawling hat in hand and say: look at what the coronavirus did to us.”Among the coronavirus aid recipients is Hallador Coal, an Indiana-based coal mining <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.eenews.net/stories/1062934367" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">company</a> that hired Donald Trump’s former environment chief Scott Pruitt as a lobbyist. The company’s former <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/04/21/this-coal-company-with-ties-trump-administration-just-got-10-million-small-business-loan/" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102); text-decoration-line: none;">government relations</a> director now works at the energy department. Hallador is taking $10 million to fund two months of payroll and other expenses.Coal mining company Rhino Resources, which was formerly run by Trump’s Mine Safety and Health Administration head, David Zatezalo, is receiving $10 million.Coal firm Ramaco Resources, whose CEO, Randy Atkins, is on the energy department’s <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.energy.gov/fe/national-coal-council" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">National Coal Council</a>, is getting $8.4 million.The U.S. coal industry has been in steep decline, driven out of the market by cheap natural gas and environmental concerns. Trump campaigned on putting coal miners back to work, and his agencies have unsuccessfully explored ways to bail out coal companies, which are seeing their <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/us-coal-mining-employment-hits-new-low-at-the-end-of-2019-may-go-lower-in-2020-57173047" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">lowest employment levels</a> in modern history. The Trump administration has also rescinded nearly all of the environment and climate protections the fossil fuel industry has opposed.Fossil fuel companies can also take advantage of tax benefits under the coronavirus legislation, including deferring payment of social security and medicare taxes.The Missouri-based Peabody <a data-component="auto-linked-tag" data-link-name="auto-linked-tag" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/energy" target="blank">Energy</a> coal company has said it will speed up collecting an alternative minimum tax refund of $24 million to 2020 and defer $18 million of owed taxes.U.S. taxpayers already subsidize the fossil fuel industry at roughly $20 billion a year, according to <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">conservative estimates</a>.The Center for International Environmental Law has <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.ciel.org/reports/pandemic-crisis-systemic-decline/?utm_campaign=Bailout&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=87229767&hsenc=p2ANqtz-T0usMF1JIzmKzk4V6u3gpSocO0p8_Z8R4nHhJJRsSDTiCqDZi4fHWH2Q-H2zOK-oLJ_8SgiC8DYAyd7_8zP4kz_P_9w&hsmi=87229767" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">accused</a> the oil, gas, and plastics industries of “exploiting the crisis by aggressively lobbying for massive bailouts and special privileges in a desperate attempt to revive an oil and gas industry already in decline.”The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis argues that federal lending to the oil and gas sector would be “a <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://ieefa.org/ieefa-commentary-federal-lending-to-the-oil-and-gas-sector-would-be-a-complete-waste-of-money/?utm_campaign=Bailout&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=87229767&hsenc=p2ANqtz-T0usMF1JIzmKzk4V6u3gpSocO0p8_Z8R4nHhJJRsSDTiCqDZi4fHWH2Q-H2zOK-oLJ_8SgiC8DYAyd7_8zP4kz_P_9w&hsmi=87229767" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">complete waste of money</a>,” because it wouldn’t fix the industry’s underlying financial problems.Oil industry lobbyists have pushed for changes at the Federal Reserve to let companies with large amounts of debt use its Main Street Lending Program and borrow to pay off existing loans.In an April 15 letter to the Federal Reserve, the oil trade group the Independent Petroleum Association of America asked for the new provisions, saying “oil and natural gas producers are not looking for a government handout; they are seeking a bridge to help survive this economic disruption.”Environmental advocates say the move would disproportionately benefit <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://twitter.com/apark/status/1255914801441705984" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">small and mid-sized oil and gas companies</a>, such as Occidental Petroleum, which has <a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/e2t/c/M4WN9xSByy8W2h4c4y3TlKXr0/W2Zlk4k5NGGgsW2xJsm98R3pKK0/5/f18dQhb0S66Y2dYTs8V1xQ8M5xzGqPN1gCHKyBK5sNW6vWH7v3v46r4W40nP_C6SbbdbW1q1fwy1Xx3P3W210tVf6gq8SnW1phqS04NXDv6N1g_P_Kq0G-3W143krb98NYbyW5Q0yV83rs3ZKW5ZZhRx535GDQW5NlQM82CfYgTW7rGCsQ333KNkW6p5dZb5p5g84W2cWfwL9cjpVqW8Hk6MP8mjKrgW8PFzpG1NFxTlW2ppCHj2CXV3gW5VrFgx8pjr8HW2FNTDy5v2W-hW6svxgj4j7rspN1dvnVyFM9DtVRhfls4YRnx0N8bfdw14KdLRN3vK2m-5gg4mW8gwgt08_6wmMN2jpt05YZ8GcW6HKd_Z4JK7m2W37TVHz2MdTBRW6JtfKm74dqlXN24PWd5wjt01Vs423Y4DkPCGVPblJd1ZK42qW6gHRc42PmGhWV7nZyS3kfyHYW5wGmbf7SDyKQW2N92b45wJyVMW3Pj8tr4ngG44W30BhtN1xPKBvN3d7CJsmsLGZN1K0hcfX3xrFW5n0r1b8w-r1ZW2y_t-w162fvVW6-tCBh7BYyz3W4RnC597hc3h6W8rLJvW25NhLPN8xP9C81x5zVf8h0_LF03" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">nearly $80 billion in liabilities</a> on its balance sheet.Graham Steele, who directs the corporations and society initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business, called the situation the “classic disaster scenario where an opportunistic administration and industry is taking advantage of a crisis.”“And by the way, these are industries driving climate change. It’s both a bad financial proposition of the Fed and for taxpayers and a bad situation for the planet.”</div><div>=</div>
<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/an-epidemic-is-killing-thousands-of-coal-miners-regulators-could-have-stopped-it/">https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/an-epidemic-is-killing-thousands-of-coal-miners-regulators-could-have-stopped-it/</a>...We’ve got the bodies to prove it”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">NPR/FRONTLINE analyzed 30 years of data collected by federal regulators. They measure coal and silica dust where miners are working, and in 85 percent of the samples collected silica was at safe levels. But for that other 15 percent — which amounts to 21,000 dust samples — the data show that miners were exposed to excessive silica levels that violated federal health standards.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“That’s what causes disease, is the excessive exposure,” said Jim Weeks, an industrial hygienist and mine dust specialist at MSHA in the Obama administration and at the United Mine Workers union before that.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">An NPR review of mine dust regulations also found that federal enforcement does not directly address silica dust. If regulators measure too much silica in mine air, they place coal mines on much tougher limits for coal dust. That’s supposed to lower the silica exposure because coal and silica dust are often mixed.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But our investigation found that this indirect approach to controlling silica dust didn’t always work. MSHA’s 30 years’ dust sampling data show dangerous levels of silica or quartz where miners were working close to 9,000 times, even after coal mines were required to meet reduced limits for coal mine dust.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“They didn’t pay sufficient attention,” Weeks concludes. “And …we’ve got the bodies to prove it. I mean these guys wouldn’t be dying if people had been paying attention to quartz. It’s that simple.”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We found another example of overexposure in MSHA’s data. Each time federal mine inspectors issued citations for too much silica, which they did only a fraction of the time, they included an estimate of how many miners were affected. A review of those data shows more than 9,000 workers were exposed to silica levels that the regulations considered dangerous.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This excessive exposure to silica almost certainly happens more often than the data suggest. That’s because the data show only what happens when regulators are checking. The inspectors don’t check most of the time miners are working. Dust sampling takes place during regular mine inspections, which are scheduled four times a year in underground mines and twice a year at surface operations.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And until recently, sampling did not take place every hour miners worked or while mines were at full production.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Another finding of the NPR/FRONTLINE investigation: During some of the heaviest periods of exposure to silica, regulations allow miners to work without any monitoring for it at all.<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em auto 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.2; font-weight: normal; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A white rock dust</h3><p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Smith drove us past a pair of adjacent coal mines near his home in Canada, Ky., where he and other miners cut nothing but rock for months.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He was reluctant to pull over at the Rockhouse Energy Mine, even though it is closed, because security guards were watching from a parking lot. So he slowly passed by, describing work shifts that lasted 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for months, while cutting through solid rock. They used drills and mining machines to dig from one coal seam to another underground.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It wasn’t coal dust that you would see,” Smith said. “It was more of a white rock … dust.”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Smith and his coworkers were cutting what’s called a slope mine. It’s not really mining because there’s no coal involved. It’s all about cutting through mountainsides or blocks of rock to reach coal seams.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And because there’s no coal, it is considered development mining or construction. So sampling the air for toxic dust is not required, even though it is the most dangerous dust. Former MSHA officials told us some inspectors did it, but most did not.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Smith spent months cutting at least two slope mines in his career and believes that could explain his severe disease, even though he worked underground only 12 years.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Very possible,” he said, as we passed the mine’s abandoned conveyor belts that stretch over the road. “Most of my mining career I run a <a href="http://www.coaleducation.org/technology/Underground/continuous_miners.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">continuous miner</a>. I run a <a href="http://www.ritchiewiki.com/wiki/index.php/Roof_Bolter" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">roof bolter</a> also. And it’s very possible from all the hours we worked.”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Roof bolters operate a machine that pins roof supports into underground mines by drilling into solid rock. The machines have customized dust-control systems that suck away dust, but miners complain they get bursts of silica dust when they begin drilling and then later when they empty boxes that collect the dust that was sucked away during drilling.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The machine known as a continuous miner grinds up rock and coal. Dust is supposed to be controlled by massive ventilation fans that pump air through the mine, while heavy curtains channel that air to sweep away dust. Mining machines spray water as they cut, to tamp down dust.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">NPR interviewed 34 coal miners, all diagnosed with PMF and with 12 to 40 years in mining in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky. Sometimes the dust controls worked, most told us, and sometimes they didn’t.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px;">Federal law requires mining companies to offer dust masks or respirators to miners, but their use is not required. The law considers them a secondary and optional means of protection. Mines are required to provide air clear of dangerous dust, first and foremost.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Most of the sick and dying miners we interviewed who used dust masks said they often didn’t work.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[insert]<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/pdfs/75-120a.pdf?id=10.26616/NIOSHPUB75120" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">1974, NIOSH</a> first called for silica exposure limits twice as strict as those in place for coal miners and other workers. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that MSHA and others began to get serious about silica in coal mines.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">NPR and FRONTLINE obtained internal memos from the Clinton administration that showed alarm back then about clusters of advanced lung disease among coal miners as young as 40. MSHA sent out alerts to coal mining companies, warning about excessive exposure to silica dust and severe disease among miners. <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/95-106/pdfs/95-106.pdf?id=10.26616/NIOSHPUB95106" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">NIOSH again called for a silica exposure limit</a> that would be twice as tough, plus separate regulation of silica, as did a <a href="https://arlweb.msha.gov/REGS/FEDREG/NOTICES/1996MISC/96_30120.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">Department of Labor advisory committee</a>.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px;">“We started a national campaign first to raise awareness,” recalled Davitt McAteer, the assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health from 1994 to 2000.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“And it was that campaign that began to try to go after the silica requirements, raise the silica standard, and start on a separate path to control silica.”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px;">McAteer proposed a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/22/us/to-protect-miners-agency-to-tighten-rules-on-coal-dust.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">major overhaul of the dust sampling </a>system, which included other loopholes that permitted excessive exposures and inaccurate measurement of coal mine dust. But the effort encountered <a href="https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/special_reports/dust-reforms-stalled-by-years-of-inaction/article_64d26da0-83d1-595a-b097-414a251a35a0.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">stiff opposition</a> from the National Mining Association, the industry’s biggest lobbying group. The group sued over some elements of the plan and won.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“And then we ran out of time,” McAteer says. “And it’s something that’s unfortunate and put a lot of lives at risk.”<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em auto 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.2; font-weight: normal; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mine dust loopholes</h3><p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The regulation of silica dust wasn’t addressed during the administration of George W. Bush. During the Obama administration, mine safety advocate Joe Main was in charge of MSHA. Main was the longtime health and safety director at the mineworkers union and was on that Labor Department advisory committee that sought tougher regulation of silica back in 1996.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It was very obvious that that whole scheme that had been in place, that has left so many people sick, had to be changed and had to be fixed,” Main said.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He was <a href="https://www.msha.gov/news-media/special-initiatives/2016/09/28/respirable-dust-rule-historic-step-forward-effort-end" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">successful in closing major mine dust loopholes</a>, and he deployed new technology — dust sampling devices that measured coal dust in real time and helped make sampling more immediate, honest and accurate.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Main also made the exposure limit for coal mine dust tougher. But not the exposure limit for silica. He didn’t include any specific action on silica in his plan.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“A high tide rises all boats, as the saying goes,” Main explained. “We were going to get a benefit out of reducing overall dust exposure by what we did. [That] would not only lower coal mine dust but all dust that was part of that, including silica.”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But as the NPR/FRONTLINE data analysis shows, that formula failed thousands of times in the past. Lowering overall mine dust doesn’t necessarily reduce silica exposure to safe levels.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Monforton wonders why MSHA missed or ignored that part of the dust sampling data.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The fact that [NPR and FRONTLINE] went back for 30 years and looked at that data, and that data was available to the agency to assess as well, why wasn’t that problem recognized and rectified?” Monforton asked.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Main and other former MSHA officials say they thought they were doing what they needed to do to control silica.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Another agency did act on silica during the Obama administration. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded a 44-year review of silica exposure by enacting <a href="https://www.ehstoday.com/construction/us-court-appeals-rejects-all-industrys-challenges-silica-rule" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">tougher regulation of silica</a> dust.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">So now, every industry in the country that cuts rock, every industry except mining, has separate regulation of silica and an exposure limit twice as tough — the limit first recommended by NIOSH in 1974.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mining companies also knew they were cutting more quartz, creating more silica dust, and exposing miners to toxic dust. They were not only clearly warned by MSHA in the 1990s; they could see what was going on in their mines. Cutting rock slows mining machines and hurts production. And rock has to be removed from coal before it can be sold.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">So NPR and FRONTLINE wanted to know why mining companies didn’t act on their own to protect their workers.“Sure they could have done that,” responded Bruce Watzman, the National Mining Association’s top lobbyist for more than 30 years. “But … I’m not going to speculate on why they did or didn’t do what they chose.”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Our focus here is forward looking,” he said. “How do we prevent this in the future? I can’t answer for … what happened in the past.”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Watzman also asserted that the industry “is doing far better today than we did in the past, far better.”That assessment is based on <a href="https://www.msha.gov/msha-finds-nearly-all-respirable-coal-dust-samplings-comply-new-standards-lower-levels-respirable" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">new data from MSHA</a> following the new coal mine dust rules that began to take effect in 2014. Since then, mining companies have met exposure limits for coal and silica dust 99 percent of the time, the data show.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">MSHA cited the same data in a written statement to NPR and FRONTLINE.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The dust rule … has greatly reduced miners’ exposure to respirable dust,” wrote MSHA spokeswoman Amy Louviere, who also noted a sharp drop in the past 10 years in the percentage of mine dust samples with excess silica. Her statement did not address the NPR/FRONTLINE findings showing 30 years of excessive exposure to silica.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“MSHA continues to work diligently to protect coal miners’ health,” Louviere said.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But NIOSH epidemiologist Laney isn’t convinced the problem is solved.“They’re sampled very infrequently so we don’t know what’s going on with these miners when they’re not being sampled,” Laney said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time we don’t have information on that.”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That’s also the conclusion of a <a href="http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=25111" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">recent review</a> by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The new coal dust rules, the review committee said, “may not guarantee that exposures will be controlled adequately or that future disease rates will decline.”It will also take 10 years or more to know whether the new dust rules result in fewer cases of disease. It takes that long for disease to develop.<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em auto 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.2; font-weight: normal; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I said I suspect silica. I didn’t say it was”</h3><p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px;">MSHA declined multiple requests for interviews with top agency officials, including David Zatezalo, a former coal company executive and industry lobbyist who now heads the agency.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">So we showed up at West Virginia University in September where Zatezalo was scheduled to make a rare public appearance.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“You hear the phrase in health circles of progressive massive fibrosis, these sorts of things,” Zatezalo told an audience of mining engineering students, agency employees and industry executives and lobbyists.“To me, I believe those are all clearly silica problems,” Zatezalo continued. “Silica is something that has to be controlled.”<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But immediately after his speech, when NPR and FRONTLINE approached him, Zatezalo seemed suddenly uncertain about silica and PMF.“I don’t think that the science of the causation is that well-defined,” Zatezalo said.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px;">Asked about the direct link between silica and disease he described in his speech, Zatezalo became defensive.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px;">“No, I said I suspect silica. I didn’t say it was. … I think until such time as you figure out what it is you don’t really know,” Zatezalo responded.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px;">So far, under Zatezalo, MSHA has no plan to address a tougher limit for silica dust or separate regulation of silica in coal mines.In the meantime, the PMF epidemic continues. The biggest cluster of disease ever reported, according to NIOSH, continues to build at the Stone Mountain Health Services black lung clinics in Southwestern Virginia. The clinics continue to diagnose new cases at the rate of about a dozen a month.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I’m not seeing any slowdown whatsoever,” says Ron Carson, who directed the Stone Mountain clinics for 28 years before retiring earlier this year.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I think that America needs to know that these miners … have paid a price,” Carson added, his voice breaking. Carson cited the nation’s decades of dependence on coal for power and steel production.<p style="margin: 1em auto; font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“They paid a price so that we can have luxury and … so many have died. Thousands have died.”<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em auto 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.2; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Every one of us is either crippled or dead”</h3><div>...</div>Smith pulled up to another mine, which was also closed but had no guards in its weed-choked parking lot. This Solid Energy mine, along with the Rockhouse mine he drove by earlier, was operated by Massey Energy, now a defunct company with <a href="https://www.npr.org/series/131960177/massey-mine-investigation" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">deadly mine disasters</a> in its history and a <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/09/10/221161240/former-massey-exec-gets-42-months-in-mine-disaster-case" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline; transition: background-color 0.25s ease 0s;">CEO who went to prison</a> for conspiracy to violate mine safety laws.Smith got out and walked up to a rusted fence with a padlock. A ball cap shaded his face. Sunglasses hid his tears.“It’s [been] eating at me for the last two years,” he said, “that I’m going to die over this. … Of all the things that could’ve killed me while I did work there, the rockfalls and all that stuff, I lived through all of that. And I find out years later I’m going to die over black lung. And it’s heartbreaking.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Smith then mentioned his wife and two daughters and wondered what will happen to them when he’s gone. He wondered about the grandchildren he may never see. His voice breaking again, he talked about the excitement of being a young miner, about the hope and promise of good pay and good lives.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“We was all young and strong and stout and they took advantage of us. Every one of us is either crippled or dead. We was all young men,” he said, crying softly.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Back at his house in a narrow valley — a holler — in Canada, Ky., Smith pointed to a family cemetery on a knoll at the edge of the lawn he has so much difficulty mowing. It features a single gravestone with bright flowers and the names of his parents. Behind it, Smith told us, in the shade, is the burial plot he has picked out for himself. He’s 46 years old.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.725em; width: auto; max-width: 660px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">NPR’s Adelina Lancianese, Barbara Van Woerkom, Katie Lawrie and Cat Schuknecht; Elaine McMillion Sheldon of FRONTLINE; Benny Becker and Jeff Young of Ohio Valley ReSource; and Ellen Smith of Mine Safety and Health News contributed to this story.=</div><div>=
<div>...icn  7/18</div><div>
</div><div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">In 2014, MSHA issued a rule that lowered allowable exposure limits for respirable coal mine dust and required the use of different monitoring technology aimed at reducing mine workers' dust exposure. But the National Academies report said even that rule won't be enough to protect miners. It called for a "fundamental shift ... in the way mine operators" work to eliminate black lung.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">The Trump administration last year said it was reconsidering that 2014 rule as part of its effort to roll back regulations.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">On July 6, MSHA announced a new study of the Obama-era rule. But at the same time, Assistant Secretary David G. Zatezalo, a former miner and coal industry executive, insisted "MSHA has no intention of rolling back the protections afforded to coal miners under the final dust rule."</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Even if a miner gets diagnosed with black lung disease, there's no guarantee he or she will receive benefits they are entitled to under federal law.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">InsideClimate News, as part of it Choke Hold series, described how some companies have engaged high-profile law firms that in turn employ a cadre of doctors, setting the stage for protracted battles of conflicting medical opinions. Miners, meanwhile, are often overmatched because few lawyers will take their cases. Attorneys are barred from charging plaintiffs fees, meaning they receive modest compensation, and only if they win.</div><div> <a href="https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-brings-back-coal-miner-jobs-deaths-soar">https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-brings-back-coal-miner-jobs-deaths-soar</a><div>Newsweek</div><div id="body" itemprop="articleBody">Coal miner Rodney Osborne was towards the end of a double shift at the Gateway Eagle Mine in West Virginia in June when the 32-year-old was <a href="http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4059845-Rockwell-Fatal-State-Report-Sept-2017.html">crushed to death</a> by a rotating drill. A subsequent investigation revealed that Osborne, who had been working at the Boone County mine for just five months, had not received adequate safety training on the device.The state's junior senator, Shelley Moore Capito, said she was heartbroken by the news of Osborne's death, then reminded her constituents that "West Virginia coal miners like Rodney selflessly put so much on the line to ... power our state."Osborne was not the only miner who paid the ultimate price. In all, 15 miners died since President Donald Trump took office in 2017—up from eight in all of 2016.This is the dirty secret of Trump’s much-touted effort to help the coal industry. The president has been quick to celebrate the <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-coal-jobs/exclusive-trumps-coal-job-push-stumbles-in-most-states-data-idUSKBN1F81AK">771 workers that were hired in 2017</a>, but the administration's push to support the dirtiest of fossil fuels has been accompanied by a surge in deaths of the workers who procure it. The 2017 death toll was the highest since 2014—when there were roughly 60,000 more miners at work in America.Mining advocates put some of the blame on the president, whose support for mine owners has led to relaxed safety enforcement, scores of inexperienced new miners and inconsistent commitment to training programs and courses. In the meantime,  Republicans in the House want to cut mine safety budgets further, and Trump, who says he supports coal miners, has been silent on a Senate bill that would shore up miners' pensions.“When you look at the Trump administration policies and his ratcheting back of regulations ... this administration has no moral compass about ethics,” said Joe Main, who ran the Mine Safety and Health Administration under President Barack Obama. “Companies now think we have a less aggressive sheriff in town.”Trump’s support for coal is part of a larger economic vision of deregulation—one that he says is responsible for the stock market’s recent boom and higher gross domestic product.“The stock market is way up (because) we took off restrictions and we took off regulations,” he said on January 16.But for coal miners, those restrictions and regulations can be the difference between life and death.A majority of the 15 victims were new to their job site and seven deaths involved miners with one year or less experience at the mine where they died, data show.“There’s been a whole new generation of people hired into coal industry, younger workers who haven’t had the benefit of enough training,” said Phil Smith, spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America. “But companies are resistant to taking time to take them off production to train them.”The results can be deadly—and not only for new workers.In May, Luches “Big Lou” Rosser, 44, was traveling on an electric locomotive deep in a West Virginia mine when his head hit a steel beam, killing him. <a href="https://www.msha.gov/data-reports/fatality-reports/2017/fatality-7-may-18-2017/final-report">The official investigation into his death</a> found that Rosser, a husband and father of three, hadn’t been properly trained on the machine. He knew how it worked, but was never briefed on safety procedures.“Showing someone how to push a button isn’t a training,” said Smith.<a href="https://www.msha.gov/data-reports/fatality-reports/2017/fatality-10-july-25-2017/final-report">In July</a>, Andrew Oxenrider, a 28-year-old with seven years on the job, exited his Caterpillar D9L bulldozer on the slope of a refuse bank. Oxenrider had not been trained in proper parking procedures for that model, and the bulldozer rolled backwards, killing him before falling to the bottom of the embankment. And then there's the case of Osborne, who disabled his drilling machine's emergency shutoff system so he could make a minor alignment adjustment—only to get pinned between the cutter head and the coal seam, suffering "fatal crushing injuries," state investigators revealed.State officials issued seven citations to Rockwell Mining, including two that carry a $10,000 fine. But so far, the Trump administration's mine safety agency has only recommended education.Coal mining is inherently dangerous, with zero margin for error even under the best conditions. The average height of a mine tunnel is about three and a half feet, so miners crawl or duck-walk while avoiding big, mobile electrical equipment. Even a small lapse in safety can be catastrophic.“I have been to too many mine explosions and funerals,” said West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat. “Too many miners have died for us to get to where we are today. We can not go backwards on safety.”Last year’s death count suggests a step back. For the first seven months of the Trump administration, the top position at MSHA remained vacant. Congressional aide and White House adviser Wayne Palmer was finally put in charge of the agency in late August, but he had no experience in mining or mine safety.Under Palmer's oversight,  <a href="https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-09-12/pdf/2017-19381.pdf">MSHA proposed</a> changing language about when safety inspections must be done at metal and non-metal mines. Instead of mandating the inspection before laborers enter a mine, operators could do the check "as miners begin their work," a wording that allows mine owners to start a shift before an inspection, putting miners in potentially dangerous situations.The National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association, an industry group that <a href="https://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=getFilingDetails&filingID=E2732CFD-D690-4A8B-82B9-FA7F54FA788B&filingTypeID=60">spent $300,000 to lobby for the rule change</a> and featured former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski as the keynote speaker <a href="https://www.aggregateresearch.com/news/trump-campaign-manager-speaks-association-convention/">at its annual convention</a>, was pleased with the new language, <a href="https://www.nssga.org/msha-proposes-major-changes-workplace-exams-rule/">writing that</a> "it appears that MSHA is willing to listen to the industry."In the fall, Trump finally appointed David Zatezalo, a retired coal mining executive, to run the Mine Safety and Health Administration, but Zatezalo has a questionable commitment to miners’ welfare, advocates say.His Rhino Eastern Eagle mine in West Virginia, for example, was hit with multiple violations in 2010 and 2011. All together, Rhino mines <a href="https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/prog.php?parent=rhino-resource-partners">have been issued</a> more than $2.1 million in fines for 162 workplace safety or health violations since 2000.Now Zatezalo runs an agency charged with creating training initiatives, monitoring accidents, and, most important, carrying out safety inspections at mines several times a year. Critics say he is a pawn of industry.“He’s a former coal operator, he’s not a mine safety advocate,” said Tony Oppegard, a mine safety lawyer.This week, Zatezalo told Newsweek that the Trump Administration is committed to the health and safety of America’s miners. "At MSHA, our focus is on ensuring that every miner is able to return safely to their loved ones at the end of every shift," he said. "To ensure the health and safety of miners, MSHA will continue to conduct inspections, and vigorously emphasize safety enforcement, education and training."<div class="icopyright-ad-placeholder">Such inspections and training are mandated by federal laws, but miner advocates are not convinced that Zatezalo will aggressively enforce them.“[Zatezalo] might call the district manager in Barbourville, Kentucky and tell them how he wants the agency to run,” said Oppegard. “Influential mine operators might also call MSHA directly and say, ‘Your inspector is giving me a hard time,’ the head would then call the district manager and say, ‘Lay off.’ That kind of stuff happens. It really does.”Main, the former MSHA director, said it is likely to get worse.“If the perception of the industry is these guys are backing off, it won’t play out well for safety,” he said. “Word gets around the industry, and you know what’s going to happen there.”Smith already sees alarming changes at MSHA, such as emphasizing a more-lenient safety check system <a href="https://www.msha.gov/news-media/press-releases/2017/06/19/msha-launches-compliance-assistance-initiative-address">called “compliance assistance</a>," which was a key program under President George W. Bush. If a compliance assistant visits a mine and notices a safety or health violation, he or she does not have the authority to issue a citation or fine, the way an official inspector would.They’re essentially tourists in a mine, said Smith.If such assistants see “something going on in a mine that’s bad or wrong, they can only ask the company to fix it,” he added. “The company can easily say, ‘No we don’t think it’s a problem’ and that’s the end of it. There’s no enforcement.”MSHA responded to the recent surge in deaths by increasing the size of its compliance assistance plan, a voluntary program for mine operators. Advocates say compliance assistance is typically most popular with deregulation Republicans.“You know one administration, a Democratic administration, is interested in enforcement and wants to do enforcement. And a Republican administration wants to do compliance assistance,” Celeste Monforton, a former MSHA official and occupational health researcher, <a href="http://ohiovalleyresource.org/2017/09/01/coal-fatalities-rise-miner-deaths-increase-amid-low-coal-employment/">told Ohio Valley Resource</a> as mining deaths were on the rise last year.MSHA still uses official inspectors to carry out its mandatory inspections of all underground mines four times a year and all surface mines twice a year, and compliance assistance programs existed under Democratic presidents, as well. But the Trump administration has further dulled its teeth.<div class="icopyright-ad-placeholder">In the past, for example, all compliance assistants were to be accompanied by miners' representatives, but that is no longer the case, Smith said.Compliance assistance is “a complete waste of time,” added Oppegard. “You can directly link the reliance on this method of inspection with an increase in mining disasters and fatalities.”Annual miner deaths did increase twice during the Bush administration and were higher than under his successor, Barack Obama, who, in 2009, brought total miner deaths down below 20 for the first time in American history.Manchin expressed his own concerns, telling Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta <a href="https://www.manchin.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/MSHA%20Compliance%20Assistance%20Plan%20Letter.pdf?cb">in a letter</a> in September that MSHA inspectors were being instructed to remove their Representative Status credentials. Without the credentials, inspectors are not allowed to issue violations or remove miners from unsafe conditions."By separating the MSHA inspector from his or her credentials, one is essentially removing the ability of that MSHA inspector to issue an order to remove miners from the unsafe area and issue a violation which, particularly in the event of an imminent danger, can prove perilous," Manchin wrote.He also questioned why miners' representatives were no longer able to walk with compliance assistants. "This is particularly alarming because, no one is better suited to spot inconsistencies or unsafe conditions that the very people who work at the mine day in and day out," Manchin wrote.In the midst of the current mine safety crisis, Congress has proposed to cut MSHA’s coal enforcement budget by $11 million or 7 percent in the next fiscal year, leaving the agency with its lowest budget since FY 2013. Trump originally proposed to leave MSHA’s budget largely untouched but to reduce staffing by 42 positions.“The proposed budget cut is absolutely a move towards reducing the inspectors in the coal industry,” said Smith, adding that the plan will result in an agency staffed by “inexperienced inspectors.”“It takes five years to take an inspector up to speed,” Main added. “These are things that are really important to the life of a miner.”<div class="icopyright-ad-placeholder">Main said he worries about long-term leadership trickling out of the agency. “I was struggling to keep the agency functioning with the budget we had. Any additional cuts would hamper its ability to keep working,” he said.On-site injuries are only one aspect of the job. Sustained exposure to coal dust leads to a number of respiratory diseases, such as black lung disease, a progressive illness with no cure. More than 76,000 miners have died of black lung since 1968.Last month, Trump announced that MSHA was reconsidering rules intended to protect miners from breathing in the dust that causes black lung. And in his first days as president, Trump <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/2/2/14488448/stream-protection-rule">eliminated </a>an Obama-era rule blocking coal companies from dumping waste into streams. Miner advocates say these rule changes and others are all about appeasing mine owners, not workers.“They’re receiving a lot of complaints from coal operators that these rules are wasteful and useless, but that’s just false,” said Smith.MSHA says it is still taking comments about these rules, which went into effect in 2014 and aim to lower the concentration of respirable coal mine dust in the air, but Oppegard believes there’s only one reason to revisit them: “To raise the amount of dust miners can breathe in up again or to create other loopholes where operators could violate the standard.”Smith added that such air quality rules don't get in the way of industry profits and are simply necessary.“All of these regulations exist because someone was killed at work,” he said. “All those laws and regulations are written in a dead miner’s blood.”Manchin disagrees, claiming that there are just too many environmental rules. “Some of the stuff doesn’t make sense and makes it hard for people to do their job,” he said.Manchin is most upset with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who he says refuses to fund the pensions of 117,000 retired coal miners and dependents, who are at risk of losing their retirement funds due to the declining coal industry.A Senate bill <a href="http://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1105/cosponsors">has 21 co-sponsors</a>, but McConnell won't move it and Trump hasn't pushed the issue, Manchin said.<div class="icopyright-ad-placeholder">“We’re not talking big numbers here,” said Manchin. “Most pensions top out at $500 or $600 each month.”Manchin added that Trump has been a sympathetic ear on the issue, but has not acted. To Joe Main, that means Trump's rhetoric about caring for coal miners is empty.“I don't think I’ve ever heard the president talk about this pension,” he said. “These are people who produced the energy for this country to grow, they’re owed healthcare and a darn pension.”Trump’s efforts to prop up the coal industry are bucking decades of decline for the mineral, mostly due to a drop in global demand. Even with hundreds of new miners hired last year, the solar and wind industries still employed <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/clean-energy-more-jobs-than-fossil-fuels-32f615915399/">nearly three times</a> as many people as the coal industry. Half of America’s coal-fired plants have shuttered since 2010 and since Trump took office at least 17 plants have announced they’ll be closing shop. Coal isn’t cost-competitive with cheaper natural gas and it faces new competition as the cost of renewable energy continues to decline.Coal is a leading source of carbon emissions, and many nations are weaning themselves off the pollutant to fight climate change, even as officials in the United States deny some realities about global warming. Exports of coal fell 23 percent in 2015 and another 32 percent through the first half of 2016, though domestic production is slightly up, thanks to a growing economy under Trump.“I’m the one that saved coal,” the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/us/politics/trump-interview-excerpts.html">president said in a year-end interview</a>. “I’m the one that created jobs.”But on the homefront, Trump’s call to end the “war on coal” appealed to his base: wealthy, anti-regulation industry leaders and blue-collar workers nostalgic for a past they likely never knew. Trump’s support for coal countered Hillary Clinton, who was <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/may/10/context-hillary-clintons-comments-about-coal-jobs/">widely misquoted</a> during the campaign that she would intentionally “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”Trump carried eight of the top nine coal-mining states in the 2016 election</div></div><div>
<div><div>On  a party-line vote, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday confirmed longtime coal company executive David Zatezalo to be assistant secretary of Labor in charge of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.</div><div>
</div><div>Senators voted 52-46 in favor of President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Labor Department agency that’s in charge of enforcing the federal laws intended to protect the health and safety of the nation’s coal and other miners.</div><div>
</div><div>All 52 Senate Republicans voted to confirm Zatezalo. Forty-four Democrats and two independents voted against confirmation. Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., did not vote.</div><div>
</div><div>Zatezalo, 62, of Wheeling, is a former top executive of Rhino Resources, a coal company that clashed repeatedly with MSHA as the Obama administration tried to toughen safety and health enforcement in the nation’s mines following the deaths of 29 miners in an April 2010 explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine, in Raleigh County.</div><div>
</div><div>Among other things, Rhino, under Zatezalo’s leadership, was twice warned by MSHA that one of its mines was a scofflaw and faced a rare federal court lawsuit from regulators when another mine allegedly tipped off workers underground about an impending inspection.</div><div>
</div><div>“David Zatezalo is a mining industry executive who has made it clear that he cares more about corporate profits than workers,” said Washington Sen. Patty Murray, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “Instead of nominating an advocate for workers’ health and safety, President Trump nominated one of the industry’s worst offenders.”</div><div>
</div><div>HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said that Zatezalo is “uniquely qualified” for the MSHA post “because he knows the industry inside-out.”</div><div>
</div><div>Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that Zatezalo spent “a lifetime working in the mining industry” and that he “knows about various levels of the business, which would be an important asset as he works with operators, miners and inspectors to ensure that mining operations are safe for our nation’s mine workers.”</div><div>
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</div><div>Zatezalo is a mining engineer who started his career as a laborer for Consolidation Coal Co. He moved into management, running the coal operations of American Electric Power and then rising to the top of Rhino Resources.</div><div>
</div><div>He will take over MSHA at a time when coal-mining deaths are on the rise again, after years of reductions. So far in 2017, there have been 14 coal-mining deaths nationwide, compared to eight the prior year, according to MSHA.</div><div>
</div><div>Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., voted to confirm Zatezalo and said his comments during his confirmation hearing “made clear that he will continue to rigorously enforce our mine safety laws and will work to expedite the deployment of new technologies that will help make our mines safer.”</div><div>
</div><div>Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., voted against Zatezalo’s confirmation, saying that, after looking at his “qualifications and record of safety during his time in the coal industry,” he is “not convinced Zatezalo is suited to oversee the federal agency that implements and enforces mine safety laws and standards.”</div><div>
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</div><div>Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702, or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/special_reports/beyond_sago/senate-confirms-ex-coal-executive-zatezalo-to-run-mine-safety/article_9c6ff79c-3aca-52e3-811f-7aa6218e8359.html">https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/special_reports/beyond_sago/senate-confirms-ex-coal-executive-zatezalo-to-run-mine-safety/article_9c6ff79c-3aca-52e3-811f-7aa6218e8359.html</a></div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>sharply divided Senate committee on Wednesday advanced the Trump administration’s pick to run the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, even as new details emerge about the conduct of one of the companies where MSHA nominee David Zatezalo was an executive.On a party-line 12-11 vote, the <a href="https://www.help.senate.gov/about/members" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions</a> consented to Zatezalo’s nomination and sent the matter to the full Senate. The committee’s 12 Republicans all voted to confirm Zatezalo. The 10 Democrats and one Independent all voted against confirmation.Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., called Zatezalo “uniquely qualified for this role,” while the ranking minority member, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said Zatezalo had not convinced her that he would “stand up to President Trump as he continues to roll back worker protections.”<div id="tncms-region-article_instory_top" class="tncms-region hidden-print" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Zatezalo, 62, of Wheeling, is a mining engineer who started his career as a laborer for Consolidation Coal Co. He quickly moved into management, running the coal operations of American Electric Power, and then rising to the top of Rhino Resources.Trump’s nomination of Zatezalo has been under scrutiny because of <a href="https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/special_reports/beyond_sago/trump-msha-nominee-could-face-questions-about-safety-record/article_a5543973-3634-552b-a191-adec9af28447.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">mining deaths that occurred at operations</a> where Zatezalo was a mine manager, company official or corporate executive, and because, while Zatezalo was a top executive there, Rhino Resources <a href="https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/trump-nominates-former-coal-exec-to-run-msha/article_40c71218-785f-5cd2-a1db-fc8176fde6b7.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">was the subject of some of the toughest enforcement MSHA</a> can levy.Agency officials twice <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3984028-Rhino-Eastern-POV-Letter-2011.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">warned Rhino</a> that one of its West Virginia mines was a safety scofflaw and took the unusual step of <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3984019-MSHA-Rhino-Injunction-Brief.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">suing Rhino</a> when company officials tipped off workers about an impending inspection.Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., <a href="http://newslibrary.cnpapers.com/cgi-bin/texis/search/+mOeG00ixFqGiwGmaAnDaSwBnSwcdqzmhwwwmFqr_MdDBr5hFq0eRGlnGeRRHmqwceRkHmGprveRDxxLo5eRS3t+XWXtFqwrFqw/storypage.html?id=59ce12219" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">has said</a> he will vote against confirming Zatezalo when the matter reaches the Senate floor.Sen. Shelley Moore Capito-R-W.Va., has not indicated how she plans to vote. Neither Manchin nor Capito serves on the Senate HELP Committee that advanced Zatezalo’s nomination. The Senate currently has 52 Republicans, 46 Democrats and two Independents, both of whom caucus with the Democrats.The vote on Wednesday came just hours after the nonprofit news organization ProPublica <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/trumps-mine-safety-nominee-ran-coal-firm-cited-for-illegal-employment-practices" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">posted a story</a> that outlined more details of a case in which Rhino’s Rhino Eastern LLC arm <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4112279-EEOC-Rhino-Complaint.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">was sued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission</a> after the agency concluded that the company “subjected a mine foreman to pervasive national origin discrimination and retaliated against him for his opposition to the harassment.”After hiring Michael Jagodzinski as a mine foreman in May 2011, Rhino and its supervisors and other employees subjected Jagodzinski to taunts and slurs based on his Polish ancestry, the EEOC lawsuit alleged. The company allowed graffiti with ethnic and sexual slurs to be displayed on mine walls and elsewhere in the workplace, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit said that one employee took Jagodzinski’s cellphone without his permission and used it to take a photo of his own testicles.Despite Jagodzinski’s complaints about this hostile work environment, Rhino failed to prevent or correct the harassment, the EEOC said. Instead, the company falsely accused Jagodzinski of sexual harassment as a pretext to firing him in March 2012, the EEOC lawsuit said.The incidents alleged by the EEOC occurred while Zatezalo was a top Rhino official, and <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4112316-EEOC-Zatezalo-Depo-Notice.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">court records</a> indicate that the government planned to take a sworn statement from Zatezalo as part of the case.The lawsuit itself was filed in late September 2014, about two months before Zatezalo left the company. In January 2016, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger approved <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4112280-Rhino-Consent-Decree.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">a settlement</a> through which Rhino would pay $62,000 and, under a five-year consent decree implement a new policy prohibiting harassment, discrimination and retaliation.The EEOC lawsuit was mentioned by Murray during an opening statement <a href="https://www.help.senate.gov/hearings/department-of-labor-and-national-labor-relations-board-nominations" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">at Zatezalo’s Oct. 4 confirmation hearing</a>. News releases were issued by the EEOC about <a href="https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/9-30-14f.cfm" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">the filing of the lawsuit</a> and the <a href="https://www1.eeoc.gov//eeoc/newsroom/release/1-20-16.cfm?renderforprint=1" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">settlement of the case</a>.</div><div></div><div><div class="asset-related-siblings inline-asset" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 40px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="asset-related-article sibling-article inline-asset" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 40px;"><article id="card-summary-35920e3f-9ce7-5b1a-a616-2dc64bf145ef" class="clearfix card summary has-image image-top card-section-news-us-and-world" style="box-sizing: border-box; width: 236.656px; margin: 0px; position: relative; border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);"><div class="card-container" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px;"><div class="card-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 10px; margin: 0px;"><div class="card-headline" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px;"><h3 class="" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 500; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px 0px 5px;"><a href="https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/us_and_world/trump-msha-pick-advances-despite-more-details-about-company-s/article_35920e3f-9ce7-5b1a-a616-2dc64bf145ef.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">Trump MSHA pick advances despite more details about company's conduct</a></h3></div><div class="card-lead" style="box-sizing: border-box;">A sharply divided Senate committee on Wednesday advanced the Trump administration’s pick to run the federal Mine Safety and Health Administrat…</div></div></div><div class="clearfix" style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></article></div></div><div class="asset-related-siblings sibling-headlines inline-asset" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 40px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><ul class="headline-list list-unstyled" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; list-style: none;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-top: 4px; padding-bottom: 4px;">---</li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-top: 4px; padding-bottom: 4px;"><a href="https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/us_and_world/msha-pick-quizzed-on-blankenship-black-lung-safety-record/article_4b4cf37d-8068-5701-b8d1-1085b1f329f5.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">MSHA pick quizzed on Blankenship, black lung, safety record</a></li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-top: 4px; padding-bottom: 4px;"><a href="https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/special_reports/beyond_sago/trump-msha-nominee-could-face-questions-about-safety-record/article_a5543973-3634-552b-a191-adec9af28447.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none;">Trump MSHA nominee could face questions about safety record</a></li></ul></div></div><div></div><div><div>WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans voted on Wednesday to confirm the former leader of a coal company with a record of serious safety violations to become the country's top regulator of miner health and safety.</div><div>
</div><div>On a 52-46 party-line vote, the Senate approved David Zatezalo, President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Mine Health and Safety Administration (MSHA). Under Trump, MSHA has already moved to roll back and delay Obama-era regulations intended to protect workers in one of the country's most dangerous industries, and Zatezalo’s leadership of a Kentucky coal-mining firm has raised further concerns among worker-safety advocates.</div><div>
</div><div>RELATED: Trump delays, proposes rolling back protections for mine workers</div><div>
</div><div>While he was chairman and CEO of Rhino Resources, MSHA sent two "pattern of violations" notices to the company for running afoul of federal health and safety standards. The notices are serious citations that MSHA issues to companies "that pose the greatest risk to the health and safety of miners," according to the agency.</div><div>
</div><div>"Instead of nominating an advocate for workers’ health and safety, President Trump nominated one of the industry’s worst offenders," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said on Tuesday, when the Senate advanced Zatezalo’s nomination to a vote. "David Zatezalo is a mining industry executive who has made it clear he cares more about corporate profits than workers."</div><div>
</div><div>Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a leading advocate for the coal-mining industry, joined his party in voting against Zatezalo.</div><div>
</div><div>"After reviewing his qualifications and record of safety during his time in the coal industry, I am not convinced that Mr. Zatezalo is suited to oversee the federal agency that implements and enforces mine safety laws and standards," Manchin said in September when he first came out against the nominee.</div><div>
</div><div>At his Senate confirmation hearing in October, Zatezalo said he dismissed the local managers who were responsible for the violations that lead to the MSHA citations, which the agency issued shortly before and after a Rhino miner was killed by falling rocks in 2011.</div><div>
</div><div>Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., defended Zatezalo on the Senate floor, describing him as "uniquely qualified" to run MSHA given his broad experience in the industry. "He has spent his career in mining, starting as a miner. He is a member of a union," Alexander said on Tuesday.</div><div>
</div><div>The retired Rhino executive has received mixed reviews from labor unions representing miners, who were heartened to hear Zatezalo's promises to continue inspections and enforce certain safety regulations during his confirmation hearing, but who remain concerned about his leadership of MSHA given Rhino's track record.</div></div><div>
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