
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 17, 1991                   TAG: 9103170111
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: D-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BLACK LUNG BENEFITS DISPUTED/ MINERS: MINE AIR STILL TOO DIRTY

In the 1960s people learned that the hazards of coal mines were not limited to explosion and collapse. Mines were bad for breathing. Coal dust in underground mines could cause black lung disease, the generic term for any one of several progressive, often fatal respiratory ailments including emphysema and silicosis.

In acknowledging that employers often bore responsibility, Congress in 1969 set up a disability program, financed initially by the government and later by taxes on the coal industry as well. Half a million black-lung victims have been granted benefits over the years, and about 260,000 get them now.

But fewer receive benefits, currently $387.10 to $774.10 a month, than otherwise might. Like most welfare aid, the black lung program came under scrutiny for suspected waste and abuse in the Reagan years, and eligibility rules were tightened.

As a result, 6 percent of 80,000 applicants from 1983 through 1990 have been granted benefits, compared with 30 percent over the four preceding years. And some wait five or 10 years for approval, so the money goes not to them but to their widows and children.

The decline in the percentage of applicants approved is attributable in part to better mine ventilation, say the Mine Safety and Health Administration and coal companies.

"It should be impossible to get black lung disease under current levels of exposure," said Tom Altmayer, a vice president of the National Coal Association, an industry group.

But miners, their unions and Eastern coal country Democrats in Congress argue mine air is often dirtier than regulations allow and that black lung disease is by no means a thing of the past.

Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., has written the most comprehensive of several bills addressing the issue. Among other things, it would restore the broader eligibility criteria of earlier years and reopen the cases of people who were denied benefits. Estimates of the annual cost range from tens of millions of dollars up to more than $1 billion.

In the face of tight budgets, a veto-ready White House and the priority that congressional Democrats have attached to other issues, Rahall's and similar proposals face slow going.

But new evidence that air in many of the nation's 4,645 coal mines contains more coal dust than government standards allow, and that many mine operators have been disguising that fact, is giving the initiatives a boost.

The Justice Department and the mine-safety agency say only that they are investigating other companies. But from 1981 through 1990, the mine safety agency says it collected $2.9 million in fines for hundreds of dust-sampling violations.

Jim Weeks, a health and safety expert at the United Mine Workers of America, says safety technicians have told him of evidence showing tampering at 472 mines from March through September last year.

Companies test air in mines with a device consisting of a battery-powered pump that draws air through a 1-inch plastic disk containing a wafer of filter paper. The devices are placed at various locations in mines for five consecutive daily work shifts every two months.

After a disk in a miner's air-sampler has been exposed to mine air for eight hours, the disk is sent to an MSHA office in Pittsburgh. There it is weighed to determine the amount of coal dust accumulated, out of sight, inside the sealed disk.

by CNB