Appalachia sees highest rate of Black Lung Disease in 50 years from silica dust

Appalachia is facing its highest rates of Black Lung Disease since 1978, reports Howard Burkes for The
Daily Yonder (republished from Public Health Watch). The statistics come from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, just as courts stall protections for coal miners.

“If you imagine one out of every three school teachers were getting an incurable lung disease because of something they were exposed to at work, the whole country would put their hands up screaming and stop whatever this exposure was immediately,” said Dr. Drew Harris, a medical director at Virginia’s Stone Mountain black lung clinics, which sees the most patients for black lung care and legal help in the country. “[But] this is largely impacting rural Appalachian folks that don’t have a voice, that don’t have a country to unite behind them.”

A troubling reality is that younger coal miners are falling ill because as Appalachia’s thickest coal seams were mined out, companies looked to smaller seams, which require digging through more rock that tends to be rich in silica. Mining through silica produces highly toxic dust that poses health risks to miners.

“Excessive inhalation of coal mine dust is the sole cause of [black lung] in coal miners,” the new NIOSH research letter said. “Substantial evidence shows that exposure to the respirable crystalline silica component of coal mine dust plays an important role in contemporary disease patterns.”

Even as mining companies comply with silica overexposure regulations 90-97% of the time, any exposure can lead to an influx of cases and lives affected. Stricter regulations for exposure have been suggested by NIOSH since 1974, but no bipartisan action had taken place. 

The Biden administration made exposure limits twice as restrictive and incorporated noncompliance fines in 2024. In response, mining companies sued and federal courts responded. “The Trump administration did not oppose the delay, announcing it too would put enforcement on hold.”

Bill to increase black lung benefits gets bipartisan local support, faces uphill climb in Congress

Black lung disease, as depicted in the above 

X-ray photo, has affected thousands of coal miners. 

Efforts to increase those benefits have been ongoing 

but have thus far failed. (Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com)

Efforts to increase benefits to coal miners suffering from pneumoconiosis, commonly known as “black lung disease,” have stalled in Congress despite bipartisan support at the local level across coal-producing states. Liam Niemeyer reports in the Kentucky Lantern that “dozens of county and city governments — comprised of both Republicans and Democratic leaders — across multiple Appalachian states have passed resolutions to urge an increase in benefits to support the approximately 25,000 recipients of black lung disability benefits.”

The Save Our Miners Act was introduced June 30. The Lantern story notes that it “would seek to increase benefits all the way back to the same funding level, relative to inflation, as miners received in 1969.” The average monthly benefit in 2026 is $794 or about two thirds of what the check would have been in 1970, adjusted for inflation. But while local officials from both parties sound the alarm, partisan ideologies on Capitol Hill have prevented change.

The trust fund pays miners when coal companies deemed responsible can’t be identified or have gone out of business. The revenue comes from a tax on mined coal. “That fund has taken on hundreds of millions of benefit liabilities because of coal mine bankruptcies, a larger trend seen with the rapid decline in the state’s coal mining industry,” Niemeyer reports.

Republicans are hesitant to support the increased spending, citing concerns about the solvency of the fund, and they accuse Democrats of waging a war on coal companies who pay into the fund. Democrats say their proposals would require only modest investment to provide the needed benefit increases.

The Save Our Miners Act is sponsored by Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) and co-sponsored by Rep. Chris DeLuzio (D-PA) and Rep. Morgan McGarvey (D-KY). It goes next to the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Opinion: The battle over data centers -- what they take, where the profits go and how some states show a better path

Data center developers have zoned in on rural America as
the best place to build. (Photo by R. Starnes Sr., Unsplash)

It was sold to Americans as the "cloud." Fluffy, white -- and most importantly, floating harmlessly in the heavens -- never to touch or interfere with life on Earth. But for all its promise, some say it is a lie. 

Lurking behind the cloud are data storage and computation machines that will eat up an inexhaustible amount of energy and water wherever they are built, writes Lawrence Winnerman for Blue Amp Media.

Stepping back, as cloud and AI developments began to take off, data center developers ran into a problem: Where could they find the land and resources to build their mega-scale, profit-generating AI machines? It didn't take them long to find the answer. They pinpointed the rich land and water resources in rural America as the ideal location, writes Jim Branscome in his opinion on Substack. 

Rural Americans, particularly those in Appalachia, who think data center developers are targeting their wide, open land and deep aquifers for their profits, are right. "The Pew Research Center, drawing on Data Center Map figures in early 2026, found that for the first time most planned data centers in the country are being built in rural areas rather than metropolitan ones; the South alone counted some 754 planned facilities against 1,209 existing, a 62% increase," Branscome explains. So far, the coalfields of Northern Virginia have the most planned or in-progress data centers. 

Pew Research graph

From public reporting, Branscome provides a list of Appalachian data center developments: 

• In West Virginia, the Monarch campus in Mason County, the Fundamental Data complex in Tucker County, the TransGas project in Mingo County, a $4 billion campus in Berkeley County, and a multibillion-dollar Google campus in Putnam County 
• In Southwest Virginia, proposals in Wise, Wythe, Pulaski and Montgomery counties, and a Google project in Botetourt
• In Pennsylvania, the four-gigawatt Homer City complex rising on a dead coal plant’s bones in Indiana County

“Every extraction in this region’s history has followed it — timber, then coal, then the dam-and-power complex, and now the machine," Branscome explains. "Each arrived speaking of jobs and progress. Each was welcomed by men who held office. Each took something that could not be replaced and left a bill that the people are still paying. The data center is not a break from that history. It is the latest chapter of it. . ."

And while Appalachia is "being asked to supply the land, the electricity, the natural gas, the water, and the tax forgiveness," the profits will not belong to those communities, Branscome writes. Instead, those riches will "belong to corporations headquartered far from [the] mountains."

As some rural communities have pushed back against data center build-outs, they have sought the support and protective advocacy of their lawmakers. Branscome adds, "Lay the states side by side and the moral is unmistakable. Where lawmakers chose to protect their citizens, they could. Where they chose to protect the industry, that too was a choice."

West Virginia’s leaders, and to a "growing degree Kentucky’s, have decided that the way to compete is to promise the fewest protections and ask the fewest questions. . . . It is precisely the logic that governed the coalfields for a hundred years," Brascome writes. In the name of economic development, elected officials are "signing over the people’s signed objections. This is not a new story. It is the oldest story we have, told in silicon.“

How the battle ends is yet to be decided. Branscome writes, "Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio have shown, each in its imperfect way, that a state can make the industry pay its own way, protect the ratepayer, demand transparency, and leave the decision with the people who live there. The technology is not the enemy; the terms are.

"A data center built on a reclaimed mine, paying its full freight for power and water, bound by an enforceable agreement, leaving real money in the county, and sited only where the community has agreed to have it — that would be something genuinely new in the history of these mountains."