Black lung threat increasing among coal miners

I come from miners. Learned early on that you cant trust a mine inspector or a coal operator.

This is like the industrial revolution

This is obscene. No way we should have this problem again.

“I think I’m getting the black lung, Pop.” – Derek Zoolander

With all due respect to Mr. Ted Koppel and his excellent work pointing out the real situation with coal mining, it left me with a lot of questions and possible solutions.
The lung damage problems has been known for generations, it's nothing new.
First the root of all the problems is that a lot of the mining companies, maybe all, don't follow the rules passed by the Government, if they did there would be much less of a problem. According to incognito miner named Roscoe the problem probably wouldn't exist.
The mining companies whether private or public are in it to make money. The private ones don't have to respond to anyone but the owners, the public ones always love to say that they have " a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for their share holders" to the workers is more like forget you, to be polite.
The Government has passed laws to protect the miners, sends inspectors to inspect the
mines, but the management, with the complacency of the miners, cleans its act for the inspection and goes right back to business as "normal' once the inspector leaves the mine.
When it comes to safety, complacency can be dangerous, in this case it kills.
Possible solutions:
Pollution monitoring stations are everywhere in the world, it's a very well developed field. Why the monitoring stations in the mines, where the filters are, through the internet they don't have the real time data sent to the Mines Safety and Health Administration/
Why doesn't the MSHA send mystery miners, inspectors to work on a mine for a short period of time and send an inspector to the mine so that the mystery miner records the "clean up act? If it is not legal it should be, lives are at stake. Since the situation is known for decades, what about doing something about it? It's been way too long.
The lawyer, bless his heart, has the fantasy that fines would take care of the problem, as stated above the inspector will not find any problems, fines or not, because of what is stated on the previous paragraph.
The respiratory therapist doesn't know the cost of a lung transplant? Why? But later she says it may cost close to a million.
Kevin I really feel sorry for him, but he really threw me for a loop when he stated that he made $76,000 in 6 months on a $12 an hour job. I crunched the numbers to try to figure out how it is possible? Let's say a year has 50 weeks, for the sake of simplifying and I will also round off the hours to the whole hours while disregarding the decimal parts.
So 6 months is 25 weeks times 40 hours per week at $12 per hour is 25×40= 1000 hours at $12 per hours is $12,000 base pay. $76,000 minus $12,000 equals $64,000. Now let's assume that those extra hours were paid double time $24 per hour. $64,000 divided by 24 equals 2,666 hours extra divided by 25 weeks equals 106 hours per week plus the regular 40 hours equals 146 hours per week or 20 hours per day, and Kevin would have to work with no days off for 6 months straight.
Now to the miners, as a whole, I hate to place any fault on victims, but its their lives, their kids lives that are primarily affected, so what are they doing about it? I can somewhat understand that they don't want to lose their jobs by complaining, but what about pressuring their representatives and senators to do something about the situation?
Also how have they used their votes? Don't they vote mainly for the party that will try to block stronger regulations, instead of voting for regulations that will better protect their health and safety?
By my account West Virginia has 3 republicans and one democrat in congress.

You can thank Bob Murray for this, but he’s burning in Hell now. This is why we need strong unions

And yet everyone keeps voting gop/red/right wing/republican/trump…..ironically that party will never do anything that benefits the miners….only things that benefit the billionaires and coal companies.

Would wearing n95 masks or some higher end mask at least take out some dust?

It's always Republicans standing in the way of increasing safety regulations, as mentioned in passing in this video, reported like it's self evident that Republicans always do that, since they always do. West Virginia is incredibly polluted because it was allowed to be done. The coal companies got insanely rich and left poisoned land and broken men, mired in poverty behind. I don't understand why people who've had their lives destroyed and their families left impoverished keep voting for the political party that has made certain that this is what would happen to them.

The Republikkkans will NEVER vote for the legislation as they have a track record of supporting the employers and not the employees. Plus, the are clinging to a world passing.

Black Lung increasing in coal miners. Not news. DE-creasing. Now THAT'S news.