Mining creates dust – lots of it. Whether from drilling, blasting, mucking or crushing rock, miners have been exposed to dust since the very beginning of underground mining. While we all breath in a fair amount of harmless dust every day, dust from underground rock can cause long-term, deadly lung diseases.
The most significant industrial disease of the twentieth century undoubtedly silicosis. Caused by exposure to silica dust (the world’s most common mineral), the disease generally develops anywhere from 10 to 30 years after exposure, producing a massive fibrosis (i.e., scarring and thickening of the lungs) the impairs breathing function and eventually causes death. As mining technology progressed in the twentieth century, with larger drilling operation and increases use of explosives, silicosis became a global epidemic. The first major outbreak was in the South African gold fields near the turn of the century, but by 1924 doctors had identified cases in the relatively new gold mines at Timmins, Ontario.
Dust suppression and ventilation are the most sure-fire ways to prevent silicosis, but developing high-end systems that removed all the dust proved to be expensive. Companies and miners’ unions fought over what might be considered a safe threshold limit for silica exposure. In 1944, the mining industry in Ontario began to spray aluminum dust into miners’ changerooms as a supposed prophylactic, an approach that was based on shaky evidence, and which has since produced neurological disease among former miners, prompting an apology and compensation from the Ontario government.
Between 1926 and 1971, 1,303 miners died in Ontario from silicosis. While improved working conditions have lessened the toll of this disease, it has not been eliminated, with clusters of cases emerging in poorly regulated mining districts, or in other dusty workplaces such as brick manufacturing, granite works, ceramics and sandblasting.
The history of black lung disease (referred to historically as miners’ asthma, anthracosis, or coal workers’ pneumoconiosis) is not well-documented in Canada. The relative absence is owing mostly to the fact that the mining industry (along with industry-funded medical researchers and company doctors), led a well-funded campaign to declare coal dust safe, and blame all miners’ lung diseases on silica dust. Even miners who coughed up black liquid were told that the effects of coal dust inhalation would pass a few years after retirement. Black lung thus remained a hidden lung disease until a high-profile protest movement (including wildcat strikes) erupted in the late 1960s in West Virginia.
Our project team hopes to shed light on the historical impacts of silicosis and black lung disease among Canadian mine workers and their families, documenting miners’ struggle for clean air in the workplace as an important expression of occupational health and environmental activism.