In severe cases, someone with black lung suffocates, unable to draw breath into organs left looking like a blackened sponge. It is a terrible disease, long thought eradicated in this country.
But now it’s back.
It is a reminder that the coal industry has always demanded a human price in exchange for the power it gives.
Too long coal has taken a hidden ransom from the workers and surrounding communities to keep what is the most dangerous, the dirtiest, and now one of the most expensive ways of generating power going. And it is standing in the way of a just transition for communities.
With cheaper, cleaner and safer alternatives now available that toll has no place in society today.
This week yet another case of black lung was uncovered in Queensland, the twenty-second person stricken with this disease, with more likely to come.
“There’s a long latency period before people are diagnosed with Black Lung, so it could be 10, 15, 20 years or it could be two years,” Chair of the Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis Select Committee, Labor MP Jo-Ann Miller, said.
“We’re expecting there could be hundreds, if not thousands, diagnosed in the future.”
The hundreds left with a disease eating away at their lungs are not the company’s board members and executives, they are workers toiling hard to put food on the table for their families.
Workers like Stephen Mellor, who were trying to build a future but were instead left feeling like he’d been thrown on the “scrap heap” after contracting the disease.
“We bought all this new machinery to cut coal faster and crush it and what were we doing for the worker?” Mellor told media.
“The system has completely and utterly failed. The introduction of self-regulation saw mining companies allowed to have their own doctors, radiologists … and a regulator asleep at the wheel.”
And it isn’t just those who work in the mines who are paying coal’s human price.
The Black Lung disease committee has now expanded its terms of reference and is now seeking submissions regarding dust exposure risks in coal mining towns, coal ports, and rail workers involved in transporting coal…
Source: The Price Of Coal Must Be Measured In Human Rather Than Financial Terms
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