September 2007 | Back to Table of Contents
Cover Story
Data Mining
By Richard Broderick
Miners, physicians, and state officials are searching for clues about the possible relationship between exposure to taconite dust and cancer.
If you visit Joe Scholar around lunch time in his Virginia, Minnesota, home, the diminutive 84-year-old retired taconite miner is sure to fix you a meal of Cornish pasties—a recipe he learned from his grandmother growing up on the Iron Range in northeastern Minnesota. Despite his age and physical problems—he has twice been diagnosed with lymphoma and also suffers from pleural asbestosis—Scholar regularly bakes up a batch of pasties for the other residents of the senior apartment complex where he lives; not long ago, he even planned to open a pasty shop with his daughter near the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. That was before a second bout with lymphoma laid him out—literally—two years ago.
Although there’s no question about the origins of his asbestosis, Scholar believes that asbestos exposure also played a role in his cancer. Certainly, he had ample opportunity for asbestos exposure, having worked for the Erie Mining Company in Hoyt Lakes for 43 years. Since he was first diagnosed with lymphoma 20 years ago, he has made it part of his life’s work to get the state to look into possible connections between taconite mining and asbestos exposure, the theory being that the dust in the mines is unhealthy because taconite ore contains asbestos or asbestos-like minerals.
“In 1989, when I got strong enough, I began wondering how I got this [the lymphoma],” he says. “It dawned on me that asbestos had been found in the dust.”
Nearly a decade later, it seemed as if his lobbying was finally going to pay off. In 1998, he was appointed to the advisory work group for a Department of Health investigation into the mesothelioma deaths of 17 mine employees—mesothelioma, a fatal form of cancer that attacks the lungs and pleural lining of the lungs, is almost always caused by exposure to asbestos. But those hopes were dashed when he discovered the limited scope of the study. The department issued a report in 2003 declaring that commercial exposure to asbestos—the mineral is widely used in piping, tiles, boilers, and other construction materials—rather than mining per se was the likely cause of 14 of the mesothelioma deaths. The cause of the others could not be determined at that time, according to the report.
“And that was it,” Scholar says with some acerbity, reflecting his disappointment in the conclusions and about the fact that the other deaths were not further investigated at the time.
“I think it’s time the government started doing its job.”
Joe Scholar isn’t the only taconite mine retiree demanding action. On a clear July afternoon, when a light breeze carries a cloud of dust across the open pit at the Thunderbird mine and up into the streets of Eveleth, Dave Trach is busy inside the Elks Lodge, which serves as the offices of SOAR (Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees), laying out an incriminating paper trail on a conference table about asbestos exposure. The material includes death certificates, obituaries, attorneys’ documents, and old news stories—all of which are related to mesothelioma and asbestos exposure in the taconite mines.
“These aren’t just statistics to me,” Trach says soberly, gesturing toward the table. “These are guys I knew and worked with.”
Trach is president of the local chapter of SOAR and also sits on SOAR’s international board. For 38 years, he held a number of jobs with the now-defunct LTV Steel Mining Company before retiring in 1996. Throughout that time, he says, “there was no awareness of asbestos. The company called the dust we worked in ‘nuisance dust.’ That was the phrase that was used.”
To underscore how serious he believes the threat is from dust exposure, Trach cites the results of screenings done on Iron Range miners beginning in 1998 as part of a series of lawsuits against mining companies. Of 480 retirees checked so far, 286 show signs of asbestos-related problems, including mesothelioma.
Trach says the retirees he represents would like to see many things happen, including receiving medical assistance for the conditions they have developed or may develop as a result of working in the mines. When LTV shut down in 2001, medical insurance for its retirees was discontinued. But they also support the idea of a study of health problems among taconite miners carried out by the University of Minnesota. It was proposed that the university do a study after recent revelations that the Minnesota Department of Health had withheld for a year the names of 35 mine employees who’d died of mesothelioma between 1998 and 2005. Reports of the department’s actions set off a firestorm of controversy, fueled by further revelations that Dianne Mandernach, the Commissioner of Health, had earlier revealed the information to mining companies operating on the Iron Range. In the wake of the scandal, Mandernach, who announced her resignation in late August, pledged $100,000 for a new study by the Department of Health. Some legislators, led by members of the Iron Range delegation, called instead for a multiyear, multimillion dollar study led not by the Department of Health but by the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health.
“It’s hard to get a fix on the health problem up here,” Trach says. “It’s too late to do anything about exposure for guys like me, but I don’t want to see the guys working in the mines today ending up with problems because of asbestos fibers, wherever they come from.”
How Dangerous?
Mining has always been considered a dirty, dangerous occupation. Nationwide, the industry has the second highest rate of fatal injuries with 25.6 deaths per year for every 100,000 employees; only the industry described by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics as “agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting” boasts a higher percentage of on-the-job fatalities, with 32.5 workers killed per 100,000 in 2005, the last year for which figures are available. Meanwhile, mining’s absolute death count is low simply because the size of its labor force is small. In 2005, 159 miners died in accidents out of a total 5,702 fatalities for all industries.
When it comes to nonfatal injuries and workplace illnesses, mining looks much healthier than other industries—although statistics, in this case, are probably misleading. In 2005, the industry reported an accident and illness rate of 3.6 cases per 100 full-time workers, considerably lower than that for the private sector as a whole, which reported 4.6 cases per 100 workers, and much lower than that for the construction, which reported 6.3 cases for every 100 full-time employees. Two possible reasons for mining’s relatively low ranking in this category might be that most mining accidents prove to be fatal and because the more serious occupational illnesses that afflict miners, for example, silicosis, Black Lung disease, asbestosis, and, now, mesothelioma, have long gestation periods (between 20 and 40 years for mesothelioma) and may not make their presence known until after a miner retires.
Mine companies are supposed to report occupational illnesses even among their retired workers. But in at least one infamous case reported in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2005, LTV used a loophole in regulations issued by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), the federal agency responsible for regulating the industry, to avoid reporting an upward trend in mesothelioma among its workforce for 25 years. The maximum penalty for failing to do so? Sixty dollars per incident.
Although mining as a whole is dangerous, taconite mining in northern Minnesota presents fewer immediate hazards to its workers than do other mining operations elsewhere in the country. For one thing, taconite is mined on the surface, in vast open pits—some taconite holes on the Range measure more than a mile across—rather than in underground tunnels, as in Appalachia’s anthracite coal industry. Underground explosions, cave-ins, carbon monoxide asphyxiation, and flooding are not the sort of accidents that occur on the Range. Then, too, much of the actual mining and processing in taconite mines is now heavily mechanized, the primary reason why the Range’s mining workforce has shrunk from about 15,000 employees during the 1970s to about 3,000 today. Thus, the types of occupational injuries reported by area doctors are similar to those incurred by workers doing other types of manual labor (see “Other Hazards of Mining”).
Dirty Work
Even if open-pit taconite mining is not as immediately dangerous as underground mining, it is certainly dirty—and extremely dusty. Which means there are plenty of opportunities for exposure to airborne particles of all kinds.
“Where I worked in the ore-dressing department and tailing depositions, there was terrible exposure to dust,” recalls Scholar. “You could hardly see 20 feet in front of you at times.” Why is taconite mining so dusty? The way the mineral is recovered and processed makes it unavoidable.
Taconite ore is only about 30 percent iron, as compared with about twice that in other kinds of ores. Nonetheless, it is a very hard substance and has to be blasted out of the earth at the open pits. From there, the ore is carried in trucks the size of small houses with tires that stand 9 feet tall to a processing plant, often located close to the open pit. There, the ore is crushed, mixed with water, and ground into a powder. Powerful magnets separate the iron from the powder; then the iron is mixed with clay into marble-sized pellets that are shipped to steel plants around the country. Everything else is dumped into the huge tailing basins that dot the Iron Range landscape.
Other Hazards of Mining
The types of injury seen in taconite miners are the same as those found in any field involving heavy manual labor, says Brian Konowalchuk, M.D., an occupational medicine specialist with SMDC Health System in Duluth, who also sees patients in SMDC’s Hibbing facility. “My most recent patient was a fellow who drives a 240-ton ore hauler. He tripped getting out of the cab, grabbed the railing, and tore his triceps.”
Konowalchuk also sees mine employees suffering from exposure to extreme heat and cold, lacerations, low-back problems, and repetitive stress injuries. “I had a female patient recently suffering from a terrible case of bursitis and rotator cuff problems because she spends all day turning on and off an overhead pressure valve,” he says. Not all the repetitive stress injuries, he points out, are the result of manual labor. He reports a significant number of cases of carpal tunnel among mine company office staff. In fact, repetitive stress injuries to the back, shoulder, elbow, and wrists are the No. 1 complaint among the mine employees he sees.
His experience is borne out by Douglas Wendland, M.D., also an occupational medicine specialist who works out of St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth and assists community physicians in setting up occupational medicine programs for miners.
“Mining in Minnesota ranks near the top along with health care workers for musculoskeletal injuries,” Wendland says. “In fact, nursing assistants rank right up there with miners.” Unlike health care, however, the state’s mining industry has been much more successful in reducing the number of such injuries, once again because of increased mechanization.
The lifestyle many miners lead can make the job even more hazardous to their health. Joseph Martinelli, M.D., a pulmonologist with St. Luke’s in Duluth, says emphysema and asthma both rank high among the occupational hazards he encounters. Such problems are aggravated by smoking, which is prevalent among the mining employees and retirees he sees.
Martinelli points out that patients with asbestosis who smoke cigarettes have a 60 times greater risk of developing lung cancer than nonsmokers. “One of my biggest objectives here is to try to get people off cigarettes because no matter what I do, their lungs are not going to get better with that kind smoking going on,” he says.—R.B. |
At almost every stage during the mining and processing of taconite, there is the potential for creating lots of dust. When the dust at the pits gets particularly bad, the mine companies send out water trucks to settle it down. In the crushing and milling areas, fans remove some of the dust and workers are supplied with respirators. But the crushing operations are hot and dirty, and not all workers comply with instructions to wear respirators.
“We do all have personal protective equipment, but people wonder if masks are enough to cut down the dust,” says Ray Pierce, the president of Steelworkers Local 6615 in Virginia and a millwright at the Arcelor Mittal—formerly Minnorca—mine. “And some of the places where you work are so hot, you don’t wear your masks.”
That appears to be especially true, he says, among younger employees. “I would have to say that younger guys we are hiring have this attitude that ‘I’m not going to worry about it.’ But the older guys coming to the end of their work look back and wonder if they should have been more careful.”
On the other hand, until a couple of years ago, although there was plenty of vague concern on the Range, miners had no concrete reason to think that they needed special equipment to protect them from dangerous levels of asbestos. That’s because it wasn’t until 2001 that MSHA began using electron microscopy to test the air samples it gathers twice a year from taconite operations. The microscopes the agency had been using, it turned out, were too weak to detect many asbestos fibers; the switch to more powerful electron microscopes was triggered by revelations that MSHA had managed not to find asbestos in air samples at a vermiculite mine in Libby, Montana, where hundreds of miners and residents have been stricken with asbestos-related illnesses.
As soon as MSHA made the change, the agency discovered asbestos in air samples from Minnesota mines where none had been found before; at the Northshore mining operation in Silver Bay, for example, air samples showed asbestos levels 14 times higher than allowed by standards—or at least, the federal standards that pertain to OSHA. MSHA regulations, by contrast, allow levels of asbestos 20 times higher than permitted by OSHA. In 2003, the agency moved to tighten its asbestos limits. The new regulations are still under review.
“What you have to understand is that MSHA is different from OSHA,” explains Wendland. “It’s much looser than OSHA in setting standards. For some reason, they have not been nearly as rigorous with their asbestos standards.” (Mining companies contacted about current working conditions and safety precautions for this story did not respond.)
The Politics of Mining
Despite MSHA’s lax regulations, concern about asbestos exposure on the Iron Range goes back at least to the Reserve Mining case in the early 1970s. Asbestos fibers in the tailings Reserve was dumping in Lake Superior were deemed a potential threat to the region’s drinking water. The concern was that asbestos could cause cancer in the gastrointestinal tract as well as in the lungs and pleural lining.
Then in 1985, a doctor in Virginia reported an unusually high number of pulmonary disorders among patients who worked in the mines, triggering new concern about airborne exposure. There followed a 12-year period during which Iron Range officials and politicians regularly promised to get funding for a comprehensive study about taconite mining and asbestos exposure, only to have the promises come to naught. In one case, the head of the Iron Range Resource and Rehabilitation Board (IRRRB), which consists of members of the Iron Range legislative delegation, wrote the state’s Planning Commission to say that even though then-Gov. Rudy Perpich had called for a study, the board had decided not to do one.
At the time, the IRRRB was reluctant to grapple with the issue in ways that might hurt the taconite industry—the region’s primary source of employment—especially during a time when mechanization was already eroding the workforce. Throughout his fight to raise public awareness during the early 1990s, Joe Scholar says, “We had no cooperation from the unions.” He also speaks with some bitterness about certain DFL politicians from the Range who turned a deaf ear to pleas by him and other activists for a state-sponsored study of whether there’s a connection between exposure to taconite dust and the illnesses suffered by miners. Even today, there are active members of the taconite workforce who’d like the issue to go away.
“I get flak from time to time from active miners who think all this is going to cost them their jobs,” admits David Trach. “I just tell them, ‘Look at some of the guys I know who can barely get around in their 50s and 60s. Is that how you want to end up?’”
Such communal resistance to bad public health news is hardly unusual. Fred Quivik is an attorney who worked for the U.S. Justice Department on Superfund litigation against the W.R. Grace Company, which operated the vermiculite mines in Libby. Even there, where some 350 of the town’s 10,000 residents have died of asbestos-related disorders, including 29 from mesothelioma, “there was a lot of sentiment that the case would hurt Libby land values, and a lot of people just wanted it to go away,” Quivik says.
Making the asbestos issue on the Range “go away” became impossible when in 1997, the Minnesota Cancer Surveillance System (MCSS) revealed that the rates of mesothelioma in northeastern Minnesota were 70 percent higher than those in the rest of the state. (As of 2005, the rate was in excess of 125 percent.) Since this elevated rate affected only men, it was reasonable to conclude that it was occupational in origin.
The MCSS report was followed by an investigative article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press detailing a 12-year history of studies about occupational lung disease on the Iron Range that were incomplete or never undertaken. The following year, the Legislature established ORDIS (Occupational Respiratory Disease Information System) to track occupational lung disease in northeastern Minnesota and to complete the first comprehensive study of the causes of the region’s elevated rates of mesothelioma. The first part of the study would look at the role of commercial asbestos exposure in boilers, pipe fittings, tile, and other common construction materials. This was the 2003 report on whose citizens’ advisory board Joe Scholar served.
“Our objective in the study was to find what factors might affect any effort to determine the precise relationship between taconite mining and asbestos exposure,” says Alan Bender, D.V.M., Ph.D., head of the Minnesota Department of Health’s Chronic Disease and Environmental Epidemiology Section and the study’s lead investigator. “Obviously, identifying the role of commercial exposure would be a critical first step. But that’s as far as we got.”
In 2002, funding for ORDIS was eliminated, and the system was dismantled altogether, as part of state budget cuts that year.
Bender says that the Department of Health tried unsuccessfully for two decades to find funding for three studies: an occupational cohort mortality study, a case-control study of mesothelioma, and medical screening of current and former miners. The cost of those studies was estimated to be $3 million.
Joe Scholar sees the situation differently. He believes the Department of Health had no intention of doing further studies on the possible link between taconite dust and mesothelioma.
“The real question,” Bender says, “is What would we know by now if ORDIS had not been cut? We would have completed the mesothelioma study, found out if taconite dust alone poses a risk factor, and we would know the occurrence rate of respiratory diseases among mine employees. In other words, there would be a lot more answers and a lot fewer questions if we’d been able to keep the program up and running.” The Department of Health will participate in the new study that’s been called for, but only as part of a team headed by Jeffrey Mandel, M.D., a faculty member in the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health who specializes in occupational medicine and epidemiology.
As envisioned by Mandel, the study could be costly, given that there are more than 72,000 members of the original mining cohort that was the focus of the previous study.
He says there’s a need for a multifaceted approach: to examine all causes of death among taconite miners in Minnesota, to assess asbestos exposure at the mines now and in the past, and to determine factors associated with mesothelioma, including the amount of dust exposure miners encounter.
“The last part of the picture would involve a screening evaluation, including physical examinations and medical histories [of Range miners], breathing tests, and chest X-rays. This part would focus on respiratory conditions besides mesothelioma and other nonrespiratory diseases,” Mandel explains. “We know that there are 3,000 to 4,000 current workers, and from that list, we would try to do representative samplings.” If funded, the university research would begin with an occupational exposure assessment, directed by Gurumurthy Ramachandran, Ph.D., a faculty member who specializes in industrial hygiene. “It’s a fairly challenging project,” he says, one that will involve trying to gather as much quantitative information about exposures as possible from MSHA and the mine companies themselves, then complementing that with information about the workplaces and qualitative data gathered from interviews with company industrial hygienists and miners and their survivors.
In all, the research is projected to take about three years to complete. “But when we’re done, this study will be the first truly comprehensive report of all occupational illnesses associated with taconite mining ever compiled,” Mandel says. The chances that this research will go forward appear good, given the recent spotlight on the issue. But even such a study—if and when it is completed—won’t be enough to satisfy Joe Scholar.
“My fight is for the kids,” he says. “I want the companies to tell new employees about the hazards of the dust and to hold training sessions on what to do in dusty conditions. I want someone to come up with a dust mask that removes asbestos fibers and that’s comfortable to wear for long periods of time. I want all the dust collecting and filtering equipment at the mines fully maintained. But most of all, I want the federal and state governments and any agency connected with mining to do their jobs. They aren’t now. It’s time they got started.” MM
Richard Broderick is a St. Paul freelance writer.