It used to take a single day for Andy Martin to mow his lawn. But after developing severe black lung disease, cutting his grass now takes three.
“ If I mow it all at once, I can't breathe the next day,” Martin told Wyoming Public Radio in a recent phone interview. “It's got me hacking from all the pollen coming out of that grass. And that's even wearing a mask, doing that. You lose your breath quick. You really do. I mean, if you bend over, you push the air out of your lung, you know how that goes. You can't breathe. It messes with you. Anything that you used to do is going to take you almost twice as long to do it.”
He attributes his illness, a severe form of coal worker's pneumoconiosis characterized by extensive lung scarring better known as black lung, to his 31 years working at Wyoming coal mines like the Jim Bridger Mine in Point of Rocks, near Rock Springs.
Diagnosed with lung cancer at age 48, Martin, now 68, said doctors later came to the conclusion he had black lung.
“ I used to be able to – a couple years ago – walk on flat ground all day,” he said. “Now, I have to stop, catch my breath, even on flat ground.”
Martin and dozens of other miners from across the U.S. traveled to Washington, D.C. this week to protest the latest delay in enforcing a new federal rule meant to protect trona and coal miners from exposure to toxic silica dust, which can cause the most severe stage of black lung.
“Be with us on this, help us get this pushed through so that miners aren't dying at 55 or 38 years of age,” said Vonda Robinson, vice president of the National Black Lung Association and the wife of a coal miner with black lung. She went to the rally, too, with about 75 miners.
Federal regulators at the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) first released the rule in April 2024 during the Biden administration. It aims to cut miners' exposure limits to silica dust in half and opens the door for mine operators to be cited and fined when miners are overexposed.
It also establishes a surveillance program for metal and nonmetal workers who may encounter silica during the course of their jobs, like those working in trona mines, requiring a similar surveillance system already in place that identifies sickness in coal miners specifically.
“ If you're a coal miner, you're placed into a monitoring program,” said Marshal Cummings, a trona miner who represents about 700 fellow union workers in southwest Wyoming. “They will take those images of your lungs and let you know if you're getting progressively worse throughout your life. The most important part of that is that you have a baseline, so your first imaging will tell you how much you've lost over time. For metal, non-metal, that's not something that happens. So that's a huge part of the silica standard that they're implementing.”
But after mining industry trade groups sued to overturn the rule in April 2025, citing high costs for mine operators to comply, federal judges twice paused its enforcement before the government shutdown delayed it a third time on Oct. 2.
Martin and others went to D.C. and stood outside the U.S. Department of Labor on Oct. 14 to speak out against further delays from the courts or the Trump administration in requiring mine operators to comply with the rule.
These days, Martin is retired. He lives in southwest Virginia.
He and his wife receive federal benefits due to his workplace disability, totalling roughly $1,200 a month between the two of them. While coughing into the phone, Martin described how he still gets calls from his coal miner friends in Wyoming, asking him about black lung. The disease is caused by inhaling coal or silica particles for even a short period of time and is incurable. Experts say silica is to blame for an epidemic of severe black lung in the U.S.
Martin tells his miner friends to get checked out by doctors at a black lung clinic in Denver. Four of his friends who followed that advice learned they have evidence of the disease, all former miners at the Jim Bridger Mine, he said.
“I’d get more, but they don't listen,” he explained. “They all think they're going to have to end up paying money. They don't realize that [getting tested] don't cost them a damn thing. I got guys calling me all the time, ‘What do I do? What do I do?’ And I tell them, ‘This is what you do.’”
Despite being the No. 1 coal-producing state, black lung isn’t discussed as much in Wyoming compared to Appalachia, according to Cummings.
“ It's the same reason you see suicide so high with miners, because we're a lace your bootstraps up and get to work kind of people, especially in Wyoming, [we have that] cowboy-up mentality,” he said.
After the Sorptive Minerals Institute and the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association filed their lawsuit against the rule in April, the federal 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an indefinite emergency stay while the Trump administration and industry groups negotiate a resolution.
But Cummings said that if the administration wants to provide concessions to the industry and weaken the rule, they won’t have many options. The Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 keeps mine regulators from diluting rules after they’ve been implemented.
“ For me personally, I worked in a coal-fired boiler house where all the coal that's rolling through has silica in it,” he said. “So the delay on it is, honestly, just a cop out. It keeps getting delayed and delayed, and then it's not going to be enforced. Miners aren't asking for anything above and beyond anything that the surface workers are already awarded for their health and safety. Silica dust is a slow and silent killer.”
Trona mining comes with its own health risks due to silica exposure, he added, but there’s very little health data for exposure to trona dust.
Cummings theorizes that the reason trona miners in Wyoming aren’t getting silicosis as young as coal miners in Appalachia is because of a type of clay found in the state that sticks to silica particles.
“ So the silica particle is not so sharp to cut up your lungs,” he said. “ I would say that's why they're not getting silicosis, but they are getting cancer. That's from a ton of research.”
Richard Miller, a retired policy director for the House Committee on Education and Workforce who worked on black lung issues during his time in Congress, said he expects the enforcement delays to continue.
“ Clearly, MSHA is not acting with the interest of miner safety and health, foremost, in their mind,” he said. “What they're interested in doing is acting foremost in the interest of the mining industry's profits. Because of that, you have a conflict where the interests of the miners are not being adequately represented by the Mine Safety and Health Administration. That's a problem.”
A spokesperson for MSHA did not respond to a request for comment on the Oct. 14 rally or the administration’s intentions concerning the rule. An automatic email reply reads, “Due to a lapse in funding, certain government activities have been suspended and I am unable to respond to your message at this time.”
As the legal process plays out, coal and trona miners will continue to work under the old standards for exposure to silica dust, Miller said.
“ Miners are going to continue to suffer injury because there's no requirement for implementation, and there's no enforcement of the new standard,” he said.
Cummings predicted that the ultimate intent with the administration’s requests for more time is to find a judge willing to overturn the rule entirely.
“ Delaying it is to find a way to poke a hole in it and to find a court that will take that stance and say, ‘I don't care what the Mine Act [of 1977] says, we're going to roll it back,’” he said.
Speaking the night before the rally outside the Labor Department, Martin said he expected the protest to go well.
“ I think it's going to go good, because I already had a Wyoming guy … he called my wife,” he said. “He said, ‘How'd your husband get so famous? He's in The New York Times.’ The more exposure we get, the better off we are.”
As of Oct. 14, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has not yet set a date for oral arguments in the case, which could spur MSHA into acting on the rule one way or another. That outcome impacts miners in Appalachia, Wyoming and the Navajo Nation.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
