A young miner's lungs may be hearty and hale

When he enters the mines with his dinner pail

But coal dust and grime

In a few years of time

Fill up his lungs and they soon start to fail.

Black lungs, fall of coal dust-

Coal miners must breathe it or bust.

Black lungs, gasping for breath-

With black lungs we are choking to death.

James Wyatt. who write that song last year, knew what the words were all about but it was hard for him to sing them, because black lungs were about all he had left after 40 years in West Virginia's mines. But he sang the song anyway, at a rally in Charleston, and people listened. It was high time to listen to coal miners.

For the most part people in this country don't think about coal miners much, nor for that matter about coal. If they think about it at all they figure that coal must be on the way out. After all, you don't run trains with it any more. You don't heat houses with it. Who needs it?

The answer is that the steel mills need it and the power plants need it and more of it is being mined now than ever before: and the Federal Bureau of Mines predicts that consumption of coal will be doubled in the next generation. In West Virginia, mines are being opened with hundred-year life expectancies.

It used to be that men mined coal with picks and shovels-half a million men. But after World War II, when mechanization came to the mines. machines began replacing the men. Coalmine employment in Appalachia dropped from 475,000 in 1950 to 119,000 last year-but now, according to the Burean of Mines, the decline has about dropped, and over the next several years the number of men working in the mines will increase again. Right now there are 96.00 men working underground, producing the bulk of the 50,000.000 tons of coal produced annually in the United States.

You can look at that statistic more than one way. One way is to figure that 96,000 men out of a U. S. population of 200,000.000 just isn't that many-why worry about them? But you can look at it another way: this country is relying on fewer than 100,000 men to produce the raw resource for the steel and electric power without which the United States wouldn't function for five minutes. When you look at it that way, the rest of us owe a lot to the coal miner. Pretty important man. Couldn't get along without him.

If that's the case we certainly haven't shown much gratitude. Coal mining is the most dangerous occupation: 12 to 20 times as dangerous as driving a truck, for instance. The Associated Press reports that "a man who spends his life working in the mines faces one chance in 12 of being killed in an accident, at least one chance in five of suffering lung disease. He also can figure on suffering three or four injuries severe enough to keep him off the job. An airplane pilot can get insurance at standard rates; a coal miner cannot."

Coal mines have been killing miners at a rate that works out to an average of 100 per month for the past 100 years. Sometimes they die in explosions and fire like the Mannington disaster of 1968 that killed 78 (and Monongah, 1907. 307 dead: Centralia. 1947. 111 dead: West Frankfort, 1951, 119 dead: or Benwood, 1924, 119 dead: or Eccles, 1914. 183 dead-and on and on).

But fire and explosion and roof falls kill fewer men than the slow stifling black lung disease-coal workers' pneumoconiosis, in proper medical terminology. "Black lung" is just that: a lung so clogged with the steady accumulation of coal particles that it no longer functions. When both of a miner's lungs are coal-black and completely clogged, they stop functioning, and he dies. The process, being cumulative, is slow and agonizing. The U. S. Public Health Service estimates that 125,000 miners-active and retired-are afflicted with black lung: and admits that the figure may be conservative, because reports vary in accuracy from state to state.

The reports vary because until very recently the states Weren't taking the trouble to compensate men for black lung. Until 1969 only three states recognized the disease in their Workmen's Compensation statutes, and only one state. Pennsylvania, was actually systematic about diagnosing black lung and compensating for it. Pennsylvania reports that about 1100 miners are dying of the disease every year. That's one state. There are 23,000 working miners in Pennsylvania: nearly twice that many in West Virginia, which is the nation's leading coal-mining state and which, until 1969, operated under Workmen's Compensation laws so rigid and restrictive that only four awards had ever been made for black lung.

What was the excuse? It wasn't that the disease wasn't known about. Although the Public Health Service didn't begin research on black lung until 1963. British doctors had identified the disease as far back as 1813. It wasn't that the disease was declining thanks to automation. On the contrary, the disease was on the increase. Automated machinery creates much more coal dust than picks and shovels ever did, and coal machinery operators breathe more dust on every shift than men working half a century ago breathed in a week.

And no one could say there weren't ways to prevent or control the disease. The British began paying compensation for black lung in 1943, and ten years later, faced with staggering compensation payments, began putting dust-control techniques into effect, he result was quantifiable: 4,000 British miners suffering from black lung in 195?: 740 in 1967. That works out to ?.8 cases of black lung for every 1,000 miners.

Here? by comparison, the Public Health Service figures that one out of every ten active miners has black lung to a debilitating degree, and one out of every five retired miners. In Eastern Ken?u?ky, plagued by every kind of trouble known to men in poverty, the government recently estimated that 27,000 men have the disease. The irony is great. Most of Eastern Ken?ucky's mines are played out: the coal is gone; the men, unwanted, are on welfare: but black lung stays with them....

Who was doing anything about it? The United Mine Workers were so cooperative that the president of U. S. Steel's mining division thanked them for helping to fight "government interference and unreasonable safety regulations." The union spent its time buying a bank and using dues to make low-interest loans to coal companies and Congressmen: its three top officers set up a secret pension fund and put $1.5 million into it for themselves. But retired union miners had to settle for pension benefits of $??5 per month-when they could get it. so many of them were excluded, for technical and arbitrary reasons (and denied the right of appeal) that they finally banded together in 1967 and hired a lawyer to fight the union for them.

And about that same time the miners of West Virginia figured they'd had enough. They finally had a spokesman?a tough old doctor named I. F. B?ff, who lived in Charleston and liked to talk to coal miners. Whenever he could get them together, he talked, and they listened:

Tell me, you there, brother, how much longer do you think you're going to live? You got the black lung! You can't walk ten steps without resting. You can't breathe. You spit up black juice. But the company says you just got compensationitis! You're dying! And the killing will go on until you tell them to grant you compensation and clean up the miners or there won't be any coal coming out of West Virginia!"