Road Dust Control

Archive for the ‘Dust’ Category

Emissions reductions equivalent to removing 153,000 cars from California highways

Results are in from the first year of a new air quality program for farmers: 2,523 applications were submitted for the program to clear Central Valley skies by offering incentives to retire old inefficient engines and adopt cultural practices to improve air quality. The $22.6 million made available this year through USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in California was able to fund 586 applications. Preliminary calculations suggest that the effect these farmers will make will be an emissions reduction equivalent to removing 153,000 vehicles from California highways.

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Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean condemned the killing of an activist opposed to a Canadian mine during the last day of a state visit to Mexico while protesters chanted "Canada, get out."

About 50 supporters of Mariano Abarca Roblero were kept about 200 metres from a Mayan women’s collective where Jean visited the colonial town of San Cristobal de Las Casas, about five hours from the mine’s location.

"We find it deplorable, inexcusable," Jean said in a statement Wednesday.

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If they can define it, they can measure it, and then they will Tax it.

Several studies considered the relation between long-term exposure to particulate matter (PM) and total mortality, as well as mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Our aim was to provide a comprehensive review of European epidemiological studies on the issue.

Methods: We searched the Medline database for epidemiological studies on air pollution and health outcomes published between January 2002 and December 2007.
We also examined the reference lists of individual papers and reviews. Two independent reviewers classified the studies according to type of air pollutant, duration of exposure and health outcome considered.

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A new settlement that includes an estimated $11.2 million in cleanup work will ensure continued cleanup of the West Site/Hows Corner Superfund Site in Plymouth, Maine. The agreement is between the U.S. EPA, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection ( MEDEP ), the Maine Attorney General, and potentially responsible parties at the Site.

The settlement will ensure that work proceeds at the Site as detailed in the 2002 and 2006 “Records of Decision.” This work includes: construction and operation of a groundwater hydraulic containment system, a technical impracticability waiver for the Source Area Groundwater, monitored natural attenuation of the Non-Source Area Groundwater, institutional controls, and further investigation and mitigation, if necessary, of the potential vapor intrusion pathway.

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Haul Road Dust Control is a vital element to the efficient operation of a mining business. Not just with regards to safety but also to the workers health.  Surface mining operations employ huge off-road haul trucks extensively to move material at mining properties. Past research, using the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) emissions factors for unpaved haul roads, has exposed that haul trucks produce the bulk of dust emissions from surface mining sites, accounting for just about 78%-97% of total dust emissions. This is yet greater with low quality haul road dust control programs.

Observations of dust emissions from haul trucks prove that if the dust emissions are uncontrolled, they can become a safety risk by means of impairing the operator’s visibility. This increases the chance for haul truck accidents. However, the greatest long-term health danger of dust generated from hauling operations is due to inhalation of the respirable dust middle diameter <4 micrometers (?m) along with thoracic dust, which is comparable to the EPA’s characterization of PM10 particulate matter with a median diameter <10 ?m. Exposure to respirable dust has always been thought a health hazard at surface mining operations, in particular if silica dust is there.

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The mexican pocito coal mines are in a few ways stuck in the past – the distant past.

Mined by means of air hammers along with pickaxes, bereft of dust control or consistent monitoring of volatile methane gas, the pocitos make use of methods out-of-date inside the United States a century ago.

Two latest disasters that killed 25 miners uncovered the ancient conditions. Last week, 13 miners drowned when a mine called La Espuelita flooded and the men couldn’t getaway. The catastrophe came four months subsequent to another pocito, La Morita No. 49, exploded and killed 12.

Each of the pocitos, about 30 miles apart in Mexico’s only coal-mining district, had a single straight down bore, violating safety standards adopted within Mexico along with additional countries long ago.

"Nowadays, American coal mines are required to have a minimum of 2 shafts. That is something that we figured out back in the 19th century," said mine engineering Lecturer Chris Haycocks of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Little seams of coal like those that pocitos mine are ignored by current American operations, said Jerry Herndon of the United States Mine Health and Safety Academy in West Virginia.

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In the construction business, respiratory disease, often resulting in disability or an increased risk of cancer, may be a major public health concern. Studies led by Deborah Young-Corbett, a school member in Virginia Tech’s College of Construction, have shown that specific varieties of sanding tools are highly effective in reducing the dust that causes these health hazards, nevertheless the industry’s usage of the offered technology remains terribly low.

To find out why, Young-Corbett conducted follow-up studies through construction company owners and employees, and found a variety of barriers to the embracing of expertise that lead to better environments. She said they related to efficiency, labor quality, and perceptions of benefits and risks.

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New set of rules to decrease miners’ exposure to coal dust will be proposed within a couple of weeks, according to the nation’s top mine controller.

Joseph Main, the new head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, said he has long thought there is “a need to lower the intensity of unhealthy dust in mines,” and he indicated that a new, wearable dust control monitor that can continuously measure miners’ exposure to coal dust may be part of the new rules.

“A tool has been built, it has been tested, I’ve worn it myself. It works,” Main told the media in a conference call Friday. “It’s a tool we can now employ to help fix this problem of harmful coal mine dust that has plagued miners.”

That dust can produce deadly black lung, which has killed more than 21,000 miners from Kentucky and other coal-producing states since the mid-1980s.

High concentrations of dust also can be an explosion hazard.

Main, who first worked in coal mines when he was 18 years old, is a former head of the United Mine Workers of America’s Occupational Safety and Health Department.

Safety advocates had expressed hope that under his leadership, MSHA would be aggressive about implementing new coal-dust exposure rules.

In May, before Main was nominated by President Barack Obama to run MSHA, the agency announced that it intended to look at a new rule on dust – but not until 2011. That timetable upset safety advocates, who said MSHA was moving too slowly.

Main suggested Friday that that timetable will be revised in the coming new regulations.

“I think you will see a comprehensive plan on ending black lung unveiled,” Main said. “We’re going to do everything we can to speed up the process here.”

Tony Oppegard, a Lexington, Ky., attorney and former state and federal mine regulator, welcomed Main’s comments as good for miners.

“The respirable dust program has been an abject failure for decades,” he said. “Hopefully, this is a step in the right direction.”

The dust-exposure limits set in 1977 were intended to end black lung among miners. But Oppegard said another generation has worked in the mines since those set of laws took effect, and the disease persists.

That’s evidence the system has not worked, for whatever reason,” he said.

Main’s former union said it was looking forward to seeing MSHA’s proposed set of laws.

“This issue has been on the back-burner at the group for far too long,” UMWA spokesman Phil Smith said in an e-mail. “With the incidence of black lung once again on the rise in the coalfields – as well as among younger miners – it’s crucial for MSHA to take swift, aggressive action so that we can end this scourge once and for all.”

Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, said in an e-mail that “industry has been working with MSHA, NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) and labor for years to perfect dust monitoring devices.”

MSHA last month asked the mining industry to provide input by mid-December on the use of the dust monitors.

Under the current dust-monitoring system, a miner wears devices that note exposure levels on a cassette. The cassette is removed at the end of a shift and sent to a laboratory for examination. Results at times can take weeks.

The new monitor would record dust levels as the miner works and show instantly whether the dust is reaching unsafe concentrations.

The current exposure limit for coal dust is 2 milligrams per cubic liter of air. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommended in 1995 that the limit be reduced to 1 milligram.

In 1998, The Courier-Journal published a series of articles detailing widespread cheating by mine operators, aided by miners, to conceal deadly coal-dust levels.

But MSHA did not issue a new rule under then-President Bill Clinton, nor did the agency act during the presidency of George W. Bush.