New workplace limits for a lung-damaging and ubiquitous substance called silica are about to take effect, decades after federal health experts warned that the nation’s existing rule was dangerously lax.
Silica, found in rock and sand, poses a hazard when pulverized to a fine dust and inhaled — a problem on construction sites, during hydraulic fracturing operations and at a variety of other workplaces. The substance can trigger silicosis, a lung-scarring condition that can kill by suffocation, as well as lung cancer and kidney disease.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s new standard — announced last week — replaces a rule set in 1971. It reduces the allowable exposure limit to 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air, five times less than the current limit for the construction and shipyard sectors and half the current level for other workplaces.
Industry groups that argued against the change call the rule a job-killer that will cost far more than OSHA anticipates. Worker-safety advocates, disputing that, say silica is a worker-killer and the standard is long overdue. OSHA estimates the rule will prevent about 640 deaths a year.
“The current OSHA standards are woefully out of date,” Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO’s director of safety and health for the union federation, said by email. The 1971 rule was “based on science from the 1920’s, long before many of the health effects of silica exposure — like lung cancer — were known.”
Workers exposure to silica is a prime example of the country’s broken system for protecting Americans on the job, the Center for Public Integrity found in a 2015 investigation. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health urged in 1974 — 42 years ago — that OSHA substantially tighten the silica limit. But OSHA, hemmed in by court rulings, corporate resistance and procedures and that have turned the process of setting a single standard into a years-long marathon, has updated few of its 470 exposure limits since adopting them…