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The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s silica rulemaking process has entered a significant new phase with the long-awaited issuance of a proposed rule: “Lowering Miners’ Exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica and Improving Respiratory Protection.”

Case decisions and Mine Safety and Health Administration enforcement trends are the subject areas that tend to have the biggest impact on the compliance activities of mine operators and on the work of attorneys who focus on mine safety legal issues. But the one topic that currently has everyone’s attention is the spike of fatal accidents occurring across the mining industry.

Mine operators are accustomed to the Mine Safety and Health Administration regularly being on-site for inspections, but the agency can also conduct enforcement activity in other ways.

In recent years, the scope of what constitutes an appropriate request for documents under the Mine Act has expanded.

Every January, Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) civil penalties typically increase in accordance with the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990. This year has been no exception.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) recently announced that it is implementing a silica enforcement initiative focused on reducing exposures to respirable crystalline silica.

On the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA) website, there is a notice about an enhanced enforcement program focused on mine operators’ responsibilities that aims to reduce accidents, injuries, and fatalities for contract and customer truck drivers, as well as managers and supervisors performing mining work.

While the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) continues to work on developing a new crystalline silica standard (that is expected to cut the exposure limit in half), the agency has decided to ramp up enforcement of operator silica compliance with the requirements that are already on the books.

The U.S. Senate has confirmed Christopher Williamson as assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health (MSHA). Williamson takes the helm at MSHA at a time when the agency is adding personnel and undergoing organizational changes.

Operators and miners often say that “MSHA never changes.”

Two words sum up where the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is as 2021 comes to a close and mine operators prepare for 2022: transition period.

Although it is too early into the Biden administration to prove statistically, there is, nonetheless, anecdotal evidence of an uptick in Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) special investigations under section 110(c) of the Mine Act.

One of the first things that comes to mind when a mine operator evaluates the ramifications of having received a citation is how much the resulting civil penalty might be. That is certainly a valid concern, but the penalty is only part of the story. The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA) enforcement powers go far beyond imposing monetary penalties as punishment for a violation or as an inducement to come into compliance.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) announced today that it would hold a public meeting on its recent Request for Information (RFI) on Respirable Silica (Quartz). That RFI, published on August 29, 2019, requests that stakeholders provide, by October 28, 2019, “information and data on feasible best practices” to protect miners from quartz in respirable dust.