When Johnathan Wright began working underground in coal mines more than 25 years ago, the percentage of veteran working coal miners in Central Appalachia diagnosed with black lung disease was down to roughly one in 10.
Today, that reported rate is the highest it’s been since 1978: One in three — and Wright, age 44, has joined them.
“It’s awful,” Wright tells correspondent Howard Berkes in the new documentary Coal's Human Cost, a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE, NPR, Public Health Watch & the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom that premieres tonight on PBS and online and follows up on the 2019 documentary Coal's Deadly Dust.
“You work your whole life to enjoy the rest of it, and then you can’t enjoy it,” says Wright, who was diagnosed with the incurable disease in 2023 after he started struggling to breathe when climbing the Kentucky hills.
Wright is among the coal miners who share their stories in tonight's documentary, which premieres as the Trump administration has been boosting coal mining, with a pledge of nearly $700 million to keep coal-fired power plants running and coal exports flowing.
Against that backdrop, Coal's Human Cost is a penetrating — and years-in-the-making — chronicling of black lung's resurgence. Berkes reports on how black lung disease is currently devastating families in Appalachia, how doctors and advocates have been trying for years to sound the alarm and to get better protections for miners, and how the government and the industry have failed to respond.
“You can’t imagine a schoolteacher rate of one out of three getting this disease. The public would put their arms up and scream and stop whatever exposure it was until this got better,” says Dr. Drew Harris, a pulmonologist and medical director at black lung clinics who has worked with hundreds of sick miners over the years. “But this has been going on for decades. And we know why this is happening, and it is entirely preventable, and we aren’t preventing it.”
For the full story, watch Coal's Human Cost. From writer, producer and director Molly Born alongside producer and correspondent Berkes, the documentary will be available starting tonight at 10/9c on PBS stations (check local listings) and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and at 7/6c at pbs.org/frontline and in thePBS App. The documentary will also be available on PBS Documentaries on Prime Video.
Thank you for watching.
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