Many retired mine workers are fuming at the Minnesota Department of Health’s decision to withhold information for a year about the death of 35 miners from mesothelioma, reports Minnesota Public Radio (MPR).
Bob Skiba, from Hoyt Lakes, Minn – a company town where most Iron Range miners lived – says he was a “zinc man” at the mines. His job was to combine zinc and asbestos to make liners for the ore crushers.
“They used to have asbestos, and you had to mix it with oil and grease,” he explains. “Dust flying all over, regular asbestos. And when we poured, we wore an asbestos coat,” he laughs in disbelief. “You wore it, that’s what you had for protection for the hot heat.”

Skiba says he and the others never realized that the asbestos could cause deadly diseases like mesothelioma, an aggressive and painful cancer that kills quickly.

“If I would have, I wouldn’t have been playing with it, mixing it, I don’t guess,” he says with some bitterness. “But you had to do it, I guess. No, I wasn’t aware of it.”

Skiba retired in 1995, but told MPR that one in three of his co-workers now have a myriad of lung disorders associated with asbestos exposure. Some haven’t worked in the mines for decades.

“I got it, I guess. I don’t know what it is,” Skiba says softly. “It’s in my lungs anyhow. I’m short of breath, always seems like I’m plugged up, and I tire a little easier than I used to. Apparently it’s a progressive thing; I don’t know what they can do with it. What do they do with it?”

Mary Stodola, a registered nurse and the wife of a fellow miner, tried to explain. “Your tissues in your lungs turn into pearls, and eventually they go into turning into little cavities throughout your lungs,” she says. “And it’s a progressive disease, as it gets worse your lungs will break down, to virtually nothing.”

Mary’s husband Bill worked in the repair shop at the mine for years. “The north doors faced the crushers, and you could see the dust roll out of the top of the crushers,” he says “And sometimes it would come right in, you’d have to shut the doors because it would come through the shop, and the same thing on other end, the south doors faced the pelletizer and you’d get the soot; you’d have to shut the south doors. So it was the same thing no matter where you went out there.”

Stodola has asbestosis, and last year his doctor told him he has mesothelioma.

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