November 6, 2026 - Working veteran underground coal miners in central Appalachia are suffering from black lung disease at the highest rates in nearly 50 years. It’s now as bad as the 1970s, with thousands of miners sick and dying. 

How did this health crisis happen, and why haven’t miners been protected? 

Those questions are at the heart of Coal’s Human Cost, an investigative documentary eight years in the making from FRONTLINE, NPR, Public Health Watch and the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom. Its Nov. 10, 2026 premiere comes 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 tracks the resurgence of black lung disease in Appalachia, its impact on miners and their families, and the role of the government and the mining industry in failing to protect them. 

“One in three veteran coal miners tested in central Appalachia now have black lung, the highest rate since 1978,” says the documentary’s correspondent, award-winning journalist Howard Berkes. “Our new investigation traces the road to this moment, and the ongoing human toll.”

Berkes has spent 15 years reporting in and out of the coal fields of West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky chronicling the comeback of a disease that’s both incurable and preventable. In the 2019 FRONTLINE/NPR documentary Coal’s Deadly Dust, his reporting revealed an ongoing epidemic of severe black lung disease connected to decades of overexposure to toxic silica dust. 

Nearly eight years later, there’s evidence things have gotten worse.

Coal’s Human Cost reports on how black lung disease is currently devastating families in Appalachia, with 2,000 new cases reported by black lung clinics last year alone, and 1,700 black lung deaths reported from 2020 to 2023. The documentary also examines how doctors and advocates have been trying for years to sound the alarm and to get better protections for miners, and how federal regulators and the industry 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 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 starting Nov. 10, 2026, at 10/9c on PBS stations (check local listings) and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and at 7/6c at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS App. Coal’s Human Cost will also be available on PBS Documentaries on Prime Video. Subscribe to FRONTLINE’s newsletter to get updates on events, podcasts and additional reporting related to Coal’s Human Cost.
Credits Coal’s Human Cost is a FRONTLINE production with Five O’Clock Films in association with Forage Media. The writer, producer and director is Molly Born. The producer and correspondent is Howard Berkes. The senior producer is Frank Koughan. The managing editor of FRONTLINE is Andrew Metz. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.