In 1959, before Grace bought the mine, the company running it X-rayed 130 workers. More than a third of the films came back abnormal. The workers were never told.
By 1969, under Grace, the company concluded that 65 percent of men who had worked at the mine for 20 years or more had some form of lung disease. Again, the workers were not told.
A year earlier, in 1968, a company safety officer had put a thought on paper. Chances were, he wrote, "that we may be able to keep them on the job until they retire, thus precluding the high cost of total disability."
The mine kept running for another 22 years, until 1990.