This is part 1 of a series on silicosis.
Eric Reyes-Barriga first learned how to cut and polish stone in a small shop in Sun Valley, where nine stone fabrication shops face one another in an alleyway. He spent 15 years not knowing the job he loved so dearly was killing him.
“I have a lot of scars on my lungs, but it’s not as bad as I need to be carrying oxygen,” said Reyes-Barriga, 36, who was diagnosed with silicosis two years ago.
The East San Fernando Valley is the epicenter of statewide silicosis cases, a fatal lung disease caused by inhaling silica dust, a mineral found in certain stones, rocks, sand and clay.
Stone fabrication workers who cut, grind and polish artificial stone countertops that are made with high concentrations of silica, breathe in the toxic dust, which causes lung inflammation and scarring and often leads to severe lung disease and even death.
Silicosis, a Devastating Medical Diagnosis
Reyes-Barriga sometimes experiences headaches or his bones will hurt, but he feels lucky to have caught the disease at stage two, before it destroyed his entire life.
There are four stages of this acute form of silicosis. In stage one, the disease appears in the lymph nodes, which act as filters in the body. In stage two, scarring can be found in the lungs. By stage three, patients need to carry oxygen with them, and eventually, at stage four, they need a lung transplant.
It has been difficult, Reyes-Barriga said, to watch the strong, hard-working men beside him go from carrying large slabs of stone every day to frail shells of themselves, hardly able to breathe.
“If I keep doing this work, I’ll eventually end up in the same way, or worse,” he thought. “At that point, I knew people who had passed away because of silicosis.”
He was resistant to getting tested at first and probably would have continued working had his wife, Aris Melendez, not pushed him to get checked after her father was diagnosed with silicosis.
“The day that they gave us Eric’s diagnosis, I felt devastated,” said Melendez. With the two most important men in her life facing the same deadly disease, she thought, “What’s gonna happen to me now?”
When working together, Reyes-Barriga would catch his father-in-law unable to breathe, tired from heaving stone slabs around when he once carried them up staircases with ease.
Melendez’s father was becoming constantly short of breath, in immense pain and with a relentless cough. He was misdiagnosed three times by doctors before, a year later, being diagnosed with stage three silicosis by Dr. Jane Fazio, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Olive View UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar.
A regular chest x-ray can often miss silicosis, causing victims to be misdiagnosed with ailments such as pneumonia, diabetes, COVID-19, tuberculosis, sarcoidosis, asthma, or COPD. Patients typically require a specialist and a High-Resolution Computed Tomography (HRCT) or a biopsy to receive a proper diagnosis.
“All this affects not only the person, but the family,” said Reyes-Barriga.
For Melendez, it’s often the little things that take the biggest emotional toll.
“He loves to sing mariachi,” Melendez noted about her father. “What really killed me was that he couldn’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’ for my birthday.”
Now, the countertops, the tables, the stone hearts, which her husband and father crafted with love, remain in her home as reminders of their pain.
Melendez’s dad, 55, is now permanently on oxygen, often waking up in the middle of the night, coughing in pain and unable to breathe. He is on the waitlist for a lung transplant, a procedure that can be as difficult as the disease it is meant to help remedy.
There is no cure for silicosis, said Fazio, but once in an advanced stage, a lung transplant can prolong someone’s life by an average of six years. It’s a highly specialized, high-risk and expensive procedure. If they make it off the waitlist and their body happens to accept the transplant, patients still have to take dozens of medications with side effects to keep the lung from being rejected.
Reyes-Barriga said many of the workers he knows are facing the procedure question: “What’s the difference [between] dying of the lung transplant, or without the lung transplant?”
One worker, he said, is only 25 and in need of a lung transplant. In 10 years, he will be Reyes-Barriga’s age, awaiting a second transplant.
Finding a Path Out of the Industry
Fabricators are often the primary income earners for their families. Once they are no longer able to work, they can no longer be that support for their family. Further, when diagnosed with late-stage silicosis, patients are susceptible to other ailments and need extensive care. It can be difficult for them to shift from the role of provider to being cared for.
Most workers are now aware of the dangers they face working with engineered stone, having watched friends or family members contract the disease, said Reyes-Barriga, but many feel stuck in the industry.
Latino men, many of whom are immigrants or undocumented, make up the majority of stone fabrication workers. There is a lot of fear in the community, and oftentimes, they can’t afford to stop working or switch to a less lucrative career.
Most fabrication shops, like the one Reyes-Barriga once owned, are mom-and-pop shops with just a few guys cutting and polishing stone. They invested time and money into a business that could support their family. For many in the already vulnerable population, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) regulations designed to improve worker safety are causing more problems and financial burdens than solutions to the epidemic.
Reyes-Barriga now works with the Stone Fabricators Network, where he provides information to workers and helps connect them to resources, including medical testing, legal representation, transportation and job training.
“There’s other options, besides pretty much dying in here,” Reyes-Barriga tells them, “There’s different opportunities outside the industry.”
With all the efforts to curb the silicosis epidemic, from legislators trying to pass bills that regulate workplace safety in fabrication shops, Cal/OSHA enforcing stricter workplace standards and outreach workers providing laborers with information about proper PPE, Reyes-Barriga questions why there isn’t a complete ban on engineered stone.
“For us as fabricators or owners of shops, it’s better to remove the material from the market and continue working with natural stone,” said Eric Reyes-Barriga.
Next week: Is a product ban the only real solution to the silicosis epidemic?
Not thrilled with this coverage. The obvious topic of safety measures isn’t covered until deep in the story, then they’re treated as an annoying expense. Their presence, or absence, in the workplace should be featured.
Why don’t such workers *habitually* wear high-density protective masks, just as gardeners wear long sleeves to protect against sun cancer?
If you see older relatives suffering, why not—starting your first day on the job—*over*-protect yourself from the same fate? If that was tried but failed to prevent illness, that point should be central.
Reyes-Barriga’s *commendable* work disseminating safety measures—which you should enumerate—needs to go in the first two or three grafs.