For years, the quartz countertop industry had geography on its side. Nearly every confirmed case of engineered stone silicosis came out of California, and a lawyer for one of the biggest slab makers told Congress this year that the other 49 states had only a handful. Then on May 18, NPR aired a silicosis report which took that argument apart.
NPR reported sick fabricators in Florida and Colorado, cases federal inspectors found at a Chicago countertop maker, and a former head of federal OSHA who believes the national count is short by thousands. Three days later, California’s workplace safety board met in downtown Los Angeles and voted to start writing a ban on the high-silica material those workers cut.
If you cut, grind, or polish quartz in San Pedro, the San Fernando Valley, or anywhere else in Los Angeles County, both stories are about you, and neither one is finished.
What the NPR Silicosis Report Found Outside California
California leads the country in known cases partly because California went looking. The state made silicosis a reportable disease in 2025, and its public health department posts engineered stone cases on a tracking dashboard that keeps climbing. Most states do neither, which is the point NPR’s reporting kept circling back to.
New York officials told NPR they knew of four cases. Washington knew of four. Massachusetts announced its first case in December 2025 and has found two more since. David Michaels, a George Washington University epidemiologist who used to run federal OSHA, set those numbers beside an industry that employs an estimated 100,000 people nationwide and Australian studies that found lung disease in more than 10 percent of countertop workers there. His read on the national picture: “We could easily have 10,000 workers here with silicosis and possibly far more.”
The cases that do surface often take the long way in. A Florida fabricator NPR profiled left the emergency room with a pneumonia diagnosis and antibiotics that were ineffective before a CT scan, and a biopsy found silicosis. California’s own case research shows the same detour, with pneumonia and tuberculosis as the most common wrong answers.
Federal Inspectors Keep Finding the Dust
OSHA’s silica dust standards date to 2016. The permissible exposure limit is still 50 micrograms of respirable crystalline silica per cubic meter of air, averaged over an eight-hour shift, with an action level at half that. What changed in 2023 was attention. Federal OSHA launched a targeted inspection program for countertop shops, and a Labor Department spokesperson told NPR its inspectors have checked more than 400 workplaces in at least 25 states.
About one air sample in five came back over the legal limit. A third topped the action level, the point where employers owe workers more air testing and health screenings. Inspectors also wrote more than 75 citations for shops that skipped the medical surveillance the rule requires.
A skipped exam is how a lung disease stays invisible until it sends someone to the ER.
California Stopped Regulating Quartz and Started Writing a Ban
California spent three years trying to make quartz safe to cut.
In December 2023, the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board adopted emergency rules for stone shops. Cutting, grinding, or polishing artificial stone became a “high-exposure trigger task,” and so did cleaning up the dust afterward. Those tasks require effective wet methods, high-level respiratory protection, and medical surveillance no matter what an air sample shows, and the rules outlaw the dry-cutting shortcuts that fill a shop with dust. The state made those rules permanent on Dec. 19, 2024, then added a law that autumn requiring artificial stone shops to train workers and certify that training to Cal/OSHA every year. Cal/OSHA’s silica enforcement program has issued more than 900 citations.
The cases kept coming anyway. By October 2026, the state had confirmed more than 660 cases of engineered stone silicosis since 2019, with at least 35 deaths and 75 lung transplants. When the Standards Board voted in May, Los Angeles County alone accounted for roughly half the statewide total. Physicians at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center is Sylmar were among the first to spot the cluster in stonecutters from San Fernando Valley shops.
Why Wet Saws and Respirators Weren’t Enough
It starts with the risks of working with engineered stone. Engineered quartz typically runs about 95 percent crystalline silica, far above granite (10-15%) or marble/limestone (under 5%), and Cal/OSHA now warns that silica from artificial stone is much more toxic than silica from natural stone. The doctors who petitioned for a ban also told the state that the resins and pigments in the slabs could be making the disease worse. Our page on quartz countertop silica exposure breaks down where the dust comes from.
When Cal/OSHA and the Standards Board’s staff evaluated that petition, both concluded that existing protections couldn’t fully address the hazard. Shops had been under wet-cutting and respirator rules for more than two years, and workers were still getting sick.
Where the Engineered Stone Silica Rulemaking Stands Now
The petition came in December 2025 from the Western Occupational and Environmental Medical Association, a group of occupational medicine physicians. It asked the state to prohibit fabricating and installing artificial stone that contains more than 1 percent crystalline silica, the same line Australia drew when it banned the material in 2024.
On May 21, 2026, the Standards Board voted 3-0 at its Los Angeles meeting to grant the petition and put Cal/OSHA to work on an emergency rule. Cal/OSHA held an advisory meeting on July 31. On Sept. 16, it posted a discussion draft of the rule that would prohibit fabricating and manufacturing artificial stone above the 1-percent line. As drafted, the prohibition would take effect six months after adoption, and the draft sets a far lower action level for the highest-risk work. Public comments closed on Sept. 30.
The Standards Board still has to weigh in but hasn’t scheduled its vote yet. Industry lawyers have already questioned whether Cal/OSHA has the authority to effectively ban a product, so expect a court challenge if it passes.
Cal/OSHA regulates workplaces, so even a ban couldn’t pull slabs off a showroom floor, and no rule reaches back to undo exposure that already happened. For a worker who spent ten years at a saw, this rule-making protects the next crew more than it protects you.
What the Rules Give You on the Shop Floor
You don’t have to wait for a ban to claim the protections California already has on the books.
- You have a right to water on every cut, grind, and polish.
- You have a right to a respirator built for this dust, which means more than a paper mask from the hardware store.
- You have a right to medical exams at no cost to you
- You have a right to medical removal protections if a doctor says you need distance from the dust.
- You have a right to training on what the dust does to your lungs.
You also have a right to report a hazard without losing your job over it. Cal/OSHA takes complaints confidentially. Retaliation for a safety complaint is illegal in California, and the state Labor Commissioner treats threats about immigration status as retaliation too. Our FAQ explains how immigration status is handled in a silicosis lawsuit, along with the bill in Congress that would shield makers from these cases.
Where the Rules Stop
Every one of those rules binds your employer, and California’s workers’ compensation system generally keeps you from suing your employer. There are narrow exceptions. But the companies that made, imported, and sold the slabs aren’t your employer, so workers’ comp doesn’t shield them. Most occupational silica exposure lawsuits in California run against them, on the theory that they failed to warn fabricators or sold a material that can’t be cut safely with the tools the industry expects shops to use.
That’s where the regulatory record becomes really helpful. A Cal/OSHA citation doesn’t win a lawsuit by itself, and how much off the record even reaches a jury is a judge’s call. Still, manufacturers often argue that sick workers should blame their shops, and at least one Los Angeles County jury has sided with a slab maker after the defense pointed to the shops where the worker cut. The state’s own conclusion that its protections couldn’t fully contain the hazard is a hard fact for that defense to get around.
If the Diagnosis Already Came
Stop the exposure if you can. That’s easy to write but hard to do when the shop is your paycheck and your family is counting on it. So, talk it through with your doctor before you make the call. Get to a pulmonologist who has seen this disease, and tell them you cut quartz, for how many years, and whether your shop cut wet or dry. California doctors now have to report silicosis to public health officials, which means an accurate diagnosis also creates a record that won’t get lost.
Our page on how engineered stone silicosis gets diagnosed covers the tests that actually catch it. Once you are diagnosed, protect the rest of the evidence:
- Keep copies of every scan and breathing test.
- Keep a list of every shop you worked in, including the ones that have since closed.
- Keep anything with a slab maker’s name on it, from phone photos to invoices.
- Document any and all violations, including photo or video footage of dry cutting, missing water feeds, and paper masks.
- Document it if your employer never offered you a medical exam.
You have legal options for artificial stone silicosis. Most California claims like these must be filed within two years of when you knew, or reasonably should have known, that you were sick and why.
Frost Law Firm, PC, Has Seen This Kind of Dust Before
Asbestos taught our firm how these stories go: a material that looks harmless once it’s installed, workers who learn what was in the dust from a pulmonologist years later, and rules that tighten only after the damage is done.
Engineered stone is running the same course on a faster clock, and the NPR silicosis report suggests most of the toll outside California hasn’t been counted yet.
Scott Frost has represented victims of asbestos-related disease for more than eighteen years. Today, Frost Law Firm, PC, handles artificial stone silicosis claims for fabrication workers and families from our office in San Pedro, in the same county that has produced about half of California’s cases. We also take cases in Nevada, Hawai’i, and beyond. If you or someone in your family worked with engineered stone and now has a diagnosis, let’s talk.
Consultations are free, and we don’t take a fee unless we win. Contact our San Pedro office to tell us what happened. At Frost Law Firm, PC, we stay with these cases From Exposure to Closure.
