For workers in one of the most dangerous jobs in America, the push for benefits is often the most formidable challenge that coal miners ever face — a battle for the money they need to support their families, and in some cases, to stay alive. A special federal black lung trust fund was created decades ago to pay medical bills and provide for families of ill miners when coal companies filed for bankruptcy and could no longer provide any support. But the fund of last resort has been buckling under financial and political pressures — drained of hundreds of millions of dollars at the same time that the deadly disease is surging in central Appalachia at a rate that medical experts have never seen. The impact on the fund and a backlog of cases have left miners and their widows waiting — sometimes years at a time — to get the benefits that they need. To read more, head to the link in our bio. 📝: Anavi Prakash, Victoria Malis, Tianyi Wang and Jessie Nguyen/Medill Investigative Lab 📸: Jus...