In the summer of 2021, Wade Hanicker felt a pain under his shoulder blade. He took ibuprofen, thinking it was a muscle knot that would go away with massage and time. One day at work in a Tampa-area stone fabrication shop, the pain started creeping around to his chest. He was having trouble breathing. His wife insisted they go to the emergency room when he got home. After a misdiagnosis and a series of biopsies, Hanicker was eventually diagnosed with silicosis—a progressive and potentially fatal lung disease now ripping through people who cut, grind, and polish artificial stone.
Hanicker’s diagnosis came just after he found out that his wife was pregnant with their second child. He had to shut down his countertop servicing business and estimates that he’s lost about half his income—and strength. The kinds of household projects he once zipped through now take “20 times longer,” he told me. “As a father you want to be able to play with your kids and teach them how to ride bikes.” His kids—now three and five—“might get five or 10 minutes of actually good play time before I’m winded and have to go sit down.... That has become the hardest part.”
Hanicker has spent the last few years cycling between doctors and medications to manage a hellish array of symptoms. His lungs, irritated and scarred by replicable crystalline silica, or RCS, have become dotted with fibrous nodules as the tissue hardens. But the silicosis also triggered an autoimmune condition. Doctors prescribed him a corticosteroid to deal with the ensuing inflammation. The side effects from that drug—especially after longer-term usage—can include bone and muscle degradation. When we spoke, Hanicker, 39, was still recovering from a double hip replacement. Tired of experimenting with medications, he’s cut his treatment down to just two pills and semiannual injections of the chemotherapy drug Rituxin at a local cancer center. This regimen keeps him relatively comfortable and able to function day to day, as doctors try to preserve and improve his lung capacity. “That’s all they can do for me until my lungs are bad enough for transplant.”
After his second biopsy, Hanicker got a medical bill for roughly $100,000. That’s when, somewhat reluctantly, he opted to join the hundreds of workers nationwide who are suing the manufacturers of the products—crystalline silica-based countertops, or artificial stone—they hold responsible for their disease. They aren’t alone.
Since California’s Department of Public Health began tracking what it calls engineered stone silicosis in 2019, it has recorded 668 confirmed cases and 35 deaths; the Department expects to tally 3,000 new cases by 2030. The Golden State’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board is now poised to ban engineered or artificial stone—names manufacturers dispute—by way of emergency regulation. In doing so, they’ll follow in the footsteps of Australia, which banned “quartz” countertops in 2024 after recording hundreds of cases of silicosis among engineered stone countertop workers since 2015.
As lawsuits like Hanicker’s mount, one of his Senators—Republican Ashley Moody, who’s up for reelection next month—has sponsored legislation that would put an end to workers suing for damages. The proposed bill, “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Stone Slab Products Act of 2026,” would grant stone slab manufacturers immunity from civil actions parallel only to that enjoyed by gun and vaccine manufacturers. A companion bill in the House, which was first introduced last September, made it out of the House Judiciary Committee early this June.
Moody’s sponsorship of the Senate version doesn’t seem to have come out of nowhere. Last October 30, her campaign and the Ashley Moody Victory Fund accepted a total of $38,000 from the family of Marty Davis, a prominent Trump donor and CEO of the United States’s largest manufacturer of engineered quartz, Cambria. According to Federal Election Commission filings, Davis and someone who appears to be his son Daniel—also listed as an employee at Cambria—made six separate gifts that day. A day after the bill was introduced, Moody also received a donation from one of the lobbyists that Cambria and three other engineered stone sellers hired to make the case for it to Congress.
Although unlikely to move forward in the next few months, Moody’s bill may give some voters pause. Hanicker, at least, who is a Republican and a steadfast Trump supporter, said he’s now “up in the air” about whether he’ll vote for for her given her support for stopping lawsuits against stone slab manufacturers. “I don’t support her on how she’s supporting this bill,” he said. “She was the main sponsor on that. I can’t stand that. There are certain aspects where I want the Democrats to win here,” he told me of Florida, “for everyone that’s being affected in this industry.”
Whether or not Moody’s backing of engineered stone companies moves the needle for other Floridians, a rare window has seemingly opened for Democrats in the state, as in other typically Republican strongholds across the country. Polling shows Moody with a shrinking lead over three-term Democratic state legislator Angie Nixon, who scored an upset primary victory running on a platform that includes Medicare for All, a federal rent freeze, and free childcare. Moody’s Republican bonafides are meanwhile airtight. Having previously served as Florida’s Attorney General, Moody was tapped by Governor Ron DeSantis to fill Marco Rubio’s seat after he joined the Trump administration in early 2025. She won her Republican primary in August to keep that seat in this year’s special Senate election.
Compared to DeSantis and Rubio, Moody has kept a relatively low profile during her short time in the Senate. Even in the context of an understated legislative record, her sponsorship of S.4792 has flown under the radar. Her Senate office doesn’t appear to have issued a press release announcing its introduction; her campaign’s website doesn’t mention it, either. Neither have responded to detailed requests for comment on her sponsorship of the bill or Davis’s donations to her campaign.
Moody may have good reason for wanting to stay quiet on the issue. A recent Bloomberg investigation revealed that Cambria’s own air sampling had “dozens of times” found respirable crystalline silica exposures “above the threshold that the company insists it’s staying below,” in some cases exceeding levels OSHA established as permissible in 2016. In six cases, Cambria “documented RCS levels that were also above the permissible exposure limit,” Bloomberg’s Joshua Eidelson reported earlier this month.
Like its companion in the House, Moody’s bill asserts that the countertop materials now subject to lawsuits and national bans are “not inherently dangerous,” and “do not pose an inherent risk of injury to human beings.” As Hanicker points out, the giant stone slabs made by Cambria and other companies need to be cut in order to be sold on to customers.
Understanding how countertops could pose such a grave threat to the people who make them requires understanding how they’re made. Unlike natural stone countertops, engineered versions rely on bonding mined and pulverized quartz together with resins, dyes, and metal. Those composites—typically made of at least 90 percent crystalline silica—are then poured into molds, dried, and baked. While larger firms like Cambria do some in-house fabrication, manufacturers most often ship giant stone slabs on to fabrication shops that shape, polish, and grind them based on their customers’ specifications. When customers receive the finished product, the contractors they hire to install them might make additional adjustments to fit them more precisely around sinks and appliances.
Cambria has consistently argued that the problem is “the process, not the product,” blaming silicosis injuries and deaths on fabrication shops they accuse of using unsafe methods that put their own workers at risk. Hanicker argues, however, that even shops trying to keep their workers safe would struggle to eliminate any human contact with crystalline silica dust. Among the most commonly used methods to mitigate exposure are so-called “wet shops,” using wet saws, floors and vacuums to keep nanoparticles out of the air. “Even wet cutting is still dangerous,” Hanicker pointed out. “Once the slurry dries there’s still dust. Even if it gets sucked into a vacuum, somebody still has to clean that filter out. There’s going to be human interaction with the dust regardless of the form of the dust.”
Nevertheless, he understands why politicians like Moody are pushing the line that quartz countertops are safe. “It’s money in their pockets. Money for their campaign,” he said. “It’s sad to see that they’re willing to put people’s lives in danger.”
Lawyers for Cambria have made some extraordinary claims in their defense of the company. They’ve testified, for one, that silicosis is not a major problem for American stone cutters outside of California, which maintains the country’s only comprehensive log of silica exposure from quartz countertop cases and deaths, requiring an extensive process to confirm silicosis diagnoses and their most likely cause. At a Congressional hearing last year, Cambria lawyer Rebecca Shult testified that there were “only a handful of silicosis cases in the other 49.” But no other state is systematically tracking that illness among stonecutters. Thanks in part to advocacy from the United Mineworkers over black lung, the National Institute for Occupational Health has for decades tracked lung disease among coal miners. Such monitoring and protections simply don’t exist for workers in fabrication shops, many of whom receive scant safety training, may be reluctant to seek care due to their immigration status or lack of healthcare, and struggle to access workers’ compensation.
While the tracking of engineered stone silicosis is new in the United States, the illness itself isn’t. Medical journals started warning about “artificial stone silicosis” shortly after those products started gaining popularity in Israel in the 1990s. A 2012 article in the journal Chest—published by the American College of Chest Physicians—noted an outbreak of cases in that country after the company CaesarStone began to popularize them there. Despite hundreds of documented cases of artificial stone silicosis in countries across Italy, Spain, China, and Canada, Hanicker said that the shops he worked in never treated “quartz” and comparatively less harmful natural stones—like granite and marble—differently. The product has steadily grown popularity during the 15 years he’s worked in “granite shops,” which fashion both natural and artificial stone.
The increased appetite for artificial stone is owed in no small part to Cambria’s CEO. Despite his folksy presentation, Marty Davis is the billionaire scion of a midwestern dynasty that’s grown wealthy off of everything from dairy farms to Sun Country Airlines. As Cambria pitches to both fabrication shops and customers at major retailers like Home Depot, Ikea, and Lowe’s, “quartz” countertops offer a number of benefits for customers willing to pay prices comparable to or even more than granite. It’s more durable and less absorbent than natural stone, and can be dyed in a wide range of colors and consistent patterns. These qualities helped demand for quartz countertops grow 800 percent between 2010 and 2018.
Since Cambria’s founding in 1999, the now $500 billion company has come to own a number of quartz mines in Canada. It transports quarried quartz by rail for processing in Minnesota, where the company is headquartered. But Cambria is unique even among the companies looking to end lawsuits related to their products. Many of the company’s domestic competitors—including subsidiaries of foreign firms—offer artificial and natural stone as well as safer alternatives to quartz, made with non-crystalline silica or recycled glass. Cambria exclusively offers “silica-based” quartz slabs. Most quartz countertops, moreover, are imported—mostly from India, Vietnam, Thailand and Spain.
In the name of protecting “free enterprise and free competition,” Davis and a few other domestic manufacturers have successfully lobbied the White House to impose tariffs on imported quartz that threatens his market share. That’s driven up costs for many of Cambria’s competitors, which are now angling to block those levies. How Davis got the ear of the president isn’t any great mystery: He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s 2020 campaign, has thrown thrown him lavish fundraisers and, in 2021, even offered the Trump Media & Technology Group a $5 million loan. He continues to donate generously to Republican campaigns around the country.
Hanicker is well aware of the president’s connections to Davis and Cambria. He spoke at length about how the administration’s trade policies—including those Davis urged Trump to slap on engineered stone imports—have hit his livelihood, too; Hanicker is still working at a fabrication shop, though now he programs a robot to cut stone from the safety of an office. “I’m sure they’re also paying Trump off on these tariffs,” he told me. “It’s hurting the industry all the way around.”
All the same, he’s still backing Trump. “Considering the other side right now,” he said, these connections haven’t made him want to support a Democrat for president. “Just because I’m a Republican and a Trump supporter doesn’t mean I agree with everything he does.”
He emailed Trump a letter about his ordeal with silicosis. Although he’s skeptical as to whether the president had read it or written the reply, he didn’t take the impersonal response personally, given the volume of mail the commander-in-chief receives and his other duties. Hannicker summarized the note: “Sorry about your health and hope that you and your family are well.”
