Part One:The Deadliest Workplace Disaster in U.S. History

Robert and Jason Pargin sit down to discuss the Hawk's Nest Tunnel project, the deadliest industrial disaster in U.S. history.

(2 Parts)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. All right, it is a podcast that you're
listening to right now. Behind the Bastards, that's the one.
We're here, We're on the air and in the sky
and around you. Jason Pargin is our guest today. Jason,

(00:22):
how are you doing today?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
I feel like I need to make this up to
your listeners for the last time I was on, because
last time we did in k Ultra, a subject that
I wanted to be a part of because I thought
it would be fun because it's conspiracy stuff and mind
control and mature and candidates. And then it turned out
once we got into the actual details to be a

(00:44):
real bummer.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yeah, it's it's just abuse on a massive scale.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, a lot of abuse, a lot of the government
money wasted, a lot of stupid people acting in foolish ways,
and basically nobody was made to pay. So I suggested
the subject of this episode because I wanted something that
was more lighthearted that would make up for for that
where even if some bad things happen, it's okay because
you know that at the end the bad guys will

(01:12):
get what they deserve.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Mm hmmmm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
And then we decided to do an episode about a
horrible industrial disaster. Instead, No, this is this is the
episode that you pitched, Jason, and uh, it's boy a
lot bleaker than I even thought it was going to
be when I when I went in on this, and
I think it's one that most people have not heard about, Like,

(01:37):
had you heard about this because it was a there
was a TikTok you came across that was kind of
like summarizing this.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Right, okay, Robert, Yes, I am an award winning New
York Times bestselling author. We cannot go on a microphone
and say, oh, you heard about this industrial accid TikTok.
We say that I read a book about it now
and that I just don't remember the title.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Jason. First off, I did read a couple of books
about it. But what I will say is, because you're
a TikTok star now, there's nothing that will increase your
credit with the gen Z kids more than getting news
from TikTok.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, we are going to record a multi part podcast
episode just on that three minute TikTok to break it
down now. Forty seconds in, he says this, No, so anyway, Yeah,
I heard about this on TikTok and then looked it
up and then found out that its Wikipedia page is
like nine hundred words long. It's almost a stub and

(02:39):
it is the worst industrial disaster maybe in American history.
I say maybe because we know almost nothing about it.
Like there are famous disasters, Like in school, I heard
about the Triangle shirt waist factory fire that is a
famous example of a gross negligence at a workplace and
that killed like one hundred and fifty people. Yeah, this

(02:59):
was much much worse. The Triangle shirtwais like that Wikipedia
page goes on and on, it's like four thousand words long.
That's something we know about. It has been documented, There's been
books written about it. This thing got swept under the
rug so efficiently, and there is met with such indifference
that it is stunning. That to me, is the most
shocking part of this is how much people don't know

(03:22):
or care about it.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
And I think one of the things that you're going
to be interested in as we get into this is
that there was a period of time in which this
was extremely famous and the degree to which it was
buried after that is a really interesting part of like
what's happened here? The disaster we're talking about because we
haven't said the name of it yet, if people are curious,

(03:44):
is the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, which I also had
not heard of at all until you sent me that TikTok, Jason.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
And like a lot of people, when you hear the
term Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, you're picturing people being attacked
by a giant swarm of hawks. Yeah, yeah, that's not
what happened.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, like a bunch of cavers like find their way
into a tunnel and it winds up being like filled
with with some sort of like eyeless, featherless like underground
nighthawk that that only hunts. I'm imagining basically the creatures
from the first Riddick movie if you if you remember
that listeners, no one, no one on TikTok has watched

(04:25):
that film.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
And if that hadn't happened, it would have been a
much more famous incident. Like I think that we would
have a statue of that of that songhere.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, yeah, And and I do think we should have
a statue dedicated to the first Riddick movie. But that's
that's a separate matter. So we're gonna get into this story,
and it is fucking wild, but But first off, Jason
up at the top here. Uh, I think you you
have a book to plug I believe as usual.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yes, the new one is called Zoe is Too Drunk
for This Dystopia. It's the latest in the Zoe ash series.
It is out October thirty first. And every possible format
including print and audio, and I guess just those two.
But yeah, all of the possible formats.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yeah, when you say every possible format, are you getting
down on the metaverse yet, Jason? Because one day, theoretically
your book can be beamed directly into the brain of
a neuralink patient. You know, they instantly know everything that
you've written. We can really save a lot of time,
you know, with the just kind of cutting out the
joy of experiencing a story and just have it be

(05:34):
a memory immediately.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
If you are listening to this podcast far enough in
the future, I am confident it will be available because
there is no way that my works will be lost
to time. It's simply not possible. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, speaking of loss to time, let's get into the
Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster. So most people listen. Everyone listening
to this knows about Chernobyl easily the most famous industrial
disaster or accident in history, and it's you know, it's
kind of perfect for you know, a mini series on
HBO or whatever it's. You've got the disintegrating Soviet state,

(06:09):
you get a nuclear reactor. This like worry that it
could have been much worse and like killed millions of people.
But when you actually drill into how bad Chernobyl was,
what's amazing is how bad it wasn't because about thirty
people die immediately, and obviously that's that's fucked up, but
only about sixty or so are confirmed to have died

(06:30):
of radiation induced cancer from Chernobyl. Ever since, now, those
numbers don't tell the whole story. I'm not trying to
minimize this. Some estimates suggest as many as four thousand
people will eventually die as at least a partial result
of the radiation exposure they received from Chernobyl. That's not
an insignificant toll, but it's also like kind of a

(06:51):
fraction of It's a fraction for one thing, the worst
industrial disaster in history, which was the Bopaul chemical plant explosion.
We've covered that on the show before. That killed about
four thousand people immediately and injured more than two hundred thousand.
At least fifteen to twenty thousand additional people are known
to have died as a result of like lingering consequences
from Beopol. More than half a million people currently suffer

(07:11):
from respiratory distress or other health issues like blindness as
a result of it. It's worse than Chernobyl on a
pretty grand scale, and in the middle of those two,
significantly worse than Chernobyl, not as disastrous as Bopol is
the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster. And one of the things
that ties it to Bopol is that the Bopol chemical

(07:33):
factory that exploded, this pesticide factory was owned by a
little corporation you might have heard of called Union Carbide.
And Union Carbide is you know, there's a lot of
corporations we like to call evil out there, because you know,
maybe they have a negative impact on small businesses, or
pump a bunch of propaganda into our eyes or whatever.

(07:53):
Union Carbide is evil in that most dictators of the
twentieth century had a lower death count than this company
in terms of like direct deaths, dude, and negligence. And
so today we're gathering to talk about another Union Carbide
disaster because the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster is all on
Union Carbide. They are the guys behind this, and it's

(08:14):
it's interesting, you know, as you noted, you brought up
the Triangle Shirtwaist fire at the start of this, Jason.
If you combine the death tolls of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,
the Sunshine Mind Disaster, and the Farmington Mind disaster, which
are three of the most famous twentieth century industrial disasters
in the US, they do not equal the death toll
of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, which by the way,

(08:35):
exceeds Chernobyle.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
And to be fair to Union Carbide, both of these
disasters happened during just a period when they were I'm
sure going through some rough stretch because these are only
like sixty years apart, so you know, there's just a period,
a dark period in their company's history when I'm sure
other than that it's been fine.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
Yeah, yeah, No, there's a there's no questions about any
of the other products that they've put out the consequences
those might have had on the population writ large. This
is interesting in part because it's an industrial disaster with
a horrible human toll that was not tied to you know,
Chernobyl was a bad nuclear plant, right, it was like
badly constructed. The Bopol Chemical Factory was a bad chemical factory.

(09:23):
The Hawk's Nest Tunnel is one of the most successful
construction projects in like the history of industrial It's basically
it's part of a hydro electric system that's still functioning today.
So one of the things that's compelling to me is
that like this was not the result of like a

(09:43):
shoddy project. This was the result of a concentrated financial
choice to make a project deadlier in order to maximize profits.
So that's interesting. But before we get into that, we
have to start with a little bit of history on
have you ever heard prior to this Jason of silicosis.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
No, but I feel like hearing it that I could
put together what it is that silica dust, Like, I
think silica granules under a microscope are very sharp and
nasty looking. The idea of breathing too many of them,
I just imagine them shrubbing the tissue in your lungs.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, that is a good way to view it, right,
because silica particles are basically just like little bits of glass.
But it's actually slightly worse than that. So what happens
with silicosis, you get it right. It's when you breathe
in too much silica dust. But these tiny particles of
silica actually get absorbed by cells in the lung and
this injures the cells and it causes them to start

(10:42):
I think the name of the process is autolysis, which
is when cells digest themselves. This causes masses of scar
tissue in your lungs and it reduces your ability to breathe. Eventually,
this will seriously compromise a person's ability to take in
oxygen at all. It's one of those things where silicas
is often not specifically what kills you, but it makes

(11:03):
you a lot more vulnerable to tuberculosis or pneumonia. You
think about like COVID nineteen right, how people who are
immuno compromised, who have some sort of issue with their
lungs were much more vulnerable to it because they just
had less lung to rely on at the start of things.
It's a lot like that and silicosis. Yeah, basically, your
lungs are basically eating themselves. That's kind of how it

(11:26):
kills you.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
Now. Right at the top, I fear some people are
going to hear this and they're going to anticipate. Okay,
this is probably a situation where they had these people
working on a project and then years and years later
they started getting sick, and then the complaint is going
to be that, well they should have known. That is
not the situation. Guys, we're going to get into it.
They knew right away. Yeah, this is not a thing

(11:49):
like asbestos, where it was something that was widely used
and then a long long time later you started to
get realize, oh, we shouldn't have been using it like that. No,
they knew. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
The timeframe on this is crez and the time frame
when silicosis can vary. Right, this is a thing that
you can get a lot of people who got silicosis
in the ancient world were like, you look at all
those very pretty marble structures in like Greece today, right
on the Parthenon. Well, to do that, you have to
chop up a bunch of bigger rocks, right, you have
to like carve them, and that creates dust that has

(12:20):
silica in it. So over time, the artisans who worked
on this kind of stuff would gradually their lungs would die.
They would get Basically it is like, this is one
of the things that gets called miner's lung or the
black lung. Right, So, craftsmen in the ancient world would
get this, but usually after a period of decades, right,
because they're not breathing in that much dust. The dust

(12:41):
doesn't have a huge quantity of silica in it, so
it takes a lot of time. It's also a thing
miners in the ancient world would get this right for
the same reason that miners in the modern world get it.
Coal mining is a lot worse for this, and so
black lung was a higher thing for them than like
a gold miner, because there's a lot of silica in
anthracite coal. Now, I said at the top, this is

(13:04):
the oldest known industrial ailment, and I meant it. It
is described I think the first time it's described as
by Herodotus. Right, Herodotus two thousand years in change ago
is writing about mine workers and craftsmen suffering from this
like lung destroying disease caused by breathing in dust. Like
we had a diagnosis for this thing about as far

(13:25):
back as we've had a concept of medicine. It's like
literally one of the first things we knew about.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Because it did not require a vast ocean of scientific
knowledge to understand I'm breathing the stuff that makes me
coughed and burns my nose. Yeah, and then eventually my
lungs feel like they're on fire, and then I can't
breathe anymore. Like it's just kind of connecting a to
be there.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
Yeah, it's not as complicated as like inventing an mRNA vaccine. Yes,
it is kind of a basic observation that you can make.
And that's relevant because the company you carbide, when this
all rolls out, as going to claim like, well, we
didn't even know silicosis was a thing, and it's like, well,
you had two and a half thousand years or so

(14:08):
to get up to speed on this one, guys. And
it's one of those things. It's not just we're not
just talking about like the kind of Greco Roman ancient
world here. Tissue samples on mummified bodies of miners from
Peru have also shown evidence of silicosis. Spanish writers in
the seventeenth century documented that indigenous people who were like
enslaved and forced into mines in South America had a

(14:32):
life expectancy of just six to eighteen months because of this.
So this is one of those things when you read
about how you know, conquistadors started taking these large chunks
of South and Central America and then eighty percent, ninety percent,
whatever of the of the local indigenous population were dead
within a fairly short period of time. This is how

(14:52):
a lot of them died. Right, They're forced into mines,
they're inhaling silica dust and their lungs digest themselves. That
is like, what's actually going down.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
As we're going to get into this, as they're working,
it's going to be it's going to become clear like
they had people who could not continue on the job,
many of them, and they were kind of just dragged
off and replaced. It's not everything that they're going to
say to defend themselves that it's like, well, this is
really the silent killer. You couldn't have known. It's like, no,
your inspectors were wearing protection when they came to look

(15:25):
at it, knowing that the workers were not. But we
all get into all of that. But yeah, the point
is this is important to establish because they they had
no reason to even from one moment, think that this
was not a danger there.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yes, yes, and we see you know, there's significant increasing
references and an understanding of silicosis in Western sources from
about the sixteenth century on. This just becomes because a
lot of a lot of the modern world is built
on silicosis, right, Like, the sheer number of people who
had to get this thing in order to create a
lot of the foundations of the society we live in

(15:59):
is in the millions. So again, no real reason anyone
involved in digging tunnels or mining would not know this.
But in order to kind of set that out, I'm
going to quote from a book on the Hawk's Nest
Disaster by an epidemiologist named Martin Cherniac. In the eighteen hundred,
silicosis reached epidemic proportions among British potters. Vernacular terms for
the disease grinder's rot, potter's rot, and miner's pathisis became

(16:23):
common in that century, reflecting as well the concomitants of
silicosis and tuberculosis. The direct association between exposure to silicaceous
dusts and morbid fibrosis of the lungs was established in
the early eighteen sixties by British physicians, Although silicosis was
not yet categorized as a diagnostic entity, its connection with clays,
quartz and sandstone had been clearly identified. The practice of

(16:45):
wet drilling to reduce exposure to dust was introduced in
England as early as eighteen ninety seven. By nineteen eleven,
dry drilling had been explicitly forbidden by South African mining.
So there's a couple things that are interesting there. For one,
when we talk about this building the modern world, it's
not just like the people who had to mind the
stone to make our capitol buildings, or the people who

(17:05):
like mind gold or coal. It's like potters. It's people
making very basic like there's so many ways you can
encounter this stuff, and obviously that changes the time frame
at which it hits you. But the other thing that's
important is that because this was such a problem, people
as early as the eighteen nineties had figured out how
to mitigate it. And the best thing to mitigate it

(17:25):
is wet drilling. Right, So, when you have a dry
drill going into a piece of coal or rock or
whatever that's got a high silica content, it's going to
kick up a shitload of dust. If you're pumping water
in there. At the same time, the dust gets wet
and it just kind of gets madded down, so there's
not nearly as much of it in the air to
breathe in very basic, very low tech and like again,

(17:49):
South Africa in nineteen eleven, not the country that's probably
most concerned with the safety of their laborers, but they're
well ahead of the United States in this regard. Right,
they are have like ban this because it's inhumane dry drilling.
So the US is not just behind in this regard.
We are one of the last Western countries to really

(18:10):
build any kind of capacity for both the study of
occupational illnesses and the implementation of restrictions that might reduce
profitability but would reduce the death toll among the labor force.
And part of the reasons why we're so lax on
this is that when we first start putting together regulatory
entities that are looking at minds that are dealing with

(18:33):
the laborers who are encountering silicosis. These regulators exist and
they have like fancy names like the Bureau of Mining,
I think it's the Department of Mining, but they don't
actually have the ability to enforce laws, right, they get
to make recommendations. They can say, hey, you should probably
wet drill, but they can't say you're dry drilling and

(18:53):
killing your laborers, so now you know you're going to
get fined or whatever. Like, they don't actually have any
kind of power early on in the twentieth century to
do much of anything here.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
I don't want to get political with this. I know
that everything is political in some way, but this is
the thing that is so hard to explain. Look, I
am more libertarian than a lot of people who say
work in the entertainment industry, but it is very difficult
to talk to someone who is on the extreme libertarian

(19:28):
site who acts like they don't understand why regulations exist
at all, because it's like, well, you know, if you
want to open a cupcake shop in America, you got
to fill fill out three hundred forms and get a
license for the oven. And it's like, okay, I get it.
If you've ever tried you know, anybody who's ever tried
to build anything and get permits, I get it. It
is a pain in the ass if you don't understand

(19:49):
the history of why we have eight million pages of regulations.
It is because if you don't have it explicitly spelled
out in the law. What you're not a allowed to
do to your workers, they will do it to the workers. Yeah,
there was an era in this country where we built
very fast, and we dug a lot of coal, and

(20:12):
we did a lot of mining, and we put down
a lot of railroad tracks with none of that stuff
on the books, and there are mass graves to show
for it.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah. And one of the things I don't get is
so a lot of the people who would make that
argument that you're making are folks who believe that part
of why you need the right to bear firearms, the
right to own in bear firearms, is that it provides
some sort of check to state power, right that one
of the things that could keep the state honest is
if you have an armed citizenry. This is something a

(20:42):
lot of those people would argue. It's an argument I'm
sympathetic to to a significant degree. But I don't see
how you can go from that to then saying like, well,
shouldn't you have something that can do that to these corporations?

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Right?

Speaker 1 (20:53):
Like, that's what a regulatory entity is. It's the state
basically holding a gun on these companies that are otherwise
going to cut whatever corners they can, no matter how
much it harms its laborers. Like, I don't understand the
why that, why that there's not like any kind of
consistency with that, with that viewpoint among a lot of people,
not everybody.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Or if you're a Republican and if one of those
workers was to steal a bunch of coal, they would
want that worker thrown in jail, no mercy. Yeah, but
it's like, okay, but why isn't the company if you
believe in law and order cops being tough on criminals,
if you have a criminal company, why don't you have
that same attitude? Why are you looking at those executives

(21:33):
and those you know, those people on the ground who
knew what was going on, Why don't you have the
same lock them up and throw away the key attitude
that you have toward you know, a kid who sticks
somebody up in an alley, it's like, no, that that
he's it's too unsafe to have him out there. It's like, okay,
but do you understand there are some too, some corporations
where it's too unsafe to have them operating as a corporation. Yeah, Like,

(21:53):
why don't you have that same knee jerk reaction of
throw them, you know, throw them under the jail.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
This is I mean, I have thought for a while
that like we need some sort of equivalent to like
a corporate death penalty, right where if a company is
acting irresponsible and enough of a scale, then it's like,
all right, well we're going to sell off your assets.
Your executives get nothing like this is a this is
the penalty for certain levels of irresponsibility. But you know,
we don't even really manage antitrust that well, So that's

(22:22):
that's probably And I'm not a not a law nowhere guy,
so I'm sure that that's illegal for a thousand different reasons.
But we should get back to the story fundamentally here.
So sorry, yeah, no, no, no, no, this is I
mean I think about this a lot because it's something
that I feel like a lot of the people who
I agree with on other things should get. But you

(22:44):
still you still encounter that attitude a lot. Anyway, Federal
agencies that are tasked with reducing sickness among workers and
managing working conditions are again hamstrung in this area. All
they can do is make recommendations. And this is the
era we are you know this story we're talking about
happens in the in the early nineteen thirties. This is
like right around the period where not far from where

(23:06):
this happens, the United States Army Air Corps is basically
bombing mine workers from the sky on behalf of management
as a result of like one of these miners uprising.
So it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of mine
workers are unwilling to spend money to keep workers alive. Now,
workers in Nevada courtz mines in the eighteen nineties get

(23:27):
diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of silicosis. Ten percent
of them die in a five year period, and this
is kind of the worst silicosis disaster prior to the
one we're about to talk about. There's another case where
a bunch of zinc miners in Missouri suffer high rates
of silicosis. Several hundred die within ten years of entering
the mines, and so by the time the twenties roll around.

(23:51):
Both of these stories are extremely well known, and precautions
against silicosas have become much more common even in the
United States. And as a result of some of these
precaus like wet drilling and a lot of operations coal operations,
in particular, morbidity from silicosis had plunged. So to sum
up quite a lot of research and trial and error
in the US and around the world by the start

(24:12):
of the nineteen thirties. Mine operators have three major methods
of reducing the lethality of their minds. Number one is
wet drilling, which we've talked about already. Number two is
providing ventilation, right, installing ventilation ducts and mines in order
to get bad air out right. That should be pretty obvious.
I don't think people need explanation as to why ventilation helps.

(24:32):
And the number three is issuing respirators from miners to
wear right. These are This is like a more primitive
version of the respirators. A lot of US war and
wear as a result of the COVID nineteen pandemic the years,
and I actually didn't know there were functional respirators this
far back, but the US Bureau of Mines started publishing
recommendations on which specific respirators to issue in nineteen twenty six.

(24:56):
And all of this wisdom is going to be ignored
deliberately to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, so that part
of the story starts with the town of gaully Bridge
in Fayette County, West Virginia. In nineteen thirty, it had
a population of just over seventy two thousand. Now, West
Virginia is like a lot of parts of the world
that are have a troubled history with this sort of thing.

(25:18):
Rich in natural resources and also always poor. You run
into a lot of these spots when you talk about
industrial disasters, and you will not be surprised to learn
that it was hit particularly hard by the Great Depression.
The unemployment rate in most counties of West Virginia hovered
between thirty and forty percent, which is I don't think

(25:39):
it's like an exaggeration to call that like near apocalyptic, right,
think about, like the Great Depression, how bad it is. Famously,
in most of the country unemployments like maybe twenty to
twenty five percent, Right, You've got forty percent or in
some cases higher in most West Virginia counties. It's just
a calamity for the whole state.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
Let me say, let me venture this. You're for you
to correct me if I'm wrong. Forty percent unemployment in
this era in that place, with the state of the
infrastructure that they had at that time. There's no pore
in the United States now that compares to that kind
of core. Like that's poor on a level that most
of us can't comprehend.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
I mean, honestly, I believe with that. I don't think
I'm being like exaggerating here. At forty percent unemployment in
the US, like this would be a failed state, Like
the basics of infrastructure would no longer function, It would
be a calamity.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah, the elements of the social safety net stuff that
came about after the depression. There's a whole lot of
stuff that did not exist exist back then in terms
of assistance, in terms of everything, in terms of where
you would seek medical help if you had an infection
or a broken leg or anything. It is hard to comprehend.
This is crucial to understand because when we start talking

(26:56):
about this case, you're going to be asking, if you
are very naive or very young, well, why did they
just quit or why did they go to the press,
or why didn't they complain to this? You know, the
labor Relations board got to understand the context here. This
is a place where if a job comes along, you
don't say no to it.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah, period, For a lot of these people like it
might seem like the world's ending things are so so bad.
So part of why they are so bad, why unemployment
so much higher in West Virginia, is that over the
course of the twenties and thirties, the mining industry that
had largely built what prosperity West Virginia had had fallen apart.

(27:35):
The region is obviously very rich in coal, but for
a variety of reasons, including under regulation in that particular state,
its minds were also inefficient. So by the twenties and thirties,
a lot of the nation's coal needs are being served
by newer and more efficient facilities in other states. And
because there's so many additional new and more efficient minds,

(27:57):
there's a surplus of coal for i think, pretty much
the first time since we started needing it, and that's
disastrous for West Virginia's mining industry as well. All of
this deals a near fatal blow to the United Mine Workers' Union,
which provided the bosses with opportunities to basically make ad
hoc agreements with groups of starving miners that would deny

(28:18):
them any of the protections and security that previous generations
or the generation right before them had fought to gain right.
So one of the things that's happening here is because
of how disastrous this is, there's not really any labor
power in the state of West Virginia that can provide
any kind of countervailing force to the bosses that are
going to be running this project. But you know what

(28:39):
does provide a countervailing force to this podcast, I suppose
is ads we're back ugh, so we're talking about why
the setup to this disaster. So one of the other

(28:59):
things that's happened here is that, like West Virginia used
to be covered in old growth forests, those are basically
all gone by this point. So that's an industry that
no longer exists. That's another part of why so many
people are out of work, and so because coal isn't
really profitable right now, the forests have basically been killed.
The one thing that West Virginia has an abundance is
moving water. Right. The state's got a lot of big rivers,

(29:23):
and those rivers can be harnessed to provide hydro electric power,
which we have figured out to do pretty well by
the early nineteen hundreds, So the Electro Metallurgical Company, the
start of the century starts building hydro power capability in
the state, and they start buying up smaller companies who
are involved in like mining different kinds of minerals, like
the Wilson Aluminum Company, and adding that to their portfolio. Now,

(29:46):
the founder of this company is a guy named Major Morland,
and in nineteen eleven he draws up plans for a
massive new hydro electric facility which will use the power
of a river to support the manufacturing of futuristic new
alloys that required high to temperatures and state of the
art power hungry facilities to provide. I think this facility
is going to be a significant part actually of like

(30:06):
our production of the alloys that make the US part
of World War II possible. Right, you need a lot
of metals that don't just come naturally out of the
ground on their own in order to make let's say,
a P fifty one Mustang. So they pick for this
hydroelectric plant an area of the new River Canawa Falls,
which is kind of the ideal location in their mind.

(30:28):
So construction begins at first at a place called Glenn
Ferris on the river, and a small, rather primitive dam
is built than in nineteen seventeen, the Electro Metallurgical Company
merges with three other corporations in West Virginia to form
a new entity, the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation. So
this is the start of Union Carbide. This is actually

(30:48):
going to be its first big project, what we're talking
about here. So now that it's flush with cash, plans
move forward to create a new and a much larger dam.
The problem is expanding the size of this dam the
way Union carbid once is illegal. The Army Corps of
Engineers has laid out strict requirements about how large such
facilities can be because you have to have a navigable waterway, right,

(31:10):
you can't just like destroy the ability of a river
to like function, to be traveled across, to be utilized
by people for a variety of other reasons, just so
you can build your hydro electric facility. So, since this
is illegal, Union Carby decides what if we just break
the law and build it anyway, which they do, and
they build this fucking thing, and in the nineteen nineteen

(31:32):
when it's done, they reach out to the government and
are like, hey, you know this thing we're not allowed
to do. Well, we did it. Can we get retroactive permission.
Now to their credit, the government's like, well, no you can't,
but they don't do anything. Again, we have at this
point these regulators are able to like say all the
right things like you can't illegally build this dam that

(31:52):
fucks with the waterway, but they don't have any kind
of like power to actually take action, which is a
pretty bad mix in my opinion. Not to get political here,
but Union Carbide makes plans to expand its holdings on
the New River. They construct two additional dams, and they
file plans in nineteen twenty seven through a corporate entity
they cut out to handle this whole business, the New

(32:14):
Cana What Power Company. And so this is going to
be a project of this company called the New Cana
What Power Company. But that's Union Carbide, right. This is
a thing that they build and create in order to
mitigate risk for themselves. If they like fuck up the
whole project and get a bunch of people killed. It's
a kind of thing that corporations don't do anymore. Right, obviously,

(32:34):
that would be ano.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Well, okay, I do want to talk about something because
to this day you have Silicon Valley billionaires talking about
we want to just move fast and break things out
and we can always like apologize later, we'll pay whatever fine,
but we're just going to take off and do it
because that's you know, that's how innovation happens. We're not
going to worry about all of these little rules, all
this stuff. We're gonna launch our rocket. We're I'm gonna

(32:57):
worry whether or not debris reins down on houses for
six miles in every direction. Like we'll just what matters
is that we achieve the rocket launch and then all
this other stuff we can smooth smooth it over later.
Like there's this spirit of once we build it, we
may have to pay a fine later maybe like they

(33:17):
may yell at us, they may shake their finger at us,
but the thing we built is going to stay built. Yeah,
and that's been true. I feel like for a long time,
it's like, well, let's just do it, and then once
it's done, it'll be harder for them to because you know,
what are they going to do? Fill it back in?
It's like no, most likely they'll just shout at us
a little bit or even if that, yeah, and then
we'll have our thing. We'll have our dam.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah. It's frustrating like how consistently that works, because there's
really there's still not a counter to that kind of thing, right,
because like, what are you going to do, like dismantle it?
It would be kind of cool if they did, but
also probably would cause a bunch of other people to
die of silicosis.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
So anyway, I'm just gonna say, likewise, if you compare
the size of the fines for say, the opioid epidemic
to these form of companies versus the amount of profit
they made, Yeah, selling the pain killers, it's nothing. It's
a drop in the bucket. So it's like, well, why
not just invent the new addictive thing, because yeah, you'll
have to pay back five percent of it in the

(34:15):
form of a fine, But so what nobody went to jail.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
Yeah, it's the kind of thing you know, you'll hear
debate a lot when people talk about like Enron, right,
where maybe the two thousand and eight crash wouldn't have
happened if more of those guys had gone to prison.
And I don't know that that would have done anything.
But it couldn't hurt to try, right, Like, it wouldn't
have hurt to try. It wouldn't have hurt to try
in two thousand and eight. It wouldn't have hurt to
try in nineteen thirty with this thing, you know, treating

(34:40):
these crimes that have much higher body accounts than like
bank robbers do with a similar degree of severity. But
that's not going to happen in this case, so I
guess we should just move along. So this new plan
for this massive, massive hydro plant involves the creation of
a sixteen thousand, two hundred and forty foot long tunnel. Right,
they're going underground to divert water from the new river

(35:03):
through a mountain, gaully mountain, and because of like the
angle at which the water is going to be coming in,
they're basically building an underground river that they can use
to funnel water from the existing river and run the
hydro electric plant with that. This is a three mile
long tunnel through solid rock. So it's one of those

(35:23):
things that, like to the fathers of the people building
this thing would have been an impossible project in their youth,
Like this is something that modern science and machinery has
just made possible now because the goal of this tunnel
is to provide electricity for the electro Metallurgical co subsidiary
that exists within Union Carbide. This is not a mining

(35:45):
project technically, right, It's just a construction project, which means
none of the workers are protected from any of the
regulations that do exist to keep miners safe from silicosis.
So the minimal protections that existed aren't in place here
because they're technickly not mining, even though as we'll cover,
they are going to be mining. But I want to
quote now from a fascinating study in the American Society

(36:08):
of Safety Professionals journal vantage Point that's analyzing this disaster. Quote.
Union Carbide received thirty five bids and awarded a two
year contract to rein Hart and Dennis, one of the
few construction companies able to manage such a large project.
During the bid process, rein Hart and Dennis reported having
built fifty one tunnels in the past thirty five years.
Engineers from New Kanawa Power were to design and oversee

(36:30):
the operation. The contract specified that reine harton Dennis would
assume all liability, thus Union Carbide was shielded. The contract
included a clause that allowed engineers for New Kanawa Power
to force changes into the contractor's procedures if injuries were
caused by negligence on behalf of the contractor, but New
Kanawa Power never intervened. The contract also called for reine

(36:51):
Hart and Dennis to furnish an equipment on site hospital,
but only four first aid stations were provided, one at
each dig. Workers sustaining major injuries were transported to Coal
Valley Hospital fourteen miles away. So even under the terms
of the very again even more minimal than the protections
that existed. Like contract they sign this subsidiary, Ryan harton

(37:11):
Dennis is going to further cut costs, right, because they're
trying to maximize what they get from Union Carbiden actually
get to take home. Union Carbide wants to cut costs
because that's going to get their facility up and running,
which is going to let them produce alloys faster. So
they want this faster and cheaper. Everybody's interest, like the
further you go down the chain is just how can
we do this faster? How can we do this cheaper?

(37:32):
And the easiest way to cut costs is with the workers' lives.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
Right. So I know that it gets confusing getting into
stuff like loopholes and subsidiaries and all that, but I
cannot emphasize enough, and I don't want to belabor the point,
but the reason why the regulations are a stack of
papers eighteen feet tall is because the companies have lawyers
to do things like say, well, technically, this is a

(37:56):
construction project, not a mining project. They're not mining for anything.
They're built in a tunnel, So why do we need
like finding little ways to sneak around the regulation so
you don't have to provide the respirators or go through
the rules with normal governed mining, because well, technically, according
to the paperwork, a mine is this, and technically we're

(38:18):
doing this, even though everyone knows it's the exact same
work with the exact same dangers. That is why the
regulations look the way they do, because you have to
close every conceivable loophole because the companies have their own
lawyers specifically to find them.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Yeah, and I think one of the best ways to
look at how complex and labyrinthine regulations get is think about, like,
if you're a military history nerd, like like I am.
I'm I'm not sure about you, Jason, but I like
reading about that stuff. When you look at the maps
of like civil war battles, right, there's just it's it's
this hugely there's all these different colored little symbols that
stand for these different units, and these arrows moving all

(38:58):
in all around and like to show like where everyone's gone.
It's these incredibly complex series of movements and counter movements
and advances and retreats. When you're looking at regulations, what
you are seeing is, to some extent, the fossil record
of a conflict. Right of government makes regulation, corporation finds

(39:19):
loophole to get around it. Government has to clarify or
add in new rules or make a new law to
deal with the loophole that provides new loopholes. Like that's
that's what you're seeing is like a record of a
conflict that is fundamentally over Like how much can you
endanger people in order to make a profit.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
Just look at the list of terms of conditions when
you buy anything, and this is like do I need
this documents eight pages long so I can buy a toaster?
It's like, yes, you're looking at the history of houses
that have burned down. Yeah, every other thing that it's
like that you're looking at a fossil record of a
fight between regulators and consumers and every other thing.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
Yeah, Yeah, so we're going to be getting into darker
territory from here because the workers hired by Ryan Hart
and Dennis aren't just devoid of protections, they're also being
thrown into a working environment which their bosses are incentivized
to take risks with their lives in order to make
more money. Because the contract for the tunnel has incentives
and penalties. There's a two year target date, and if

(40:22):
they beat the target date for every day they are
shorter than two years, for every day that they finish
like earlier than two years, they get two hundred and
fifty dollars. So as a spoiler, they're going to finish
this thing in about a year, which is a significant
amount of extra money for them. And the only way
to do that is by cutting down on things that

(40:45):
take time. And one thing that takes time is wet drilling. Right,
it's slower to wet droll. I think it's like half
as fast as dry drilling. So I just want to
keep in your mind right now, rhin harton Dennis, the
construction company, because of how Union Carbide has structured the deal,
has a vested financial interest in rushing this gig now.
On March thirty first, nineteen thirty a Union Carbide executive

(41:06):
pilot's a steam shovel to dig the first load of
earth away from what will become the Hawk's Nest tunnel.
This is purely a media gesture, and I think there's
also it's one of those things the contract they have
with the state, they have to start digging by a
certain point, so they do it for that, But real
work is going to take a little bit of time
to spin up here. Ryan Hart and Dennis are going
to need about five thousand workers on the project total,

(41:27):
and I think about three thousand who are going to
be in the tunnel, right. Tunneling like this requires a
huge number of people now, and only some of the
jobs are what are known as high skill positions. So
a high skill position in an operation like this is
manning a drill. There's like machines to kind of like
suck extra track.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Like.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
All of the kind of machine work, right, most of
which happens outside of the tunnel are that's high skilled jobs. Right.
The engineers who have to oversee everything, those are high
skilled jobs. But the workers in the tunnel who are
physically digging through the chopped up rock, who are moving
it into the bins and stuff to take it away.

(42:06):
Who are doing the actual tunnel digging. That's a low
skill job. Again, I'm not making a judgment about this work.
I couldn't do it. I'm just saying, like, within kind
of the parlance of the times, that's what they're calling it.
So given the ongoing depression, it should not be surprising
that workers flood into this project begging for jobs. The
company claimed that they hired mainly from local men who

(42:28):
had been mine workers and had experience making tunnels, but
this was a lie. Experienced miners from the area made
up a small percentage of the workers. The company didn't
mostly want to hire those guys because number one, they
know how shit's supposed to work, so they're going They
know how to organize their experience. So if the company
is taking risks with their lives or is treating them wrong,

(42:49):
there's a higher risk that they might stand up for themselves. Also,
locals have more protection than migrant laborers. If you fuck
with a local that town, right, if you get people
in that town pissed off enough, they might literally take
destructive action against your facilities. That kind of stuff had
happened and was happening around the country at this period

(43:10):
of time. Migrant workers have no support base. They don't
have family they can go to for one thing, they
don't have anyone who can help them if they wind
up being taken advantage of. So Union Carbide is mostly
going to hire migrant workers, and the vast majority of
these migrant workers are not white. So over eighty percent

(43:31):
of the locals in this county are white people. Union
Carbides records, though, report that sixty five percent of the
men working in the tunnel are black. I've heard reports
as high as like seventy five percent. Most of these
men came from outside Fayette County, and the best records
we have suggests that less than twenty percent of the
men who are on the project in the tunnel line
out of it are from the area. So yeah, traveling

(43:54):
black laborers are obviously the easiest group of workers you
could have to fuck with, right for one thing, the
miners camp I mean, obviously, racism is a major factor here. Golly,
the town that's nearby. Some of the reports I've read
from that interviews with black labors say that like it
was better than most towns if you were a black

(44:14):
person it was not as bad as a lot of places,
but you still can't move there, right, You don't have
connections there, and these white locals are extremely unlikely to
stand up for you if something like bad happens. Right,
So you're kind of if you're one of these black
laborers who's traveled from like the Carolinas or whatever to
work on this project, you're kind of in space, right,

(44:37):
Like your only tether to being able to get food, water,
medical care is the company that's employing you. Right, You're
totally at their mercy. And I'm going to read another
passage from Martin Cherneyac's book that lays out how most
of these workers get hired. The account of an eighteen
year old from South Carolina may be typical. With his
father and uncle, he had worked for yin Hart and

(44:58):
Dennis on seasonal jobs in the carolin He first heard
of the tunnel through a work acquaintance, a company stringer
who was supplied with bus fare and a stipend to
promote employment amongst southern blacks. The boy paid his own
fare to Gallybridge. He was immediately added to the roles
because he was known to several of the contractor's foreman,
and there are some sources that will claim that a

(45:18):
lot of the black workforce was press ganged into the job,
basically kidnapped by company agents sent in from other states.
This actually was a common strategy across the country, particularly
the South. Like Cherniacs book is, like most mining and
large construction projects in large chunks of the South had
some degree of press ganging people literally being forced to

(45:39):
work there. But in this particular case, Chenniac says, at
least based on the interviews that exist with surviving black labors,
most of those guys insisted that was not really a
part of this. You didn't need to write because of
how desperate the economic situation is.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
I want the listeners to please appreciate the layers of
deniability the company gives itself here, because they can say
nobody forced them on this job. They could have quit
at any time, and likewise they could have said, well,
this subcontractor that actually did the work, we didn't tell
them to do dry drilling. We didn't tell them. It's

(46:16):
like no, but you set an incentive and a deadline
that they couldn't meet unless they did. But you gave
your self deniability, And I cannot tell you how many
of history's horrors have worked that way where it's like, well,
we didn't tell them to do that. It's like, no,
you gave them parameters that could only be met if

(46:39):
they did X, Y and z, even though you did
not explicitly tell them to do X, y and z.
X and X, y and z are atrocities. Like you
didn't have to spell it out. You simply gave them
a situation where the only way to do the thing
you asked them to do was to cut these corners.
And likewise they can say, well, these weren't slaves. It's
not like some of these other minds where they literally

(46:59):
made them work at gunpoint. These people came there voluntarily
and they got paid, and they could have they didn't
like it. If they felt it was unsafe, they could
have quit. And it's like in the strictest sense, maybe,
but not as a practical matter.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
No, Yeah, and yeah, it's it's uh, we'll be getting
into that even more here because it's it's actually like
worse than I have I have laid out already. I
should also note that a lot of these these migrant
black labors are still from West Virginia, right if you
look at the known death toll, they're just from other
parts of the state. Right, So a huge number of

(47:35):
these migrating labors they come from deeper in the South,
from places like Georgia, from the Carolinas, and they're they're
in West Virginia on their way north.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
The plan is, we need to get out of the South.
Jim Crow is too horrifying. I'm going to take this gig.
A lot of them bring their families with them, right,
because they're like, I'm going to take this gig. I'm
going to make you know, enough money, and then we'll
get set up in some nor in you know, will
get set up in like New York or wherever.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
That's the goal is to make money that will allow
them to get to a place where they have some
kind of hope of a future as opposed to staying
in the Jim Crow South. But one of the issues
this causes is that, like there's nowhere for a lot
of their families to stay. They're not allowed in the
mining camps, they're not really welcome in the nearby town. So,
like I think a lot of these people basically just
wind up kind of camping near the mining town because

(48:25):
like there's there's not a lot of options open for them.
I should also note that the white migrant workers suffered
from a form of discrimination by the townies of Galli
Bridge as well the urban population. The people who actually
live in this town consider themsel there's a conflict because,
you know, being miners and being these like you know,
industrial labors is such a part of like the conception

(48:48):
that I think a lot of people in West Virginia
today have of like their past. This gets lost a lot,
but at the time, if you lived in a town
or a city in West Virginia, there was a good
chance that you hated miners, right because they're they're bad
for your your rep as a state. Right, These like
backwards poor coal miners, these like you know, dirty rural

(49:08):
folk who are unsophisticated. We in the cities are much more,
you know, are much better people. So there's this kind
of like attitude that a lot of these these miners
who are out of work and who are coming to
this project should have you know, invested the money they
had back when mining was booming better, and the fact
that they were like poor and desperate now was their

(49:29):
own fault, right. There are that co. That is a
conflict that exists in this situation. It's not one that
I think it's talked about a lot today. So the
living situations enjoyed by black and white workers at the
mining camps were wildly different. Everyone does live in tar
paper shacks that are roughly twelve feet by fifteen feet,
but that's where the similarity ends in For white workers,

(49:52):
these twelve foot by fifteen foot shacks are divided into
two rooms, and there's two workers living in each room.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
Right.

Speaker 1 (49:58):
Their shacks also have electricities, They've got lights and stuff.
The shanties for black workers are very different from one thing.
They have no electricity, although they have to pay the
company a fee for electricity. The company's literally making them
pay out of their paychecks for nothing. Their shacks are
also more than twice as crowded. While an entire shack
would hold four white workers, there were often ten to

(50:20):
fifteen black workers in the same space. I'm going to
quote again from that article in vantage point. Imagine the
stench of body odor in such cramped quarters. All the
shacks were provided empty, so occupants had to buy bed linens, coal,
and if wanted a stove from the company. Commissary to
drive out any remaining workers. The shacks were burned down
at the end of the project. So that's that's good. Yeah,

(50:43):
we're surely seeing a lot of care being given to
these people since they had to live at the work camp.
Their actual take home wages are much less than what
had been advertised before. When you get right down to it,
these guys are getting about half or more like forty
percent of what they were told they'd be getting because
so much is taken out of them in order to
pay for them to live at this camp. Right, the
company's not going to foot that bill. You know, you

(51:06):
don't have any option to fight back though, because if
you're a migrant laborer, you show up here with no
money in your pocket. Right, So if you learn that
this is kind of a con that you're not getting
near the as much as you were promised, well, how
are you going to get back home? You don't have
any money, You don't have any food on you like
you have no You either starve or you finish the
job for like the pittance that they're going to throw you.

(51:26):
So to work, these guys went where. They soon learned
that for black laborers, even the promise of getting paid
at all was exaggerated. White workers received their payment promptly.
Black workers are paid in script, right, which is a
They get a card that says you're owed this money,
but you can only use this money in company stores

(51:47):
to purchase necessities. And I'm going to quote from Cherneyacts
book again. Deductions for food and clothing at the camp
commissary could be made directly from the script ticket. The
ticket could also be redeemed for cash, but only at
the end of the weekly paid period. Between these times,
the worker had to pay a ten percent commission to
receive cash. The system served to keep black workers dependent
on the company for goods and services. The rationale for

(52:09):
the system offered by the company was that the memories
of black workers would not last through a pay period,
and thus the use of script would minimize the number
of arguments over the amount of the daily wage. So
white workers are getting paid like every day you finish
your shift, you get cash in hand. Black workers are
given a card that they have to pay additional money
out of in order to get the pay that they

(52:30):
were promised. And the justification is, well, you black people,
you can't remember that you're owed any money, right, it's
pretty racist, pretty openly raisist. Right. And again cheriny Echle,
note this is not uncommon for the time.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
I don't want to be glib here, but I find
it fascinating that that old song from the forties, that
sixteen tons song, Yeah, you load sixteen tons and tell.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
You you get another day, older and deeper in debt.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
The fact, the fact that that's song hates a much
rosier picture of mine than this reality of the story
we're telling here. Like that, like that's almost a romantic version.
It's literally about a man who can't go to heaven
because he owes his soul to the company store because
he's so much because he's only getting paid in company
store credit, and it just keeps getting worse every day.

(53:19):
It's like, yeah, even that song actually paints kind of
a sunnier picture than what actually was happening.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
Yep, yeah, it's I mean, there's really no bottom to it.
But speaking of things, there's no bottom too. There's no
bottom to the love I have for the courageous corporations
that sponsor this podcast. So please everybody, here we go,
ads and we're back. Oh boy, good times. We're had

(53:52):
by all I'm feeling happy. Yeah, So before we get
much further, I think it'll be valuable to give the
listener and an idea of precisely how the work proceeded
on this project, since I based on and our data
isn't perfect here, you know, we it's been a while
since the last listener's survey. But I think, Sophie correct
me if I'm wrong here, less than half of our

(54:14):
listeners are professional tunnel diggers or mining engineers, right.

Speaker 2 (54:17):
I think it's about thirty two percent.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Yeah, And that's a big difference for Jason and I
because Jason, if I'm not mistaken, about seventy percent of
the audience that cracked were professional tunnel diggers.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
Right. Yeah, That's why we had so many articles on
the subject. It is like the six Funniest things about
when your mind cart overturns at the end of your shift.
And everybody nodded. Everybody nodded. Know what we were talking about?

Speaker 1 (54:41):
Eight things you learn getting black lung. So here's Cherniac
describing this is like the what what the daily workload
looks like for most of these tunnel guys. Drilling preceded
by the standard heading in bench method named for the
vertical and horizontal planes of the drilling axis. Routinely sixteen
drills were in simultaneous operation, tin boring horizontally into the

(55:04):
heading face and six into the bench or stone platform
as yet unexcavated, on which all the drillers worked. Holes
were drilled for ten or twelve feet and packed with
dynamite by powder monkeys. Typically a driller would drill two
hundred and fifty feet of drill steel in a shift
about twenty holes. Although the eighty pound anger saw drills
were equipped with supports, drilling into the heading face required

(55:24):
the work of a driller and an assistant. The easiest
vertical drilling could be done by a single driller. When
a charge was detonated and the debris cleaned away, the
first bench would be leveled to the tunnel floor or
invert on which a track could be laid for the
movement of heavy equipment, and the whole crew would advance.
The heading, now cleared of rock, became the new drilling bench.
If the tunnel was wide enough, more than one bench
could be drilled at a time. The bottom bench segment

(55:47):
rose from five to fifteen feet above the floor. Hence,
in the narrower parts of the tunnel, a single drill
crew could suffice. Either two drills were assigned to enlarge portions,
or the bottom bench was removed at a later point.
This at least describes a typical opera. So that's basically
how it works, right, that's physically like kind of what's
going on here, right, You drill holes, shove dynamine at them,

(56:08):
blow them up. Then the whole crew advances. Right, So
shortly after the drilling begins in earnest, they start analyzing
the rock that they're pulling out of this tunnel as
they blast their way through it, and coal is I
think like three or four percent silica usually, and obviously
that's enough that after years in the tunnel you can
get silicosis. The rock they're digging out of the Hawk's

(56:31):
Nest tunnel is almost one hundred percent pure silica. Like
it is. It is so pure it basically does not
need refining in order to be used in because this
is how you like make glass. You make a bunch
of shit out of silica. You don't need to even
like do anything. This this shit is like almost like
industrially pure as it comes out of the ground. Now,
that's great for Union Carbide because they're looking at making

(56:54):
all sorts of different alloys that require the use of silica. Right,
The Appellation Studies Association notes, quote, during the construction of
the tunnel, the work crews encountered silica rock. Fortunately for
Union Carbide, the rock proved to be a valuable resource
that could be used at the alloy industrial plant. In fact,
the silica rock used to make ferro silicon, a component
of steel, saved Union Carbide millions of dollars. And because

(57:18):
this is such like a windfall for them, they decides
let's massively expand the size of the tunnel, right, let's
make this a lot wider, which you know, in order
to do that and stay on the timeframe, Ryan Hart
and Dennis is going to have to put even more,
hundreds of more guys underground, and they're going to have
to keep them underground longer and longer shifts a lot
of the time.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Here's the thing. Now that they realize that the rock
they're getting out of there is an actual valuable substance
that they are going to use, this of course becomes
a mine. And I'm sure they filed the paper saying, hey, guys,
I'm sorry, this is a mine. We're mining this stuff
like the tunnel we need, but also this is functions
of mind. Let's go ahead and please saddle us with

(57:58):
the additional regulations, Yeah, because it would be irresponsible otherwise,
because this is clearly a mine. At this point, we
are mining silica for use in a factory. No I.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
Unfortunately, from what I can tell, it seems like you
don't have to be regulated as a mine if the
mining you're doing is a happy accident, right, if you
get lucky, then no regulations at all. That's that's how
the Industrial Code was written at the time. That's certainly
how Union Carbide are acting. Right.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Okay, but does the silica does know that it's not
in a mine.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
Yeah, it doesn't seem to because it's getting everywhere here
and they're not. Part of why it's getting everywhere is
they're not wet drilling, right, because that's going to slow
progress down. So reyin Hard and Davis are like, don't
wet drill, and they also decide we're not going to
give these tunnel the black tunnel labors are low skill
labors respirators, right, because that's going to be too expensive.

(58:53):
Now when this a lot of people die later, Union
Carbide will say, well, there were no approved respirators for
combatting silicosis. The regulatory agency, the Department of Mines, hadn't
approved any. And it's technically correct because the Department of
Mines had made a list of recommended respirators for silicosis,
but they had not listed them as approved because that

(59:15):
wasn't the thing that they did. But they did not
approve respirators for silicosis. All they did was recommend at
that point. They changed the language a couple of years
after this to approve to get around it. So the
company's just saying, well, you didn't do the thing that
you never did for this, and ignoring the fact that, like, yeah,
but there was a list of respirators they said would
definitely work for this that you should have when you're
doing this kind of mining. It's just like it's like

(59:37):
we were talking about earlier. It's the ways in which you've
got enough lawyers that'll tell you like, oh no, it's okay,
we can kill these people because like there's this this
kind of like this little jink in the wording of
the law that we can get around, you know.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
And any one of those people if they had had
to send their own son, oh well the other or
best friend into that mind would not dare let them
go in without something like on a human level. That's
the whole thing about all of this, is it It lets
you completely detach yourself from the humanity of the decision.
And also the fact that one load of the silica

(01:00:12):
they hauled out of there would have paid for the respirators.
The amount of money they made from just one batch
of that probably would have covered the equipment.

Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
Yeah, and it's you know, further to your point about
like if they were sending their loved ones and they
would have respirators. All of the skilled white workers, right
the machine operators and stuff who are doing these high
skilled jobs, the engineers that are overseeing it, and the
management who are coming into like check in on the project,
they are all issued respirators. It's just it's basically just

(01:00:44):
some of the unskilled white workers and all of the
black workers who don't have respirators. The other thing the
company does, so the two ways you're getting exposed to silica.
One when they're drilling, it creates a lot of dust
because they're dry drilling. And two when they detonate explosives
it obviously it fills the ton with dust. Right, So
this is a known problem. This is a non issue.
And the way that you deal with that is very simple.

(01:01:05):
You wait a while right after you blow it. You
sit and you wait until the dust falls down, and
then you can go in there and you're not going
to breathe it in. But that means it'll take longer
to make progress. So pushed by this, you know, you
get two hundred fifty bucks a day. The faster you work.
Reinhart and Dennis cuts the time back into the tunnel,
And basically they're shoving workers in there immediately after the

(01:01:28):
detonation to just get back into it, even though that
means these guys are walking through clouds of silica dust
so thick that they cannot see their hand in front
of their face. The American Society of Safety Professionals noted
in their analysis quote a break between shifts was alleged
to be two hours to allow the dust to settle. However,
in as few as thirty minutes, supervisors often sent the

(01:01:49):
next shift three hundred to four hundred feet down the
tunnel into the swirling dust cloud with visibility restricted to
three to five feet now when black tunnel workers would
fight through this cloud and get back to their workstations,
the air is just dust. And I found a single
sentence in a paper by the Oxford American magazine that
drives home how fucked up this is. By some reports,

(01:02:11):
conditions were so dusty that the workers drinking water turned
white as milk, and the glassy air sliced at their eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
We cannot convey how nasty this dust is. Like the
dust we've all had to breed dust, we've all had
to breed smoke. This is a nasty brand of dust,
like that wording that it like as like glass, as
slashes at your eyes, like it's tiny little razor sharp
microscopic particles. Yeah, I cannot imagine.

Speaker 1 (01:02:38):
You're just inhaling little razor blades almost right, Like that's
the degree of like damage this is doing to you.
So it shouldn't surprise you to note that after a
fairly short period of time, the men working in these
tunnels realized that they had been put in a very
dangerous situation. They attempted to force the company to let
them wait longer after blasts to avoid exposing themselves to dust.

(01:02:59):
Rheinhart and Dennis reacted with violence, and they actually sent
in armed security to beat these black laborers until they
would re enter the tunnel. Often right after a blast,
they would just start like shoving people in to like
get into this smoke filled tunnel and would just start
wailing on them if they didn't move fast enough. One
white engineer recalled, I have heard quite a few times

(01:03:19):
that they used pick handles or a drill set and
knock them in the head with it, so pretty horrifying.
And obviously I talked about how with coal, I think
you're looking at two to four percent silica generally in
the coal you're mining, and that's dangerous, right, that'll give
you the black lung after a while. But the concentration

(01:03:40):
of silica in this tunnel is many orders of magnitude
higher than that, and so people don't take years to
get miners lung. They get sick immediately and their symptoms
progressed to fatal at a calamitous rate. The first deaths
among tunnel workers happened two months after the start of digging.
That's how quickly this shit kills, right, you know, you're

(01:04:03):
not talking anything like normal miners lung people are dropping
right after they start, before they really even get settled
into the job.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
I mean, there's no way that they're not coughing the
entire time they're in there. There's no way that they
are not coughing up blood at some point, because that's
what happens. When you cough long enough, you start to
tear up you esophagus in your lungs. Like if you're
inhaling enough to give yourself solicosis after a couple months,
that means you knew you were breathing air that burned

(01:04:34):
ye when you breathe it, Like everyone in that tunnel.
Everyone's supervising that tunnel. Everyone everyone knew. I don't care
if you had never worked in a mine a day
in your life, if you had never seen a mine
or heard of a mine. If a small child was
brought there and asked, do you think it's safe to
work in here? The child would say no, the air

(01:04:56):
burns to breathe. You know, you don't need to be
a doctor. Like any ignorance was claimed later is laughable.

Speaker 1 (01:05:04):
Yeah, And we will talk about the company doctors in
the next episode. But one of the things I should
notice that, like, not only is this obvious. As you stated,
there's a diagnosis of what's killing these men very quickly.
There's a company more tician. The first twelve deceased workers
that he gets in his office, he cuts into their
lungs and he diagnoses them with scilicosis. This happens very quickly,

(01:05:29):
and when it happens, panic discussions erupted among Reinhardt and
Morris officers and as well as the union carbyte officers
overseeing them. The responsible thing to do, the thing you
should do when this happens is shut down construction and
rework your safety plan to mitigate this. That's not what
they did. They make public denials that there's any danger
in the tunnel. They say that the sickness is just

(01:05:50):
this is a communicable disease, basically, like the flu is
running around. Everybody's getting the flu. You galla got pneumonia.
It's fine, don't worry, guys, it's tuberculosis. You're good, you know,
Just try to wash your hands better. So to compensate
for the fact though that like this is tearing through
their labor force at an accelerated rate, a lot of
guys are getting too sick to work. They have to
accelerate their recruiting. They have to start pulling even more

(01:06:12):
men into this mind and the goal is very simple,
finish the project fast and then deal with the fact that,
like you're getting all these people killed, right, because then
you'll have the money to handle it. So that's part one. Jason,
how we feeling well again?

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
I know that this episode ended on a downer, but
I'm sure that in part two, all of these people
making these decisions, they're going to get what they deserve.
Like they they're going to regret. They're going to rue
the day they they didn't try to be human beings
for once.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
Yeah, this is the This is the one episode of
our show that's going to end with justice for the aggrieved.
So everybody look forward to that in part two. We're
not lying to you. This is not a con. Another
thing that's not a con, Jason, is your new book.
Do you want to talk about it a little bit
as we close out here?

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
Yeah, it is. Zoe Is Too Drunk for the Dystopia.
These are science fiction novels. The first two. The first
one is called Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits. The second
one is called Zoe Punches to Future, and the Dick.
The first two are available on Kindall unlimited. If you're
one of those people, it would be free. Otherwise you
can probably get them at a used bookstore for dirt cheap. Yeah.

(01:07:29):
I steal a copy from somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:07:32):
Yeah, Jacket. You know, if you're listening to this show,
you like Dystopia's, you're fascinated by collapse, and you're probably
interested in the idea of a weirdo libertarian future, independent
city state in the desert with posthumans and high technology nonsense.
It's good, you'll love it. I do so. Check out

(01:07:54):
Jason's book, and it is.

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
About a young woman who inherits a corrupt company. I
chose to subject for this podcast on purpose because she
finds herself at the wheel of a corrupted capitalist system
and it's like, Okay, how do you fix this? And
it turns out not easy.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
Yeah, Well, there we go. Everybody that has been the episode,
so let's all have a happy time. Behind the Bastards
is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from
cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or

(01:08:34):
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.