The Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I had already finished this
episode and emailed the outlined Holly when I was trying

(00:22):
to figure out what I was going to talk about
next and realized listener Angela requested this ages ago. So
thank you, Angela. I mean incredibly long time ago. Thank you, Angela.
Today we are going to talk about an industrial disaster,
one that's sometimes described as the worst industrial disaster in
US history. And unlike a lot of industrial disasters that

(00:46):
involve kind of a single acute incident like an explosion
or a gas leak or a collapse, the Hawk's Nest
Tunnel disaster involved thousands of workers being exposed to silica
dust over the entire course of the project, and then
people continued to get sick and die for years after

(01:07):
it was finished. In the words of Representative Glenn Griswold
in a House subcommittee report, quote, it is the story
of a tragedy worthy of the pen of Victor Hugo,
the story of men in the darkest days of the Depression,
with work hard to secure, driven by despair and the
stark fear of hunger, to work for a mere existence

(01:29):
wage under almost intolerable conditions. A lot of the men
who died as a result of their work on this
project were black men who had come to West Virginia
from farther south. They had basically heard that there were
good paying jobs in the minds and then they instead
wound up in this situation. Uh, this is one of

(01:50):
those episodes that I knew was going to be, you know,
a little more difficult going in, but then it turned
out to be a lot worse than I realized that.
In a lot of ways, this is a story about
people making business decisions with just total disregard for workers'
lives and safety, all for the sake of doing something

(02:10):
faster and cheaper. And this even extended to how people's
bodies were treated after they died. A lot of the
specifics of this disaster are tricky to confirm. A lot
of the records relating to it have been lost or destroyed.
Some of this probably was not malicious, like one hospital

(02:30):
went through a merger in the nineteen forties and it's
old records apparently were not retained. But some of this
missing record situation is suspicious at best, like out of
court settlements requiring workers lawyers to hand over all the
evidence that they had gathered to the companies involved, and
that happened more than once. Some of the records also

(02:53):
just never existed. Like today, employers in the United States
are expected to keep records of all that their employees
for tax purposes, including their Social Security numbers. There for
sure people that don't do that, but you're supposed to.
Those's Security numbers weren't introduced until nineteen thirty six, though,

(03:14):
and record keeping prior to that point could be really lax. Also,
once this construction project was over, a lot of the
people who had come to West Virginia trying to find
work moved on to other places. Once investigations started. They
couldn't really be found. And on top of that, the
information that we do have is full of contradictions. In

(03:36):
court and congressional testimony, workers and managers described the Hawk's
Nest Tunnels working conditions in almost totally opposite ways. There
were also multiple witnesses who initially supported workers accounts, only
to change their testimony later on and support management's version
of events. Various court cases involved suspicions of witness and

(03:58):
jury tampering. A radical labor newspaper called People's Press printed
a lot of unsubstantiated information that was picked up by
more authoritative sources. The novel Hawk's Nest, published in nineteen
forty one, was a fictionalized version of the disaster, but
some of its possibly fictionalized details were picked up as

(04:19):
fact in later writing, so it's a lot to kind
of try to puzzle through. Although another company carried out
the actual construction, The Hawk's Nest Tunnel was built for
Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation, later just known as Union Carbide.
Union Carbide and Carbon Company was formed in nineteen seventeen

(04:42):
through the consolidation of several companies that had some overlap
in their businesses. Most of them produced calcium carbide or ascettelene,
which is made from calcium carbide, or they used those
compounds in some way. This newly created company started expanding
into new industries and it acquired additional companies as it did.

(05:04):
One was Electro Metallurgical Company, which manufactured calcium carbide and acettling,
as well as other materials like tungsten, titanium, and various alloys.
Union Carbide acquired Electro Metallurgical Company in nineteen twenty two.
Soon after, Boncar, West Virginia, on the Kanaw River was
selected as the site for a new electro Metallurgical Company plant.

(05:28):
Boncar was named as a rearrangement of the syllables in
the word carbon, and it was renamed Alloy in nineteen
thirty one. This new plant would need electricity, and in
January of nineteen twenty seven, Union Carbide established the new
Kana Power Company as a wholly owned subsidiary. This company
was licensed to provide power for both industrial and more

(05:52):
community residential use. There was some suggestion that it would
ultimately be a public utility, but in reality Union Carbide
establish this company solely to provide power to this new
electro Metallurgical Company plant. Union Carbide already controlled a dam
on the Kana River, but this didn't provide enough electricity

(06:13):
to power the proposed new plant, So the plan was
to build a dam on the New River just below
Hawk's Nest Peak near the town of golly Bridge. A
tunnel would divert water from the New River to a
power plant in Bonkar. This tunnel would be a little
more than sixteen thousand feet or roughly three miles long.
It's about four point eight kilometers. It would also drop

(06:36):
one hundred and sixty two feet or almost fifty meters,
giving the water flowing through it more power to turn
the turbines at the lower end. If this were happening today,
there would be way more discussion among government agencies and
environmental groups and other organizations. Damming this river created a
two hundred and fifty acre lake behind it, and the

(06:59):
tunnel div bverded water away from several miles of the riverbed.
That stretch of river was nicknamed the Dries because it
was dry most of the time. The New River is
a tributary of the Knar River, and in times of
low water flow, they can provide more than half of
the Ohio River's volume, So there was just a huge

(07:20):
water system downstream of this dam that could be affected
by it. At the time, though, the biggest questions about
this were about whether the dam would affect the passage
of coal barges. Various state and federal agencies either approved
the project or didn't get in the way of it.
Union Carbide selected construction company Rehinehart and Dennis to build

(07:43):
the tunnel. Rehinehart and Dennis was the lowest bidder, but
also had a reputation for high quality work. Reinehart and
Dennis worked under Union Carbide supervision, carrying out a project
that was planned and designed by Union Carbide engineers. The
project was classified as a construction project, not a mine,

(08:04):
which meant that at least at first, it was free
from oversight and inspection by the West Virginia Department of Mines,
and West Virginia laws involving things like ventilation in minds
did not apply. Yeah, these laws were not particularly robust,
but they existed. Yeah. However, though this tunnel was a mine,

(08:27):
it cut through Gaully Mountain, which was largely made of sandstone,
and Union Carbide was aware of the potential to find
silica as the workers drilled through it. Silica is used
to make things like glass, ceramic, and bricks, and it's
used in the metallurgical work that was going to be
carried out at the newly built plant. And the workers

(08:48):
did find silica. They found a lot of it, and
some of it was exceptionally pure. Most of this tunnel
measured thirty two feet in diameter, but about a third
of it was expanded to four six feet in diameter
to allow the workers to remove more of the silica
as they were drilling it. A lot of workers described

(09:09):
this as a cause and effect situation. They found a
source of more than ninety percent pure silica while drilling,
so the company decided to widen the tunnel to get
more of it. While we don't know exactly when the
decision was made to widen the tunnel, there is evidence
that this expansion was part of the plan, or at
least a known possibility from the beginning. Various blueprints note

(09:32):
the possibility of expanding the tunnel's diameter, and some that
show the increase are dated about a month before drilling
started on that section, before high quality silica was discovered
in the tunnel. There's other circumstantial evidence as well, like
there's no evidence that Reinhardt and Dennis was paid more
for this unexpected increase in the size of the job,

(09:54):
which they were originally expected to finish in the same
two year timeframe that they had originally agreed to. More
than half a million cubic yards of material was removed
from this tunnel as it was being built. This included
three hundred thousand tons of silica that was all transported
to the bond car factory site for later use in

(10:16):
metallurgical work. When inhaled silica dust causes a form of
pulmonary fibrosis called silicosis. The silica particles damaged the lung tissue,
leading to scarring that can make it hard to breathe.
Silicoses can also make people more susceptible to tuberculosis and pneumonia.

(10:36):
Even today, there is no cure for silicosis, but in
nineteen thirty there was neither cure nor treatment. It's estimated
that at least seven hundred sixty four of the roughly
three thousand men who worked in the Hawk's Nest tunnel
died of silicosis, although that number may be too low
and it's likely that many more dealt with chronic silicoses

(10:57):
for the rest of their lives. We'll get into more
detail about this after a sponsor break. People have been
associating the breathing of dust with lung diseases really sense antiquity,

(11:18):
and by the sixteenth century people were also connecting this
specifically to working in minds, and they were making recommendations
on how to make mining safer. German scholar Georgius Agricola,
who is sometimes called the father of mineralogy, wrote this
in his on the Nature of Minerals, published in fifteen
fifty six. Quote, some minds are so dry that they

(11:41):
are entirely devoid of water, and this dryness causes the
workmen even greater harm. For the dust which is stirred
and beaten up by digging, penetrates into the windpipe and
lungs and produces difficulty in breathing and the disease which
the Greeks call asthma. If the dust has corrosive qualities,
it eats away the lungs and implants consumption in the body. Hence,

(12:06):
in the minds of the Carpathian Mountains women are found
who have married seven husbands, all of whom this terrible
consumption has carried off to a premature death. Georgia's Agricola
recommended that workers wear loose veils over their faces so
that the dust wouldn't be drawn into their windpipes or
their lungs, or getting their eyes. Me also described various

(12:28):
ventilating machines to draw stagnant air out of the mind
shafts during the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
people started making more connections between respiratory diseases and inhaled substances,
especially coal, dust, asbestos, and silicon. Various people, governments, and

(12:49):
regulators started trying to reduce people's exposure to these substances
at work. For example, wet drilling, which was introduced in
Britain in eighteen ninety seven, usually took long and was
more expensive than dry drilling, but it produced far less dust.
In nineteen eleven, dry drilling was banned in South Africa altogether,

(13:10):
although the US lagged behind Britain a bit, By the
early twentieth century, the US Public Health Service and the
US Bureau of Mines were both looking at ways to
reduce workplace exposure to dust. In nineteen fourteen, the Federal
Bureau of Mines started recommending annual physicals for workers who
were exposed to silica dust. The Public Health Service of

(13:32):
the Department of Mines also investigated respiratory diseases that were
occurring in mine workers in Joplin, Missouri. They released a
report on their investigations in nineteen fifteen in that they
found that inhaled dust was a primary factor in the
diseases that the workers were developing. They also clearly documented

(13:53):
a distinction between silicosis and tuberculosis, as well as the
fact that silicosis made a person and more susceptible to tuberculosis.
British researchers had connected silica dust exposure to lung fibrosis
back in the eighteen sixties, but this work in the
nineteen teens led to huge efforts to educate miners and

(14:14):
mine operators about the dangers of dust exposure. In the US,
the US Public Health Service started distributing bulletins about the
hazards of silica dust. In nineteen seventeen, a device called
the impinger was introduced to measure airborne dust in mines.
This was nicknamed the bubbler for the way the gases

(14:34):
bubbled through a vial of liquid, and it was more
efficient and reliable than earlier methods of measuring airborne dust.
There were also specific recommendations to reduce the amount of
dust in the air, like using wet drilling instead of
dry drilling. The US Bureau of Mines also started making
recommendations for ventilation and protective equipment, including recommending specific respirators

(14:59):
starting in Ninia oneteen twenty six. Crews broke ground on
the Hawk's Nest Tunnel project on March thirtieth, nineteen thirty,
at which point the dangers of airborne silica had been
well established, but little to no effort was put into
reducing workers exposure to silica. At the Hawk's Nest Tunnel,
ventilation was provided through a canvas pipe that was not

(15:21):
sufficient and was also increasingly full of holes that were
made by falling rocks and debris. Workers also alleged that
the ventilation system was only turned on when inspectors or
company visitors came to the tunnel. People who routinely worked
in the tunnel were not provided with respirators, although inspectors
and company managers reportedly wore them while they were in

(15:43):
the tunnel, and according to worker testimony, this work mostly
involved dry drilling, not wet drilling. Some of the drills
they were using were equipped with hose attachments, but workers
testified that water was only turned onto them when inspectors
were on site. Crews used a heading and bench method,

(16:04):
drilling forward into the heading and then down into the bench,
and they would fill the holes with explosives. Clear the
mind for detonation. In theory, detonations happened at the end
of the shift, and there was at least a two
hour break to allow the dust to settle, but multiple
workers testified that this break could be as little as
thirty minutes, and then as soon as they started work,

(16:27):
they started kicking up dust again. Workers described this tunnel
being thickly clouded with dust, sometimes with only a few
feet of visibility. If most of the workers in the
tunnel had been local men with mining experience, they may
have been more aware of the dangers of silica dust,
although obviously this would not have absolved their employers of anything.

(16:50):
But the vast majority of the men who worked inside
the tunnel were not local residents or men with mining experience.
They were predominantly black men who had come to West
Virginia from farther south having heard that there were good
paying jobs in the mines. In some cases, they heard
this from recruiters who were specifically looking for tunnel workers,

(17:10):
but in other cases it was word of mouth through communities.
But the Great Depression had seriously impacted the mining industry
in West Virginia, so instead of high paying jobs as
coal miners, these men made slightly more than they would
have doing agricultural work in the south drilling this tunnel.
The highest paid, most experienced workers on the tunnel project

(17:32):
were ones who had come with Reinhart and Dennis, not
people who were hired from the local community. In addition
to all of that, under the terms of its contract,
Hinehart and Dennis was supposed to provide a hospital for workers,
but in reality it only set up four first aid stations.
Seriously injured workers were taken to Coal Valley Hospital about

(17:55):
fourteen miles away. Two doctors, one employed by Rhinehardt and
Dennis and the other by Nucana Power Company, both testified
in court that they did not know anything about silicosis
or other occupational diseases. It's really not clear whether they
were really ignorant of this or whether they were lying

(18:17):
to try to protect themselves in some way. Either way,
like this was inexcusable. It's a little unfathomable that like,
two doctors working in West Virginia mine country would be
unaware of silicosis. We don't keep up to date on anything. Yeah,
either way, it's bad. Both of them reportedly gave sick

(18:37):
workers pills that were nicknamed little black devils. These were
baking soda covered with sugar. They would have done nothing.
While each of these doctors diagnosed some sick workers with
pneumonia or tuberculosis, which they may actually have had, at
least one of them frequently told workers they had ton
of ititis, saying this was a temporary condition by harmless

(19:01):
rock dust. Racism was also a factor in all of this.
When black workers started getting sick and dying, doctors claimed
that it was because black people were unusually susceptible to
lung diseases. The population of the county where this project
was located was about eighty percent white, but the workforce
at the tunnel was more than sixty five percent black.

(19:23):
Seventy five percent of the people who worked partly or
exclusively inside the tunnel were black, and many of the
white workers in the tunnel were foreman or were classified
as skilled workers. Meanwhile, black workers were assigned to the
dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, including drilling and hauling debris.
Black workers were also treated differently off the job. Most

(19:46):
of the workers on the tunnel project lived in a
company town made of tar paper shacks, and that town
was destroyed after the project was over. This was really
pretty common for these sorts of jobs at the time,
particularly when they were taking place in remote areas. White
workers lived four to a shack, and their shacks had electricity,

(20:07):
although this was mostly one bare light bulb. Black workers, though,
lived in shacks that were the same size, but they
had as many as fifteen people in each one. Sometimes
they were even sleeping two to a bunk. Rant on
the shacks was deducted from workers pay, and the amount
was the same regardless of how many people were living

(20:28):
in the same shack. Workers were also charged for coal
and electricity, whether they were using it or not. Black
workers were not only paid less than white workers, but
were also paid in script at the end of each shift,
while white workers were paid cash once a week. The
rationale for the pay schedule for this was also racist.

(20:49):
Managers claimed that black workers couldn't mentally keep up with
a whole week's worth of shifts. Script could only be
used at the company store, and while black workers could
exchange their script for cash once a week, the company
deducted a fee to do so. Many black workers reported
experiencing bullying, harassment, and threats, including at the hands of

(21:11):
armed shack rousters who cleared the camps at the start
of the workday, including forcing people who were too sick
to work out of their beds. Yeah, because people were
living in company housing, if they were too sick to
come back to work, they were often just kicked out
of the housing entirely. There was nowhere for any of

(21:31):
these workers to shower or change their clothes at the
ends of their shifts. There's actually no mention of hygiene
facilities in the site plans at all, So people left
the tunnel for the day covered in silica dust. Witnesses
who lived in Gollybridge described workers leaving a trail of
white footprints behind them which went on for hundreds of

(21:55):
feet as they left at the end of their shift.
People who lived local, which I mean there were some
people who did live locally, they got home still covered
in dust, so they exposed their family members as well.
It is not known how many additional people may have
developed silicosis as a result to exposure from their like

(22:15):
fathers or brothers or husbands, clothing and hair and all
of that. And then for the folks that lived in
the company town couldn't escape from the dust. It was
always with them and we're going to talk about how
all of this combined to form an industrial disaster after
we pause for a sponsor break. As we said earlier,

(22:45):
Cruise broke ground on the Hawk's Nest tunnel on March thirtieth,
nineteen thirty, but major digging didn't start until a few
months later. This involved four shafts being drilled at once,
although they didn't all start at the same time. That's
where they were or four first aid stations. There was
like one at each tunnel entrance. Two shafts were drilled
from the tunnel's entrance and exit toward the middle. Two

(23:10):
more started roughly in the middle at a shaft that
was drilled down from a ravine, and they worked outward.
After a cycle of drilling and blasting, crews would level
the floor of the tunnel. They would lay tracks for
equipment before they started the whole cycle over again. In
addition to the dust exposure, workers were also exposed to
carbon monoxide and exhaust from dinky engines. These were basically

(23:34):
miniature locomotives that were used to haul cars full of
equipment coming in or debris going out. Men started getting
six soon after construction started, and in court testimony. Workers
described carrying between ten and fifteen people out of the
tunnel every day after they'd been overcome by exhaust or dust,

(23:54):
and turnover among the workforce was huge. Sixty percent of
men who worked in the tunnel were they for less
than two months, eighty percent lasted less than six months,
and ninety percent stayed less than a year. On average,
white tunnel workers held the job for sixteen weeks, as
compared to fifteen weeks for black workers, but again black

(24:15):
workers were far more likely to be in the tunnel.
The turnover rate was not entirely due to illness. People
also left for other reasons or got fired. But it
quickly became obvious that working in the tunnel was hazardous,
and within two months of drilling starting, workers were dying,
so Ryan Hard and Dennis hired replacements. The Great Depression

(24:38):
was ongoing. People were desperate for work, and they had
been really overwhelmed with interested workers from the start. We
don't know what happened to everyone who died while working
on the tunnel, whether their death was due to silicosis
or some other cause. In terms of black workers, there
are records of only ten bodies being shipped back to

(24:59):
family ones. In North Carolina and Tennessee, black workers' bodies
could not be buried in local Whites only cemeteries, and
there were rumors that some of them were placed along
the river bank and covered in stone that had been
excavated from the tunnel. Another rumor involved burials taking place
in old slave cemeteries or in mass graves in fields.

(25:22):
So as far as I know, neither of those rumors
was substantiated, but Reinhardt and Dennis definitely paid local undertaker
Hadley See White fifty five dollars a burial, which was
twenty five dollars more than was typically charged for a
paupers burial. They paid him this to bury at least
thirty bodies. White said that he did this at a

(25:45):
cemetery he had created on the outskirts of his mother's farm,
and that each person was buried in his own pine coffin,
but locals believed that he buried one hundred and sixty
nine people at the farm in a mass grave. It
is not clear where this number came from. During a
highway expansion in nineteen seventy two, a crew identified sixty

(26:09):
three potential grave sites at the former site of the
White family farm, and then afterward the remains of forty
two people were moved from that site to another place
known as Whipperwill Cemetery. I have a sidebark question, yeah,
that you may not know of those sixty three grave sites.
Where did those appear to be as he had said

(26:31):
that he had put them in coffins and buried them separately?
Or was that not apparent? It's a little hard to tell, gotcha.
Like it does seem like there were individual burials. There
was wood in some of them, gotcha. Beyond that, I
did not find extensive detail. That was just my own curiosity.

(26:54):
In the spring of nineteen thirty one, Robert Lambee, director
of the West Virginia Department of Mines, heard that a
lot of workers were dying at the Hawk's Nest Tunnel
and ordered an inspection. He also called for respirators to
be issued to the workers and for warnings to be
posted about the dangers of silica dust. That was never done. Initially,

(27:15):
Lamby was very critical of conditions at the tunnel, but
later on he changed his opinion completely and testified on
behalf of Reinhardt and Dennis. He later said that his
initial information had come from his staff, whose comments had
been precautionary and did not reflect actual conditions at the tunnel.
Shortly after all of this, Lamby left the Department of

(27:38):
Mines and started working as a private consultant to mining corporations. Yeah,
just to be clear, there were some inspections of the tunnel.
We've referenced some inspections, but like the posting of warnings
and the issuing of respirators is what didn't happen. Workers
broke through the connection on two of the shafts on
August sixth of nineteen thirty one. They broke through the

(27:59):
other two on September nineteenth, which made the tunnel one
Haull Tunnel. Finishing work continued inside the tunnel until December.
The entire project was completed, about ten weeks ahead of schedule.
Only two percent of the original workforce of people who
were working in the tunnel were still there when the

(28:19):
tunnel was finished. It's estimated that more than sixty percent
of the more than twelve hundred workers who spent more
than two months working in the tunnel died of silicosis
within seven years. Although people in the area around golly
Bridge had heard rumors about worker deaths at the tunnel
didn't really spread beyond that for a few years. There

(28:43):
had been one article in the Fayette Tribune on May twentieth,
nineteen twenty one, which mentioned a gag order keeping reporters
from being able to confirm details. Then coverage mostly disappeared
until nineteen thirty three. In nineteen thirty four, when workers
in the family started filing lawsuits, more than five hundred

(29:04):
of them, many of which were settled out of court.
One group of one hundred and fifty seven plaintiffs sought
a total of four million dollars in damages, but ultimately
settled for one hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and half
of that settlement went to the attorney's dudge. J. W.
Eery heard these cases and recommended settlement amounts that were

(29:25):
based on the men's race and their marital status. So
the recommendation was survivors of a black man would receive
four hundred dollars if he was unmarried, or six hundred
dollars if he was married. Survivors of an unmarried white
man would received eight hundred dollars or one thousand dollars
if he was married. And then there was an additional

(29:45):
payment suggested for married white men of six hundred dollars,
making the maximum total payout sixteen hundred dollars. One of
the most drawn out individual cases involved a white miner
named Raymond Johnson. This was the first suit to be filed,
and at the time he was believed to have about
a year left to live. His case ended in a

(30:07):
hung jury, and there were allegations of witness and jury tampering.
His attorneys tried to file another suit, but Johnson died
of acute silicosis before that suit could be heard. In
March of nineteen thirty five, the West Virginia House of
Delegates passed a new worker's compensation law that covered silicosis.
Silicosis had been sort of implicitly mentioned in earlier legislation

(30:31):
but not specifically mentioned, but the requirements meant that none
of the men who had survived working in the Hawk's
Nest Tunnel qualified. A worker had to have been exposed
over more than two years of continuous employment, but the
Hawk's Nest Tunnel construction had not lasted that long. More

(30:51):
than two hundred workers who tried to apply for compensation
anyway had their cases dismissed because more than a year
had passed, so considered to be outside the statute of limitations.
On January sixteenth, nineteen thirty six, hearings on the Hawk's
Nest disaster began before the US House of Representatives Committee
on Labor. Newsweek reported on these hearings on January twenty fifth,

(31:16):
again bringing more national awareness of what had happened. The
hearings continued until February fourth. The people who testified before
the subcommittee included a social worker named Philippa Allen, workers
who had developed silicosis, and surviving family members. One engineer
testified that he had also developed silicosis from exposure to

(31:37):
dust in the months before respirators were issued to the
engineering team. There were also doctors, journalists, and expert witnesses.
The subcommittee recommended full congressional hearings, but these were never
carried out, and the subcommittee's report was read into the
Congressional record on April first, nineteen thirty six. This report

(31:58):
included finding's quotquote that in most of the tunnel rock
which was drilled contained more than ninety percent silica, that
in some of the headings that ran as high as
ninety nine percent pure silica. That this is a fact
that was known, or by the exercise of ordinary and
reasonable care, should have been known to the New Kana
Power Company and the firm of Dennison Reinhardt. The findings continued,

(32:22):
quote the effect of breathing silica dust is well known
to the medical profession and to all properly qualified mining engineers.
The disease is incurable, it always results in physical incapacity,
and in a majority of cases, is fatal. That for
more than twenty years, the United States Bureau of Minds
has been issuing warnings and information while conducting the educational

(32:44):
campaign on the dangers of silicosis and means of prevention.
That the principal means of prevention are wet drilling, adequate
and proper ventilation and circulation of air, the use of
respirators by the workmen, and drills equipped with a suction
or vacuum cuppliants. The sub committee found quote that there
was an utter disregard for all and any of these

(33:07):
approved methods of prevention in the construction of this tunnel.
That the dust was allowed to collect in such quantities
and become so dense that the visibility of workmen was
lowered to a few feet. That workmen left the tunnel
at the close of a working shift with their clothing
and bodies covered with a dense coating of white silica dust.
That the air circulating system was inadequate, insufficient, and out

(33:29):
of repair. That respirators were not furnished or used by
the employees of Dennis and Reinhardt. That the majority of
drills in use were used for dry drilling. That dry
drilling is more rapid and affects a large saving in
time and labor costs. That no appliances were used on
the drills to prevent concentration of dust in the tunnel.
That gasoline locomotives were used in the headings as well

(33:52):
as the tunnel entrance, and that as a result, there
was great suffering from monoxide gas among the workers. That
the whole driving the tunnel was begun, continued and completed
with grave and inhuman disregard of all consideration for the health,
lives and future of the employees. That as a result,
many workmen became infected with silicosis, that many died of

(34:15):
the disease, and many not yet dead are doomed to
die from the ravages of the disease as a result
of their employment and the negligence of the employing contractor.
That such negligence was either wilful or the result of
inexcusable and indefensible ignorance. There can be no doubt on
the face of the evidence presented to the committee. This

(34:37):
disaster and the lawsuits and hearings around it, led to
a push for better standards around worker safety, and Francis Perkins,
Secretary of Labor, declared a war on silicosis. The Walsh
Heeley Public Contracts Act, passed in nineteen thirty six as
part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, mandated that
federal contracts would not be performed under working care conditions

(35:00):
that were quote unsanitary, hazardous, or dangerous to the health
and safety of employees engaged in the performance of the contract.
States also started passing laws about worker safety, including laws
directly aimed at preventing silicosis. Industry leaders came together in
nineteen thirty six to establish the Air Hygiene Foundation to

(35:23):
combat quote misleading publicity about silicosis, which they believed would
quote result in a flood of claims whether justified or unjustified,
and will tend toward improperly considered proposals for legislation. While
the Air Hygiene Foundation did work toward establishing safe in
quotation marks thresholds for exposure levels, it also lobbied for

(35:47):
definitions of safe that were seen as acceptable to the
businesses involved, but like they weren't really grounded in any
kind of scientific or medical analysis. They kind of arrived
at another and said that's what the threshold should be.
Going to be bad for a second. In nineteen thirty six,

(36:09):
blues musician John White released a song called Silicosis Is
Killing Me under the name of Pinewood Tom. That same year,
poet Muriel Rickiser and photographer Nancy Naumberg went to West
Virginia to research the disaster. Their plan was to publish
poems and photographs on the incident as one work. For
unclear reasons, this project did not happen, and most of

(36:31):
Nomberg's photographs were lost, but Rickiser's poem sequence The Book
of the Dead, was published as part of her book
US One in nineteen thirty eight. It was republished as
a standalone work with non Berg's few surviving photos and
an introductory essay by Catherine Vennable Moore in twenty eighteen,
and this is sort of a it's become seen today

(36:54):
as kind of a lesser known classic work of American
literature from that part of the twentieth century. Whipperwell Cemetery
is now known as Hawk's Nest Workers Memorial Cemetery. This
area unfortunately fell into neglect after the worker's bodies were
moved there. People basically started using it as a dumping ground.

(37:16):
Local resident Charlotte Yeger spearheaded clean up efforts and consecration
of the burial site in the twenty teens, and more
recently has worked with a power company contractor that cleared
a lot of trees from around the cemetery during another
highway project. By the time the lawsuits were settled, Reinhardt
and Dennis had stopped doing business and most of its

(37:38):
assets had been liquidated. The Electro Metallurgical Company plant in Alloy,
West Virginia is still in operation, now jointly owned by
Globe and Dow Corning. Union Carbide still exists as a
subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company today. Union Carbide is more
infamously connected to another disaster, the boupol gas disaster in Bopa,

(38:00):
India in nineteen eighty four, in which thousands of people
were killed. There is a limited series podcast on this
disaster called They Knew Which Way to Run. For a
long time, there was a rumor slash belief that if
the water was ever drained from the Hawks and Nest Tunnel,
it would collapse due to erosion. But in twenty twenty

(38:21):
the gates of the dam were opened to lower the
water level by twenty five feet to allow for an inspection.
This inspection was carried out using remote operated vehicles, and
inspectors said the tunnel interior was still in really good condition,
looking almost as it would have when it was first built.
While the building of the tunnel was a disaster, the

(38:43):
tunnel and the dam themselves were and still are considered
to be an engineering marvel. Water is also released into
the dries below the dam several times a year, which
has been negotiated by the organization American Whitewater. During these
scheduled periods, the drives are open to private and commercial
trips down the rapids. There are also unscheduled releases of

(39:06):
water from time to time due to water levels and
weather conditions. Silica dust exposure continues to be an issue
in a lot of industries today, and some of the
industries are obvious things like mining, masonry, construction, sand blasting,
but dentists can also be exposed to airborne silica, as
can people who work in things like glass blowing or ceramics,

(39:29):
including people who do those things as hobbies. Fracking has
been cited as one of the more recent areas of
concern for silicosis exposure. In the US, it's estimated that
two million workers are chronically exposed to silica every year.
In twenty sixteen, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration
issued new standards for crystaline silica exposure, and those standards

(39:53):
went into effect in twenty seventeen. Oh, Tracy, I know,
do you have a less anger making a listener mail
to take us out? I knew this email is from Kyle,
and Kyle wrote after our episode on Doctor Anna and
Milk Sickness, and Kyle said, hello, I was surprised in
your recent podcast on Doctor Anna and Milk Sickness when

(40:15):
you read the quote about how cows were affected but goats, sheep,
and horses were not. I thought you'd already mentioned horses
getting ill, although perhaps I was misremembering. However, I certainly
couldn't agree with the part about goats being picky eaters.
When I was young, my family was quote gifted two
goats after a relative couldn't take care of them anymore.
One died soon afterward, but the other lived on for

(40:37):
years and became my responsibility. Her favorite food was leaves
from our weeping willow tree. She would stand up on
her back legs to eat them, which kept the tree
trim to the perfect height to mow under. She often
spent most of her summer time tied to a tire,
which was light enough that she could drag it to
where she wanted to go, but heavy enough to slow
her down from sneaking into the neighbor's garden. Once, my

(40:59):
sister was introduced a friend to the goat, and she
asked if she was a fainting goat. The goat had
never fainted before, but sure enough she met the friend
and fell right over. As for the picky eating. As
for the picky eating, the goat was known to nibble
on shirts, ate foam out of my dirt bike seat.
I don't know how she didn't get sick from that,
and once saint some of my mom's cash after she

(41:21):
had come home from the bank. My favorite goat story,
so I had to scoff at the idea that a
goat would be cheesy about what it was eating. In
the winter, when we felt like spoiling the goat, we
would make it oat meal, which of course we called
goat meal. Again, on the subject of being cheosy, the
goat preferred cheap, non brand oatmeal over Quaker oats picky eaters. Indeed,
thanks for all the work on the podcast. I've been

(41:42):
listening for years and always enjoy them, Kyle, So thank
you Kyle for this email. The part about the horses
and goats was one of the things that made me
go I have doubts about these diary entries. Also, I
don't think I told this story and the behind the scenes,
But when I was making notes about that part, I
had in all capital letters in my notes. Doctor Anna,

(42:04):
have you ever met a goat? Because I used to
know a goat that would eat cigarette butts off the ground,
and it's like, it's this goat. I don't I don't
remember this. The girl go to a boycot, but favorite
favorite delicacy was dried corn. Uh, dried corn was would

(42:27):
just eat forever, just dried corn. So yeah, like this,
the idea that all goats will even eat a tin
can is like not like that's that's going a little far,
but bus the goats I have known definitely were not
so picky that you'd be like, oh, they would never
eat snake root because I mean cigarette butts off the ground. Yeah.

(42:51):
I once had a I have a friend that I
used to work with who had a goat at her
family's farm that ate an entire, like industrial sized bag
of dried dawn food one night, and she had to
spend her whole night walking it up and down the
road because the vet was like, I am busy birthing
a foal right now, but if that goat lies down,
I don't know what's gonna happen to its stomach, So

(43:13):
cheap it moving. The goat lived. It was just stupid
and never learned its lesson. Listen, Ghats are smart, but
they don't always know about not putting things in their minds. Yeah, yeah,
I can relate goats. I've overeaten and then done the
same thing again, even after it maybe miserable Uh, thank

(43:37):
you so much for that email, Kyle. If you would
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcast or a history podcast a iHeartRadio dot com. Uh.
We also have some social media accounts. There's Facebook, there's
x which used to be Twitter. We're still over there,
still haven't started other accounts beyond that, also Instagram we have.

(44:00):
You can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app
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you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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