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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. You can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. You can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.