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

Like there are famous disasters, Like in school, I heard about the Triangle shirt waist factory fire that is a famous example of a gross negligence at a workplace and that killed like one hundred and fifty people. Yeah, this was much much worse. The Triangle shirtwais like that Wikipedia page goes on and on, it's like four thousand words long. That's something we know about. It has been documented, There's been

books written about it. This thing got swept under the rug so efficiently, and there is met with such indifference that it is stunning. That to me, is the most shocking part of this is how much people don't know or care about it.

But when you actually drill into how bad Chernobyl was, what's amazing is how bad it wasn't because about thirty people die immediately, and obviously that's that's fucked up, but only about sixty or so are confirmed to have died of radiation induced cancer from Chernobyl. Ever since, now, those numbers don't tell the whole story. I'm not trying to minimize this. Some estimates suggest as many as four thousand people will eventually die as at least a partial result

of the radiation exposure they received from Chernobyl. That's not an insignificant toll, but it's also like kind of a fraction of It's a fraction for one thing, the worst industrial disaster in history, which was the Bopaul chemical plant explosion. We've covered that on the show before. That killed about four thousand people immediately and injured more than two hundred thousand.

At least fifteen to twenty thousand additional people are known to have died as a result of like lingering consequences from Beopol. More than half a million people currently suffer from respiratory distress or other health issues like blindness as a result of it. It's worse than Chernobyl on a pretty grand scale, and in the middle of those two, significantly worse than Chernobyl, not as disastrous as Bopol is

the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster. And one of the things that ties it to Bopol is that the Bopol chemical factory that exploded, this pesticide factory was owned by a little corporation you might have heard of called Union Carbide. And Union Carbide is you know, there's a lot of corporations we like to call evil out there, because you know, maybe they have a negative impact on small businesses, or pump a bunch of propaganda into our eyes or whatever.

Union Carbide is evil in that most dictators of the twentieth century had a lower death count than this company in terms of like direct deaths, dude, and negligence. And so today we're gathering to talk about another Union Carbide disaster because the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster is all on Union Carbide. They are the guys behind this, and it's it's interesting, you know, as you noted, you brought up the Triangle Shirtwaist fire at the start of this, Jason.

If you combine the death tolls of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the Sunshine Mind Disaster, and the Farmington Mind disaster, which are three of the most famous twentieth century industrial disasters in the US, they do not equal the death toll of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, which by the way, exceeds Chernobyle.

The Hawk's Nest Tunnel is one of the most successful construction projects in like the history of industrial It's basically it's part of a hydro electric system that's still functioning today. So one of the things that's compelling to me is that like this was not the result of like a shoddy project. This was the result of a concentrated financial choice to make a project deadlier in order to maximize profits.

So that's interesting. But before we get into that, we have to start with a little bit of history on have you ever heard prior to this Jason of silicosis.

tissue in your lungs and it reduces your ability to breathe. Eventually, this will seriously compromise a person's ability to take in oxygen at all. It's one of those things where silicas is often not specifically what kills you, but it makes

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

They knew right away. Yeah, this is not a thing like asbestos, where it was something that was widely used and then a long long time later you started to get realize, oh, we shouldn't have been using it like that. No, they knew. Yeah.

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

it takes a lot of time. It's also a thing miners in the ancient world would get this right for the same reason that miners in the modern world get it. Coal mining is a lot worse for this, and so black lung was a higher thing for them than like a gold miner, because there's a lot of silica in anthracite coal. Now, I said at the top, this is the oldest known industrial ailment, and I meant it. It is described I think the first time it's described as

by Herodotus. Right, Herodotus two thousand years in change ago is writing about mine workers and craftsmen suffering from this like lung destroying disease caused by breathing in dust. Like we had a diagnosis for this thing about as far back as we've had a concept of medicine. It's like literally one of the first things we knew about.

world here. Tissue samples on mummified bodies of miners from Peru have also shown evidence of silicosis. Spanish writers in the seventeenth century documented that indigenous people who were like enslaved and forced into mines in South America had a life expectancy of just six to eighteen months because of this.

So this is one of those things when you read about how you know, conquistadors started taking these large chunks of South and Central America and then eighty percent, ninety percent, whatever of the of the local indigenous population were dead within a fairly short period of time. This is how a lot of them died. Right, They're forced into mines, they're inhaling silica dust and their lungs digest themselves. That is like, what's actually going down.

all get into all of that. But yeah, the point is this is important to establish because they they had no reason to even from one moment, think that this was not a danger there.

But in order to kind of set that out, I'm going to quote from a book on the Hawk's Nest Disaster by an epidemiologist named Martin Cherniac. In the eighteen hundred, silicosis reached epidemic proportions among British potters. Vernacular terms for the disease grinder's rot, potter's rot, and miner's pathisis became common in that century, reflecting as well the concomitants of

silicosis and tuberculosis. The direct association between exposure to silicaceous dusts and morbid fibrosis of the lungs was established in the early eighteen sixties by British physicians, Although silicosis was not yet categorized as a diagnostic entity, its connection with clays, quartz and sandstone had been clearly identified. The practice of wet drilling to reduce exposure to dust was introduced in

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

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

is wet drilling. Right, So, when you have a dry drill going into a piece of coal or rock or whatever that's got a high silica content, it's going to kick up a shitload of dust. If you're pumping water

in there. At the same time, the dust gets wet and it just kind of gets madded down, so there's not nearly as much of it in the air to breathe in very basic, very low tech and like again, South Africa in nineteen eleven, not the country that's probably most concerned with the safety of their laborers, but they're well ahead of the United States in this regard. Right, they are have like ban this because it's inhumane dry drilling. So the US is not just behind in this regard.

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

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

get fined or whatever. Like, they don't actually have any kind of power early on in the twentieth century to do much of anything here.

the thing that is so hard to explain. Look, I am more libertarian than a lot of people who say work in the entertainment industry, but it is very difficult to talk to someone who is on the extreme libertarian site who acts like they don't understand why regulations exist at all, because it's like, well, you know, if you want to open a cupcake shop in America, you got to fill fill out three hundred forms and get a license for the oven. And it's like, okay, I get it.

If you've ever tried you know, anybody who's ever tried to build anything and get permits, I get it. It is a pain in the ass if you don't understand the history of why we have eight million pages of regulations. It is because if you don't have it explicitly spelled out in the law. What you're not a allowed to

do to your workers, they will do it to the workers. Yeah, there was an era in this country where we built very fast, and we dug a lot of coal, and we did a lot of mining, and we put down a lot of railroad tracks with none of that stuff on the books, and there are mass graves to show for it.

sympathetic to to a significant degree. But I don't see how you can go from that to then saying like, well, shouldn't you have something that can do that to these corporations?

that same attitude? Why are you looking at those executives and those you know, those people on the ground who knew what was going on, Why don't you have the same lock them up and throw away the key attitude that you have toward you know, a kid who sticks somebody up in an alley, it's like, no, that that he's it's too unsafe to have him out there. It's like, okay, but do you understand there are some too, some corporations

where it's too unsafe to have them operating as a corporation. Yeah, Like, why don't you have that same knee jerk reaction of throw them, you know, throw them under the jail.

the penalty for certain levels of irresponsibility. But you know, we don't even really manage antitrust that well, So that's that's probably And I'm not a not a law nowhere guy, so I'm sure that that's illegal for a thousand different reasons. But we should get back to the story fundamentally here. So sorry, yeah, no, no, no, no, this is I mean I think about this a lot because it's something that I feel like a lot of the people who I agree with on other things should get. But you

still you still encounter that attitude a lot. Anyway, Federal agencies that are tasked with reducing sickness among workers and managing working conditions are again hamstrung in this area. All they can do is make recommendations. And this is the era we are you know this story we're talking about

happens in the in the early nineteen thirties. This is like right around the period where not far from where this happens, the United States Army Air Corps is basically bombing mine workers from the sky on behalf of management as a result of like one of these miners uprising. So it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of mine workers are unwilling to spend money to keep workers alive. Now, workers in Nevada courtz mines in the eighteen nineties get

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

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

of reducing the lethality of their minds. Number one is wet drilling, which we've talked about already. Number two is providing ventilation, right, installing ventilation ducts and mines in order to get bad air out right. That should be pretty obvious. I don't think people need explanation as to why ventilation helps. And the number three is issuing respirators from miners to wear right. These are This is like a more primitive

version of the respirators. A lot of US war and wear as a result of the COVID nineteen pandemic the years, and I actually didn't know there were functional respirators this far back, but the US Bureau of Mines started publishing recommendations on which specific respirators to issue in nineteen twenty six. And all of this wisdom is going to be ignored deliberately to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, so that part of the story starts with the town of gaully Bridge

in Fayette County, West Virginia. In nineteen thirty, it had a population of just over seventy two thousand. Now, West Virginia is like a lot of parts of the world that are have a troubled history with this sort of thing. Rich in natural resources and also always poor. You run into a lot of these spots when you talk about industrial disasters, and you will not be surprised to learn that it was hit particularly hard by the Great Depression.

The unemployment rate in most counties of West Virginia hovered between thirty and forty percent, which is I don't think it's like an exaggeration to call that like near apocalyptic, right, think about, like the Great Depression, how bad it is. Famously, in most of the country unemployments like maybe twenty to twenty five percent, Right, You've got forty percent or in some cases higher in most West Virginia counties. It's just a calamity for the whole state.

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

its minds were also inefficient. So by the twenties and thirties, a lot of the nation's coal needs are being served by newer and more efficient facilities in other states. And because there's so many additional new and more efficient minds, there's a surplus of coal for i think, pretty much the first time since we started needing it, and that's

disastrous for West Virginia's mining industry as well. All of this deals a near fatal blow to the United Mine Workers' Union, which provided the bosses with opportunities to basically make ad hoc agreements with groups of starving miners that would deny them any of the protections and security that previous generations or the generation right before them had fought to gain right.

So one of the things that's happening here is because of how disastrous this is, there's not really any labor power in the state of West Virginia that can provide any kind of countervailing force to the bosses that are going to be running this project. But you know what does provide a countervailing force to this podcast, I suppose is ads we're back ugh, so we're talking about why

the setup to this disaster. So one of the other things that's happened here is that, like West Virginia used to be covered in old growth forests, those are basically all gone by this point. So that's an industry that no longer exists. That's another part of why so many people are out of work, and so because coal isn't really profitable right now, the forests have basically been killed. The one thing that West Virginia has an abundance is

moving water. Right. The state's got a lot of big rivers, and those rivers can be harnessed to provide hydro electric power, which we have figured out to do pretty well by the early nineteen hundreds, So the Electro Metallurgical Company, the start of the century starts building hydro power capability in the state, and they start buying up smaller companies who are involved in like mining different kinds of minerals, like

the Wilson Aluminum Company, and adding that to their portfolio. Now, the founder of this company is a guy named Major Morland, and in nineteen eleven he draws up plans for a massive new hydro electric facility which will use the power of a river to support the manufacturing of futuristic new alloys that required high to temperatures and state of the

art power hungry facilities to provide. I think this facility is going to be a significant part actually of like our production of the alloys that make the US part of World War II possible. Right, you need a lot of metals that don't just come naturally out of the ground on their own in order to make let's say, a P fifty one Mustang. So they pick for this hydroelectric plant an area of the new River Canawa Falls, which is kind of the ideal location in their mind.

So construction begins at first at a place called Glenn Ferris on the river, and a small, rather primitive dam is built than in nineteen seventeen, the Electro Metallurgical Company merges with three other corporations in West Virginia to form a new entity, the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation. So this is the start of Union Carbide. This is actually going to be its first big project, what we're talking

about here. So now that it's flush with cash, plans move forward to create a new and a much larger dam. The problem is expanding the size of this dam the way Union carbid once is illegal. The Army Corps of Engineers has laid out strict requirements about how large such facilities can be because you have to have a navigable waterway, right, you can't just like destroy the ability of a river to like function, to be traveled across, to be utilized by people for a variety of other reasons, just so

you can build your hydro electric facility. So, since this is illegal, Union Carby decides what if we just break the law and build it anyway, which they do, and they build this fucking thing, and in the nineteen nineteen when it's done, they reach out to the government and are like, hey, you know this thing we're not allowed to do. Well, we did it. Can we get retroactive permission. Now to their credit, the government's like, well, no you can't,

but they don't do anything. Again, we have at this point these regulators are able to like say all the right things like you can't illegally build this dam that fucks with the waterway, but they don't have any kind of like power to actually take action, which is a pretty bad mix in my opinion. Not to get political here, but Union Carbide makes plans to expand its holdings on

the New River. They construct two additional dams, and they file plans in nineteen twenty seven through a corporate entity they cut out to handle this whole business, the New Cana What Power Company. And so this is going to be a project of this company called the New Cana What Power Company. But that's Union Carbide, right. This is a thing that they build and create in order to mitigate risk for themselves. If they like fuck up the whole project and get a bunch of people killed. It's

a kind of thing that corporations don't do anymore. Right, obviously, that would be ano.

this stuff. We're gonna launch our rocket. We're I'm gonna worry whether or not debris reins down on houses for six miles in every direction. Like we'll just what matters is that we achieve the rocket launch and then all this other stuff we can smooth smooth it over later. Like there's this spirit of once we build it, we may have to pay a fine later maybe like they may yell at us, they may shake their finger at us, but the thing we built is going to stay built. Yeah,

and that's been true. I feel like for a long time, it's like, well, let's just do it, and then once it's done, it'll be harder for them to because you know, what are they going to do? Fill it back in? It's like no, most likely they'll just shout at us a little bit or even if that, yeah, and then we'll have our thing. We'll have our dam.

in two thousand and eight. It wouldn't have hurt to try in nineteen thirty with this thing, you know, treating these crimes that have much higher body accounts than like bank robbers do with a similar degree of severity. But that's not going to happen in this case, so I guess we should just move along. So this new plan for this massive, massive hydro plant involves the creation of

a sixteen thousand, two hundred and forty foot long tunnel. Right, they're going underground to divert water from the new river through a mountain, gaully mountain, and because of like the angle at which the water is going to be coming in, they're basically building an underground river that they can use to funnel water from the existing river and run the hydro electric plant with that. This is a three mile

long tunnel through solid rock. So it's one of those things that, like to the fathers of the people building this thing would have been an impossible project in their youth, Like this is something that modern science and machinery has just made possible now because the goal of this tunnel is to provide electricity for the electro Metallurgical co subsidiary

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

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

assume all liability, thus Union Carbide was shielded. The contract included a clause that allowed engineers for New Kanawa Power to force changes into the contractor's procedures if injuries were caused by negligence on behalf of the contractor, but New Kanawa Power never intervened. The contract also called for reine Hart and Dennis to furnish an equipment on site hospital, but only four first aid stations were provided, one at

each dig. Workers sustaining major injuries were transported to Coal Valley Hospital fourteen miles away. So even under the terms of the very again even more minimal than the protections that existed. Like contract they sign this subsidiary, Ryan harton Dennis is going to further cut costs, right, because they're trying to maximize what they get from Union Carbiden actually get to take home. Union Carbide wants to cut costs because that's going to get their facility up and running,

which is going to let them produce alloys faster. So they want this faster and cheaper. Everybody's interest, like the further you go down the chain is just how can we do this faster? How can we do this cheaper? And the easiest way to cut costs is with the workers' lives.

They're built in a tunnel, So why do we need like finding little ways to sneak around the regulation so you don't have to provide the respirators or go through the rules with normal governed mining, because well, technically, according to the paperwork, a mine is this, and technically we're doing this, even though everyone knows it's the exact same

work with the exact same dangers. That is why the regulations look the way they do, because you have to close every conceivable loophole because the companies have their own lawyers specifically to find them.

reading about that stuff. When you look at the maps of like civil war battles, right, there's just it's it's this hugely there's all these different colored little symbols that stand for these different units, and these arrows moving all in all around and like to show like where everyone's gone. It's these incredibly complex series of movements and counter movements and advances and retreats. When you're looking at regulations, what you are seeing is, to some extent, the fossil record

of a conflict. Right of government makes regulation, corporation finds loophole to get around it. Government has to clarify or add in new rules or make a new law to deal with the loophole that provides new loopholes. Like that's that's what you're seeing is like a record of a conflict that is fundamentally over Like how much can you endanger people in order to make a profit.

and penalties. There's a two year target date, and if they beat the target date for every day they are shorter than two years, for every day that they finish like earlier than two years, they get two hundred and fifty dollars. So as a spoiler, they're going to finish this thing in about a year, which is a significant amount of extra money for them. And the only way to do that is by cutting down on things that take time. And one thing that takes time is wet drilling. Right,

it's slower to wet droll. I think it's like half as fast as dry drilling. So I just want to keep in your mind right now, rhin harton Dennis, the construction company, because of how Union Carbide has structured the deal, has a vested financial interest in rushing this gig now. On March thirty first, nineteen thirty a Union Carbide executive pilot's a steam shovel to dig the first load of earth away from what will become the Hawk's Nest tunnel.

This is purely a media gesture, and I think there's also it's one of those things the contract they have with the state, they have to start digging by a certain point, so they do it for that, But real work is going to take a little bit of time to spin up here. Ryan Hart and Dennis are going to need about five thousand workers on the project total, and I think about three thousand who are going to

be in the tunnel, right. Tunneling like this requires a huge number of people now, and only some of the jobs are what are known as high skill positions. So a high skill position in an operation like this is manning a drill. There's like machines to kind of like suck extra track.

I couldn't do it. I'm just saying, like, within kind of the parlance of the times, that's what they're calling it. So given the ongoing depression, it should not be surprising that workers flood into this project begging for jobs. The company claimed that they hired mainly from local men who had been mine workers and had experience making tunnels, but this was a lie. Experienced miners from the area made

up a small percentage of the workers. The company didn't mostly want to hire those guys because number one, they know how shit's supposed to work, so they're going They know how to organize their experience. So if the company is taking risks with their lives or is treating them wrong, there's a higher risk that they might stand up for themselves. Also,

locals have more protection than migrant laborers. If you fuck with a local that town, right, if you get people in that town pissed off enough, they might literally take destructive action against your facilities. That kind of stuff had happened and was happening around the country at this period of time. Migrant workers have no support base. They don't have family they can go to for one thing, they don't have anyone who can help them if they wind

up being taken advantage of. So Union Carbide is mostly going to hire migrant workers, and the vast majority of these migrant workers are not white. So over eighty percent of the locals in this county are white people. Union Carbides records, though, report that sixty five percent of the men working in the tunnel are black. I've heard reports

as high as like seventy five percent. Most of these men came from outside Fayette County, and the best records we have suggests that less than twenty percent of the men who are on the project in the tunnel line out of it are from the area. So yeah, traveling black laborers are obviously the easiest group of workers you could have to fuck with, right for one thing, the miners camp I mean, obviously, racism is a major factor here. Golly,

the town that's nearby. Some of the reports I've read from that interviews with black labors say that like it was better than most towns if you were a black person it was not as bad as a lot of places, but you still can't move there, right, You don't have connections there, and these white locals are extremely unlikely to

stand up for you if something like bad happens. Right, So you're kind of if you're one of these black laborers who's traveled from like the Carolinas or whatever to work on this project, you're kind of in space, right, Like your only tether to being able to get food, water, medical care is the company that's employing you. Right, You're totally at their mercy. And I'm going to read another passage from Martin Cherneyac's book that lays out how most

of these workers get hired. The account of an eighteen year old from South Carolina may be typical. With his father and uncle, he had worked for yin Hart and Dennis on seasonal jobs in the carolin He first heard of the tunnel through a work acquaintance, a company stringer who was supplied with bus fare and a stipend to promote employment amongst southern blacks. The boy paid his own

fare to Gallybridge. He was immediately added to the roles because he was known to several of the contractor's foreman, and there are some sources that will claim that a lot of the black workforce was press ganged into the job, basically kidnapped by company agents sent in from other states. This actually was a common strategy across the country, particularly

the South. Like Cherniacs book is, like most mining and large construction projects in large chunks of the South had some degree of press ganging people literally being forced to work there. But in this particular case, Chenniac says, at least based on the interviews that exist with surviving black labors, most of those guys insisted that was not really a part of this. You didn't need to write because of how desperate the economic situation is.

that they couldn't meet unless they did. But you gave your self deniability, And I cannot tell you how many of history's horrors have worked that way where it's like, well, we didn't tell them to do that. It's like, no, you gave them parameters that could only be met if they did X, Y and z, even though you did not explicitly tell them to do X, y and z. X and X, y and z are atrocities. Like you

didn't have to spell it out. You simply gave them a situation where the only way to do the thing you asked them to do was to cut these corners. And likewise they can say, well, these weren't slaves. It's not like some of these other minds where they literally made them work at gunpoint. These people came there voluntarily and they got paid, and they could have they didn't like it. If they felt it was unsafe, they could

have quit. And it's like in the strictest sense, maybe, but not as a practical matter.

parts of the state. Right, So a huge number of these migrating labors they come from deeper in the South, from places like Georgia, from the Carolinas, and they're they're in West Virginia on their way north.

mining camps, they're not really welcome in the nearby town. So, like I think a lot of these people basically just wind up kind of camping near the mining town because like there's there's not a lot of options open for them. I should also note that the white migrant workers suffered from a form of discrimination by the townies of Galli

Bridge as well the urban population. The people who actually live in this town consider themsel there's a conflict because, you know, being miners and being these like you know, industrial labors is such a part of like the conception that I think a lot of people in West Virginia today have of like their past. This gets lost a lot, but at the time, if you lived in a town or a city in West Virginia, there was a good chance that you hated miners, right because they're they're bad

for your your rep as a state. Right, These like backwards poor coal miners, these like you know, dirty rural folk who are unsophisticated. We in the cities are much more, you know, are much better people. So there's this kind of like attitude that a lot of these these miners who are out of work and who are coming to this project should have you know, invested the money they had back when mining was booming better, and the fact that they were like poor and desperate now was their

own fault, right. There are that co. That is a conflict that exists in this situation. It's not one that I think it's talked about a lot today. So the living situations enjoyed by black and white workers at the

mining camps were wildly different. Everyone does live in tar paper shacks that are roughly twelve feet by fifteen feet, but that's where the similarity ends in For white workers, these twelve foot by fifteen foot shacks are divided into two rooms, and there's two workers living in each room.

quote again from that article in vantage point. Imagine the stench of body odor in such cramped quarters. All the shacks were provided empty, so occupants had to buy bed linens, coal, and if wanted a stove from the company. Commissary to drive out any remaining workers. The shacks were burned down at the end of the project. So that's that's good. Yeah, we're surely seeing a lot of care being given to these people since they had to live at the work camp.

Their actual take home wages are much less than what had been advertised before. When you get right down to it, these guys are getting about half or more like forty percent of what they were told they'd be getting because so much is taken out of them in order to pay for them to live at this camp. Right, the company's not going to foot that bill. You know, you don't have any option to fight back though, because if you're a migrant laborer, you show up here with no

money in your pocket. Right, So if you learn that this is kind of a con that you're not getting near the as much as you were promised, well, how are you going to get back home? You don't have any money, You don't have any food on you like you have no You either starve or you finish the job for like the pittance that they're going to throw you. So to work, these guys went where. They soon learned that for black laborers, even the promise of getting paid

at all was exaggerated. White workers received their payment promptly. Black workers are paid in script, right, which is a They get a card that says you're owed this money, but you can only use this money in company stores to purchase necessities. And I'm going to quote from Cherneyacts book again. Deductions for food and clothing at the camp commissary could be made directly from the script ticket. The ticket could also be redeemed for cash, but only at

the end of the weekly paid period. Between these times, the worker had to pay a ten percent commission to receive cash. The system served to keep black workers dependent on the company for goods and services. The rationale for the system offered by the company was that the memories of black workers would not last through a pay period, and thus the use of script would minimize the number of arguments over the amount of the daily wage. So white workers are getting paid like every day you finish

your shift, you get cash in hand. Black workers are given a card that they have to pay additional money out of in order to get the pay that they were promised. And the justification is, well, you black people, you can't remember that you're owed any money, right, it's pretty racist, pretty openly raisist. Right. And again cheriny Echle, note this is not uncommon for the time.

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

as yet unexcavated, on which all the drillers worked. Holes were drilled for ten or twelve feet and packed with dynamite by powder monkeys. Typically a driller would drill two hundred and fifty feet of drill steel in a shift about twenty holes. Although the eighty pound anger saw drills were equipped with supports, drilling into the heading face required the work of a driller and an assistant. The easiest

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

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

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

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

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

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

because this is clearly a mine. At this point, we are mining silica for use in a factory. No I.

Now when this a lot of people die later, Union Carbide will say, well, there were no approved respirators for combatting silicosis. The regulatory agency, the Department of Mines, hadn't approved any. And it's technically correct because the Department of Mines had made a list of recommended respirators for silicosis, but they had not listed them as approved because that wasn't the thing that they did. But they did not approve respirators for silicosis. All they did was recommend at

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

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

The amount of money they made from just one batch of that probably would have covered the equipment.

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

You wait a while right after you blow it. You sit and you wait until the dust falls down, and then you can go in there and you're not going to breathe it in. But that means it'll take longer to make progress. So pushed by this, you know, you get two hundred fifty bucks a day. The faster you work.

Reinhart and Dennis cuts the time back into the tunnel, And basically they're shoving workers in there immediately after the detonation to just get back into it, even though that means these guys are walking through clouds of silica dust so thick that they cannot see their hand in front of their face. The American Society of Safety Professionals noted in their analysis quote a break between shifts was alleged

to be two hours to allow the dust to settle. However, in as few as thirty minutes, supervisors often sent the next shift three hundred to four hundred feet down the tunnel into the swirling dust cloud with visibility restricted to three to five feet now when black tunnel workers would fight through this cloud and get back to their workstations, the air is just dust. And I found a single sentence in a paper by the Oxford American magazine that

drives home how fucked up this is. By some reports, conditions were so dusty that the workers drinking water turned white as milk, and the glassy air sliced at their eyes.

Rheinhart and Dennis reacted with violence, and they actually sent in armed security to beat these black laborers until they would re enter the tunnel. Often right after a blast, they would just start like shoving people in to like get into this smoke filled tunnel and would just start wailing on them if they didn't move fast enough. One white engineer recalled, I have heard quite a few times that they used pick handles or a drill set and knock them in the head with it, so pretty horrifying.

And obviously I talked about how with coal, I think you're looking at two to four percent silica generally in the coal you're mining, and that's dangerous, right, that'll give you the black lung after a while. But the concentration of silica in this tunnel is many orders of magnitude higher than that, and so people don't take years to get miners lung. They get sick immediately and their symptoms

progressed to fatal at a calamitous rate. The first deaths among tunnel workers happened two months after the start of digging. That's how quickly this shit kills, right, you know, you're not talking anything like normal miners lung people are dropping right after they start, before they really even get settled into the job.

Everyone's supervising that tunnel. Everyone everyone knew. I don't care if you had never worked in a mine a day in your life, if you had never seen a mine or heard of a mine. If a small child was brought there and asked, do you think it's safe to work in here? The child would say no, the air burns to breathe. You know, you don't need to be a doctor. Like any ignorance was claimed later is laughable.

lungs and he diagnoses them with scilicosis. This happens very quickly, and when it happens, panic discussions erupted among Reinhardt and Morris officers and as well as the union carbyte officers overseeing them. The responsible thing to do, the thing you should do when this happens is shut down construction and rework your safety plan to mitigate this. That's not what they did. They make public denials that there's any danger

in the tunnel. They say that the sickness is just this is a communicable disease, basically, like the flu is running around. Everybody's getting the flu. You galla got pneumonia. It's fine, don't worry, guys, it's tuberculosis. You're good, you know, Just try to wash your hands better. So to compensate for the fact though that like this is tearing through their labor force at an accelerated rate, a lot of guys are getting too sick to work. They have to

accelerate their recruiting. They have to start pulling even more men into this mind and the goal is very simple, finish the project fast and then deal with the fact that, like you're getting all these people killed, right, because then you'll have the money to handle it. So that's part one. Jason, how we feeling well again?