It’s been called America’s worst industrial disaster. The construction of a three-mile-long tunnel to carry the New River through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia cost as many as 2,000 workers their lives.
At least 764 of the 1,213 men who worked underground at Hawk’s Nest for at least two months died within five years of the tunnel’s completion, having contracted silicosis as the result of drilling through miles of rock to build a hydro-electric plant for Union Carbide, which owned the tunnel.
Some 5,000 men worked on the project from March 1930 to December 1931, earning 25 cents an hour and working 60 hours a week. Many of the workers were African-American, and came to West Virginia to work on the project. As they began getting sick with what company doctors called “tunnelitis,” they were unable to return to their homes and those who didn’t die in their beds in the company-owned worker camps were driven out of town to die in nearby towns or were put on trains and sent home.
According to Dr. Helen Lang, an associate professor of Geology at West Virginia University, 60 percent of the men worked less than two months, 80 percent less than six months and 90 percent less than a year. The average length of work was 15 weeks for a black worker and 16 weeks for a white worker.
“Why did so many work less than the total duration of the project when jobs were very scarce and pay was relatively good?” asked Lang.
Silicosis usually was thought of as a slow-moving disease but the Hawk’s Nest workers quickly became sick with acute silicosis “caused by massive overexposure to freshly fractured, high-silica dust,” she said.
