How America’s Worst Industrial Disaster Was Erased From the Record

5 min readAt least 764 laborers died of silicon dioxide lung damage, but that estimate is likely low, says the expert who wrote the book on the Hawk’s Nest dam tragedy.Silicosis prevention was already well understood, but tunnel workers received no protection.Legal limits, missing archives, eliminated courthouse records, and racist attacks on witnesses helped shield the companies from accountability.During the creation of a new tunnel and hydroelectric dam in West Virginia, hundreds of laborers died needlessly. These deaths weren’t due to accidents, but to tiny, glass-like particles of silicon dioxide. It was 1930, and men desperate for work during the Great Depression had flocked to the town of Gauley Bridge. They carved a tunnel through a mountain with dynamite to redirect a river toward the new Hawk’s Nest dam, meant to generate power for a massive metallurgy plant.Their digging simultaneously extracted tens of thousands of tons of silicon dioxide, which in its crystalline form is found in quartz. This compound is important for smelting, or extracting metals from ore, but dangerous when inhaled in its pulverized form. Within months or years, exposure to the dust can cause a person to develop silicosis, a hardening and scarring of the lungs that gradually makes it harder and harder to breathe, and results in death. There is no cure.A total of 764 laborers died during the two-year construction of the tunnel and within five years of its completion. About three out of four of the 1,500 men were Black, the rest white. The number of deaths is the estimate of Martin Cherniack, a professor of medicine at the University of Connecticut who, in 1986, while on the faculty at Yale University, published the definitive history of the Gauley Bridge project, The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster. In it, he notes, “Not only were silicosis and its causes well-known long before 1930, but measures for its prevention through ventilation and moisture were in wide use.”Yet no recommended measures at the time were adopted to prevent risk to laborers. No masks or respirators were provided for the tunnel workers, but when executives and engineers entered the tunnel, they all wore respirators. Cherniack suspects his analysis of deaths underestimates the true toll, because New Kanawha Power Company, which built the dam, buried the men’s bodies in mass graves and suppressed any records. The actual labor was performed by Rinehart and Dennis, a contractor from Charlottesville, Virginia, that was hired by Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation, the corporation overseeing it all.This is the most barbaric example of industrial construction that has ever happened in this world. That company well knew what it was going to do to those men.In 1935, when the West Virginia state legislature passed new workers’ compensation laws that included protection from silicosis, it included a statute of limitations that rendered many of the Hawk’s Nest laborers ineligible. Thus, as Cherniack writes, “Rinehart and Dennis and Union Carbide were freed from further claims and the danger of scandal,” effectively erasing the disaster, and the lives it took, from history.“There was a sophistication to the level of local suppression,” Cherniack says. “When I was working with a state archivist, all the folders on Hawk’s Nest were missing. When I went to the Fayette County Courthouse, where hundreds of cases had been filed after the men got sick, most of those had been eliminated as well. In fact, the only reason I was able to get even some records was that an anonymous person contacted me whose father had been involved legally with some of the cases.”In Washington, D.C., a few vocal lawmakers tried to bring national attention to what happened at Hawk’s Nest and to what they saw as not only an ethical obligation to protect workers but an American one. Senator Rush Holt of West Virginia, speaking to the House Committee on Labor in 1936: “This is the most barbaric example of industrial construction that has ever happened in this world. That company well knew what it was going to do to those men. They brought up those transients, especially from the South, and treated them worse than dumb animals should be treated.”One Black driller, George Robinson, testified that he suffered from severe silicosis, and that he knew of more than 150 men who had died and estimated there were hundreds more.In its internal memorandum, Union Carbide diminished Robinson’s contributions to the project, claimed he was lying about the number of days he worked, and accused him of gleefully jumping into the spotlight of a Washington, D.C., circus to assert some kind of racial victory. An unidentified company representative was quoted in the report saying: “On this meagre basis this negro is now enjoying notoriety, travel without cost to himself, and the pleasure of making an impression on white people for probably the first time in his life.”Another hero who emerges from the historical record is Arthur Peyton, a white Union Carbide engineer on the project who became a whistleblower, testifying as part of a lawsuit brought by a tunnel worker in 1933 and again during a congressional hearing in 1936, that as a company higher-up he was eventually given a respirator at the tunnel and told of the dangers of inhaling silica dust, and that the tunnel workers were not. Still, he said, the company didn’t even give protection to the staff until the winter of 1931, months into construction.“Uncle Arthur was there working on the project, and it would have been exceedingly hard for the company to refute his testimony,” says Peyton’s nephew, Billy Joe Peyton, 68, recently retired after a long tenure as a history professor at West Virginia State University. “He was not a disgruntled laborer. I believe he did what he did, speaking out like that, out of a simple sense of right and wrong.”Arthur Peyton died of silicosis in his sixties, long after contracting it. “It’s like emphysema,” Billy Joe says. “Once those fibers are in your lungs, that’s it.”Still, even in the Peyton family, the trouble at Gauley Bridge was rarely talked about.“Growing up in West Virginia—my dad’s family was from Fayette County—there was nothing said even here,” he says. “And for obvious reasons. We were under the thumb of coal companies and industrialists for a long time. They hushed it up. My dad and my uncles and my grandmother, to a point, talked about it. But not that much.”This story has reporting by Ryan D’Agostino.