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| Image courtesy of Skewed News |
A moving article by Mark Hand on the Counterpunch website is about the deliberate flouting of health and
safety to save a few bucks from the Union Carbide the company that brought you the Bhopal
tragedy.
764 men — most of them black — died as a result of their
work at Hawks Nest in 1930 and 1931. However, others believe as many as half of
the 2,400 men who worked inside the mountain died from acute silicosis. Sixty
percent of the African American migrant workers worked less than two months on
the project. However, this was long enough to pay a deadly price.
Union Carbide wanted to build a 3.8-mile tunnel through Hawks
Nest in the Gauley Mountain in West Virginia to bring water to power its turbines.
To build the tunnel, workers moved forward through the mountain at a rate of
about 300 feet per week. But here’s the problem: Workers were forced to break
through 99.4% pure silica. At the time, experts knew that miners who inhaled
silica dust would contract silicosis, an often deadly lung ailment. Inhalation
of silica dust had been identified 15 years earlier as the cause of silicosis. Aware
of the dangers, workers were still ordered to use a dry drilling technique that
would create more dust. Dry drilling is faster than wet drilling, in which dust
raised by drilling is washed out of the air by spraying water at the drill tip.
In addition, Rinehart & Dennis provided inadequate ventilation, failed to
issue protective respirators, and imposed poor living conditions upon the
workers. Masks were supplied only to inspectors and company managers inside the
tunnel. Workers began dying two months after they first entered the tunnel. A
large number of the dead were reportedly buried in unmarked graves to cover up
the immensity of the tragedy. “They were taking the dead bodies out in wheel
barrows and dumping them in mass graves. That’s not supposed to happen in
America,” West Virginia historian Chuck Keeney said in an interview.
Officials have done a superb job covering up the truth. West
Virginia’s newspapers took little notice of the dying workers and the
construction project itself. When workers started getting sick, newspapers
published blatantly racist articles, attributing the lung problems to poor
habits of nutrition and an unusual susceptibility among African Americans to
pneumonia. The disaster is not taught in U.S. history classes. Remembrances of
the people who died are extremely rare. The companies offered death benefits of
$1,000 to wives of white workers and $800 for sons who died. The families of
the African American workers were offered $400 for a son and $600 for a
husband.
West Virginia historian Chuck Keeney asks “Nobody gets
punished for Hawk’s Nest. Nobody goes to jail. And nobody even knows about. How
many other things have happened in other places of America that get covered
up?”
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