Union Carbide orchestrated the 1930 Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster in West Virginia, exploiting legal loopholes to bypass safety regulations for 5,000 workers, predominantly Black migrants paid in depreciating script. By incentivizing a two-year early completion with $250 bonuses, the company forced dangerous dry drilling through pure silica rock, denying respirators and attributing immediate silicosis deaths to flu or tuberculosis. This systemic negligence, driven by profit over human life during the Great Depression, resulted in the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history, exposing the lethal consequences of corporate greed when regulatory enforcement fails. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Industrial Disaster Anticipation00:15:11
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It is a podcast that you're listening to right now, Behind the Bastards.
That's the one.
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Jason Parjan is our guest today.
Jason, how are you doing today?
I feel like I need to make this up to your listeners for the last time I was on because last time we did NK Ultra a subject that I wanted to be a part of because I thought it would be fun because it's conspiracy stuff and mind control and maturing candidates.
And then it turned out once we got into the actual details to be a real bummer.
Yeah, it's just abuse on a massive scale.
Yeah.
A lot of abuse, a lot of government money wasted, a lot of stupid people acting in foolish ways.
And basically nobody was made to pay.
So I suggested the subject of this episode because I wanted something that was more lighthearted, that would make up for that, where even if some bad things happen, it's okay because you know that at the end, the bad guys will get what they deserve.
Yeah, and then we decided to do an episode about a horrible industrial disaster instead.
No, this is the episode that you pitched, Jason.
And it's, boy, a lot bleaker than I even thought it was going to be when I went in on this.
And I think it's one that most people have not heard about.
Like, had you heard about this?
Because there was a TikTok you came across that was kind of like summarizing this, right?
Okay.
Robert.
Yes.
I am an award-winning New York Times best-selling author.
We cannot go on a microphone and say, oh, you heard about this industrial accident on TikTok.
We say that I read a book about it.
And that I just don't remember the title.
Jason, first off, I did read a couple of books about it, but what I will say is because you're a TikTok star now, there's nothing that will increase your cred with the Gin Z kids more than getting news from TikTok.
Yeah, we are going to record a multi-part podcast episode just on that three-minute TikTok.
Break it out.
Now, 40 seconds in, he says this.
No.
So anyway, I heard about this on TikTok and then looked it up and then found out that its Wikipedia page is like 900 words long.
It's almost a stub.
And it is the worst industrial disaster, maybe, in American history.
I say maybe because we know almost nothing about it.
Like there are famous disasters.
Like in school, I heard about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
That is a famous example of a gross negligence at a workplace.
And that killed like 150 people.
Yeah.
This was much, much worse.
The triangle shirtwaist, like that Wikipedia page goes on and on.
It's like 4,000 words long.
That's something we know about.
It's been documented.
There's been books written about it.
This thing got swept under the rug so efficiently and there was 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.
And I think one of the things that you're going to be interested in as we get into this is that there was a period of time in which this was extremely famous.
And the degree to which it was buried after that is a really interesting part of like what's happened here.
The disaster we're talking about, because we haven't said the name of it yet, if people are curious, is the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster, which I also had not heard of at all until you sent me that TikTok, Jason.
Like a lot of people, when you hear the term Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster, you're picturing people being attacked by a giant swarm of hawks.
Yeah, yeah.
That's not what happened.
Yeah, like a bunch of cavers like find their way into a tunnel and it winds up being like filled with some sort of like eyeless, featherless, like underground night hawk that only hunts.
I'm imagining basically the creatures from the first Riddick movie.
If you remember that, listeners.
No one on TikTok has watched that film.
And if that had happened, it would have been a much more famous incident.
Like I think that we would have a statue of that somewhere.
Yeah, yeah.
And I do think we should have a statue dedicated to the first Riddick movie, but that's a separate matter.
So we're going to get into this story and it is fucking wild.
But first off, Jason, up at the top here, I think you have a book to plug, I believe.
As usual, yes.
The new one is called Zoe is Too Drunk for This Dystopia.
It's the latest in the Zoe Ash series.
It is out October 31st in every possible format, including print and audio.
And I guess just those two.
But yeah, all of the possible formats.
Yeah.
When you say every possible format, are you getting down on the metaverse yet, Jason?
Because one day, theoretically, your book could be beamed directly into the brain of a Neuralink patient.
You know, they instantly know everything that you've written.
We can really save a lot of time with the just kind of cutting out the joy of experiencing a story and just have it be a memory immediately.
If you are listening to this podcast far enough in the future, I am confident it will be available because there is no way that my works will be lost to time.
It's simply not possible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Speaking of lost to time, let's get in to the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.
So most people listen, everyone listening to this knows about Chernobyl, easily the most famous industrial disaster or accident in history.
And it's, you know, it's kind of perfect for, you know, a mini-series on HBO or whatever.
It's got, you've got the disintegrating Soviet state, you get a nuclear reactor, this like worry that it could have been much worse and like killed millions of people.
But when you actually drill into how bad Chernobyl was, what's amazing is how bad it wasn't because about 30 people die immediately.
And obviously that's, that's fucked up.
But only about 60 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 4,000 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 Bhopal chemical plant explosion.
We've covered that on the show before.
That killed about 4,000 people immediately and injured more than 200,000.
At least 15 to 20,000 additional people are known to have died as a result of like lingering consequences from Bhopal.
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 Bhopal, is the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.
And one of the things that ties it to Bhopal is that the Bhopal 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 20th century had a lower death count than this company in terms of like direct deaths due to negligence.
And so today we're gathering to talk about another Union Carbide disaster because the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster is all on Union Carbide.
They are the guys behind this.
And 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 Mine disaster, and the Farmington Mine Disaster, which are three of the most famous 20th century industrial disasters in the U.S., they do not equal the death toll of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, which, by the way, exceeds Chernobyl.
And to be fair to Union Carbide, both of these disasters happened during just a period when they were, I'm sure, going through some rough stretch because these are only like 60 years apart.
So, you know, there's just a period, a dark period in their company's history when I'm sure other than that, it's been fine.
Yeah, yeah.
No, there's a, there's no, no, no questions about any of the other products that they've put out and the consequences those might have had on the population writ large.
This is interesting in part because it's an industrial disaster with a horrible human toll that was not tied to, you know, Chernobyl was a bad nuclear plant, right?
It was like badly constructed.
The Bhopal chemical factory was a bad chemical factory.
The Hawks Nest Tunnel is one of the most successful construction projects in like the history of industrial.
It's basically it's part of a hydroelectric 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 a disease.
Have you ever heard prior to this, Jason, of silicosis?
No, but I feel like hearing it that I could put together what it is that silica dust, like I think silica granules under a microscope are very sharp and nasty.
And the idea of breathing too many of them, I just imagine them shredding the tissue in your lungs.
Yeah, that is a good way to view it, right?
Because silica particles are basically just like little bits of glass, but it's actually slightly worse than that.
So what happens with silicosis, you get it right, it's when you breathe in too much silica dust, but these tiny particles of silica actually get absorbed by cells in the lung.
And this injures the cells and it causes them to start.
I think the name of the process is autolysis, which is when cells digest themselves.
This causes masses of scar 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 silicosis is often not specifically what kills you, but it makes you a lot more vulnerable to tuberculosis or pneumonia.
You think about like COVID-19, right?
How people who are immunocompromised, 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.
Now, right at the top, I fear some people are going to hear this and they're going to anticipate, okay, this is probably a situation where they had these people working on a project and then years and years later, they started getting sick.
And then the complaint is going to be that, well, they should have known that is not the situation, guys.
We're going to get into it.
They knew right away.
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 realize, oh, we shouldn't have been using it like that.
No, they knew.
Yeah, the timeframe on this is crazy.
And the timeframe on silicosis can vary, right?
This is a thing that you can get.
A lot of people who got silicosis in the ancient world were like, you look at all those very pretty marble structures in like Greece today, right?
On the Parthenon.
Well, to do that, you have to chop up a bunch of bigger rocks, right?
You have to like carve them and that creates dust that has 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 a 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 is by Herodotus, right?
Herodotus 2,000 years and change ago is writing about mine workers and craftsmen suffering from this like lung destroying disease caused by breathing in dust.
The Calamity of Black Lung00:15:16
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.
Because it did not require a vast ocean of scientific knowledge to understand I'm breathing the stuff that makes me cough and burns my nose.
And then eventually my lungs feel like they're on fire and then I can't breathe anymore.
Like it's just kind of connecting A to B there.
Yeah, it's not as complicated as like inventing an mRNA vaccine.
It is kind of a basic observation that you can make.
And that's relevant because the company, Union Carbide, when this all rolls out, is going to claim, like, well, we didn't even know silicosis was a thing.
And it's like, well, you had two and a half thousand years or so to get up to speed on this one, guys.
And it's one of those things.
It's not just, we're not just talking about like the kind of Greco-Roman ancient world here.
Tissue samples on mummified bodies of miners from Peru have also shown evidence of silicosis.
Spanish writers in the 17th century documented that indigenous people who were like enslaved and forced into mines in South America had a life expectancy of just six to 18 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 80%, 90%, whatever 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.
As we're going to get into this, as they're working, it's going to be clear.
Like they had people who could not continue on the job, many of them, and they were kind of just dragged off and replaced.
It's not everything that they're going to say to defend themselves that it's like, well, this is really the silent killer.
You couldn't have known it.
It's like, no, your inspectors were wearing protection when they came to look at it, knowing that the workers were not.
But we'll get into all of that.
But yeah, the point is, this is important to establish because they had no reason to even for one moment think that this was not a danger there.
Yes, yes.
And we see, you know, there's significant increasing references and an understanding of silicosis in Western sources from about the 16th century on.
This just becomes because a lot of the modern world was built on silicosis, right?
Like the sheer number of people who had to get this thing in order to create a lot of the foundations of the society we live in is in the millions.
So again, no real reason anyone involved in digging tunnels or mining would not know this.
But in order to kind of set that out, I'm going to quote from a book on the Hawks Nest disaster by an epidemiologist named Martin Cherniak.
In the 1800s, silicosis reached epidemic proportions among British potters.
Vernacular terms for the disease, grinder's rot, potter's rot, and miner's pathysis, 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 1860s 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 1897.
By 1911, dry drilling had been explicitly forbidden by South African mining.
So there's a couple of 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 mine the stone to make our capital buildings or the people who like mined 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 timeframe 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 1890s 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 matted 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 1911, 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 have like banned this because it's inhumane, dry drilling.
So the U.S. 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 mines, that are dealing with the laborers who are encountering silicosis, these regulators exist and they have like fancy names like the Bureau of Mining, or 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 20th century to do much of anything.
And here, I don't want to get political with this.
I know that everything is political in some way, but this is 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.
Yeah.
But it is very difficult to talk to someone who is on the extreme libertarian side 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've got to fill out 300 forms and get a license for the oven.
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 8 million pages of regulations, it is because if you don't have it explicitly spelled out in the law, what you're not 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.
Yeah.
And one of the things I don't get is, so a lot of the people who would make that argument that you're making are folks who believe that part of why you need the right to bear firearms, the right to own and bear firearms, is that it provides some sort of check to state power, right?
That one of the things that could keep the state honest is if you have an armed citizenry.
This is something a lot of those people would argue.
It's not, it's an argument I'm 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, right?
Like that's what a regulatory entity is.
It's the state basically holding a gun on these companies that are otherwise going to cut whatever corners they can, no matter how much it harms its laborers.
Like I don't understand why that there's not like any kind of consistency with that with that viewpoint among a lot of people, not everybody.
Or if you're a Republican and if one of those workers was to steal a bunch of coal, they would want that worker thrown in jail, no mercy.
Yeah.
That it's like, okay, but why isn't the company, if you believe in law and order cops being tough on criminals, if you have a criminal company, why don't you have that same attitude?
Why aren't 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 a kid who sticks somebody up in an alley?
It's like, no, it's too unsafe to have him out there.
Like, okay, but do you understand there are 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?
This is, I mean, I have thought for a while that like we need some sort of equivalent to like a corporate death penalty, right?
Where if a company is acting irresponsible on enough of a scale, then it's like, all right, well, we're going to sell off your assets.
Your executives get nothing.
Like, this is a penalty for certain levels of irresponsibility.
But, you know, we don't even really manage antitrust that well.
So that's, that's probably a, and I, I, I, I'm not a law knower guy.
So I, I'm sure that that's illegal for a thousand different reasons.
But um, we should get back to the story fundamentally here.
So yeah, no, no, no, no.
This is, I mean, I, I, I, 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 I, 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 early 1930s.
This is like right around the period where in 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 uprisings.
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 quartz mines in the 1890s get diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of silicosis.
10% 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 10 years of entering the mines.
And so by the time the 20s roll around, both of these stories are extremely well known and precautions against silicosis have become much more common, even in the United States.
And as a result of some of these precautions, 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 U.S. and around the world, by the start of the 1930s, mine operators have three major methods of reducing the lethality of their mines.
Number one is wet drilling, which we've talked about already.
Number two is providing ventilation, right?
Installing ventilation ducts in mines in order to get like bad air out, right?
That should be pretty obvious.
I don't think people need explanation as to why ventilation helps.
And then number three is issuing respirators for miners to wear, right?
These are this is like a more primitive version of the respirators a lot of us wore and wear as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The U.S., and I actually didn't know there were functional respirators this far back, but the U.S. Bureau of Mines started publishing recommendations on which specific respirators to issue in 1926.
And all of this wisdom is going to be ignored deliberately to cause the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.
So that part of the story starts with the town of Galey Bridge in Fayette County, West Virginia.
In 1930, it had a population of just over 72,000.
Now, West Virginia is like a lot of parts of the world that 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 30 and 40 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, unemployment's like maybe 20 to 25%, right?
You've got 40% or in some cases higher in most West Virginia counties.
It's just a calamity for the whole state.
Let me venture this, and you're free to correct me if I'm wrong.
40% unemployment in this era, in that place, with the state of the infrastructure that they had at that time, there's no poor in the United States now that compares to that kind of poor.
Like that's poor on a level that most of us can't comprehend.
I mean, honestly, I believe with that, I don't think I'm being like exaggerating here.
At 40% unemployment in the U.S., like this would be a failed state.
Like the basics of infrastructure would no longer function.
It would be a calamity.
Yeah.
The elements of the social safety net stuff that came about after the Depression, there's a whole lot of stuff that did not exist back then in terms of assistance, in terms of everything, in terms of where you would seek medical help if you had an infection or a broken leg or anything.
It is hard to comprehend.
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 didn't they go to the press?
Or why didn't they complain to this?
You know, the labor relations board, you got to understand the context here.
This is a place where if a job comes along, you don't say no to it.
Yeah.
Period.
For a lot of these people, like it might seem like the world's ending.
Things are so, so bad.
So part of why they are so bad, why unemployment is so much higher in West Virginia, is that over the course of the 20s and 30s, the mining industry that had largely built what prosperity West Virginia had had fallen apart.
The region is obviously very rich in coal, but for a variety of reasons, including underregulation in that particular state, its mines were also inefficient.
So by the 20s and 30s, 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 mines, 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.
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My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Regulatory Failure And Dams00:15:37
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
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 in abundance is moving water, right?
The state's got a lot of big rivers, and those rivers can be harnessed to provide hydroelectric power, which we have figured out to do pretty well by the early 1900s.
So the Electrometallurgical Company at the start of the century starts building hydropower 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 Moreland.
And in 1911, he draws up plans for a massive new hydroelectric facility, which will use the power of a river to support the manufacturing of futuristic new alloys that required high 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 U.S. 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-51 Mustang.
So they pick for this hydroelectric plant an area of the New River, Kanawha Falls, which is kind of the ideal location in their mind.
So construction begins at first at a place called Glen Ferris on the river, and a small, rather primitive dam is built.
Then in 1917, the Electrometallurgical 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 Carbide wants 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 hydroelectric facility.
So since this is illegal, Union Carbide decides, what if we just break the law and build it anyway?
Which they do.
And they build this fucking thing.
And in 1919, 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 a, 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 1927 through a corporate entity they cut out to handle this whole business, the new Canawa Power Company.
And so this, this is going to be a project of this company called the new Canawa 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 the kind of thing that corporations don't do anymore, right?
Obviously.
It would be unexpected.
Okay.
I do want to talk about something because to this day, you have Silicon Valley billionaires talking about we want to just move fast and break things.
Yeah.
And we can always like apologize later.
We'll pay whatever fine, but we're just going to take off and do it because that's, you know, that's how innovation happens.
We're not going to worry about all of these little rules, all this stuff.
We're going to launch our rocket.
We're not going to worry whether or not debris rains 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 it over, 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.
And then we'll have our thing.
We'll have our dam.
Yeah.
It's frustrating like how consistently that works because there's really, there's still not a counter to that kind of thing, right?
Because like, what are you going to do?
Like dismantle it?
It would be kind of cool if they did, but also probably would cause a bunch of other people to die of silicosis.
So anyway.
I was just going to say, likewise, if you compare the size of the fines for, say, the opioid epidemic to these pharma companies versus the amount of profit they made, selling the painkillers, it's nothing.
It's a drop in the bucket.
So it's like, well, why not just invent the new addictive thing?
Because yeah, you'll have to pay back 5% of it to in the form of a fine.
But so what?
Nobody went to jail.
Yeah.
It's the kind of thing, you know, you'll hear debate a lot when people talk about like Enron, right?
Where maybe the 2008 crash wouldn't have happened if more of those guys had gone to prison.
And I don't know that that would have done anything, but it couldn't hurt to try, right?
Like it wouldn't, it wouldn't have hurt to try.
It wouldn't have hurt to try in 2008.
It wouldn't have hurt to try in 1930 with this thing, you know, treating, treating these crimes that have much higher body counts 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 16,240 foot long tunnel, right?
They're going underground to divert water from the new river through a mountain, Golly 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 hydroelectric 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 technically 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 35 bids and awarded a two-year contract to Reinhardt and Dennis, one of the few construction companies able to manage such a large project.
During the bid process, Reinhardt and Dennis reported having built 51 tunnels in the past 35 years.
Engineers from New Kanawa Power were to design and oversee the operation.
The contract specified that Reinhardt and Dennis would assume all liability, thus Union Carbide was shielded.
The contract included a clause that allowed engineers for New Kanawha Power to force changes into the contractor's procedures if injuries were caused by negligence on behalf of the contractor.
But New Kanawha Power never intervened.
The contract also called for Reinhardt and Dennis to furnish and equip an 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, 14 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, Reinhardt and Dennis, is going to further cut costs, right?
Because they're trying to maximize what they get from Union Carbide and 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, right?
So I know that it gets confusing getting into stuff like loopholes and subsidiaries and all that, but I cannot emphasize enough and I don't want to belabor the point, but the reason why the regulations are a stack of papers 18 feet tall is because the companies have lawyers to do things like say, well, technically, this is a construction project, not a mining project.
They're not mining for anything.
They're building a tunnel.
So why do we need to like finding little ways to sneak around the regulations so you don't have to provide the respirators or go through the rules with normal govern 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.
Yeah.
And I think one of the best ways to look at how complex and labyrinthine regulations get is think about like, if you're a military history nerd, like I am, I'm not sure about you, Jason, but I like reading about that stuff.
When you look at the maps of like civil war battles, right?
There's just, it's this hugely, there's all these different colored little symbols that stand for these different units and these arrows moving all around and like to show like where everyone's going.
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.
Just look at the list of terms of conditions when you buy anything.
And this is, it's like, do I need this document's eight pages long so I can buy a toaster?
It's like, yes, you're looking at the history of houses that have burned down and every other thing that is, it's like that you're looking at a fossil record of a fight between regulators and consumers and every other thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're going to be getting into darker territory from here because the workers hired by Reinhardt and Dennis aren't just devoid of protections.
They're also being thrown into a working environment in which their bosses are incentivized to take risks with their lives in order to make more money because the contract for the tunnel has incentives 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 $250.
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 drill.
I think it's like half as fast as dry drilling.
So I just want to keep in your mind right now, Reinhardt and 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 31st, 1930, a Union Carbide executive pilots 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.
Reinhart and Dennis are going to need about 5,000 workers on the project total.
And I think about 3,000 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 traps, like all of the kind of machine work, right?
Most of which happens outside of the tunnel are that's high skilled jobs, right?
The engineers who have to oversee everything, those are high skilled jobs.
But the workers in the tunnel who are physically digging through the chopped up rock, who are moving it into the bins and stuff to take it away, who are doing the actual tunnel digging, that's a low-skill job.
Again, I'm not making a judgment about this work.
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, you're in 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 80% of the locals in this county are white people.
Union Carbide's records, though, report that 65% of the men working in the tunnel are black.
I've heard reports as high as like 75%.
Most of these men came from outside Fayette County.
And the best records we have suggest that less than 20% of the men who are on the project in the tunnel and out of it are from the area.
Migrant Workers In Shacks00:09:13
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.
Gali, the town that's nearby, some of the reports I've read from that interviews with black laborers 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 like 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 Cherniak's book that lays out how most of these workers get hired.
The account of an 18-year-old from South Carolina may be typical.
With his father and uncle, he had worked for Reinhardt and Dennis on seasonal jobs in the Carolinas.
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 among southern blacks.
The boy paid his own fare to Gali Bridge.
He was immediately added to the roles because he was known to several of the contractors' foremen.
And there are some sources that'll 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 Cherniak's, because 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, Cherniak says, at least based on the interviews that exist with surviving black laborers, most of those guys insisted that was not really a part of this.
You didn't need to, right?
Because of how desperate the economic situation is.
I want the listeners to please appreciate the layers of deniability the company gives itself here because they can say nobody forced them on this job.
They could have quit at any time.
And likewise, they could have said, well, this subcontractor that actually did the work, we didn't tell them to do dry drilling.
We didn't tell them.
It's like, no, but you set an incentive and a deadline that they couldn't meet unless they did.
But you, you gave your self-deniability.
And I cannot tell you how many of history's horrors have worked that way.
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 and 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 mines where they literally made them work at gunpoint.
These people came there voluntarily and they got paid and they could have, if 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.
No.
Yeah.
And yeah, it's, it's, we'll be getting into that even more here because it's, it's actually like worse than I have I have laid out already.
I should also note that a lot of these migrant black laborers are still from West Virginia, right?
If you look at the known death toll, they're just from other parts of the state, right?
So a huge number of these migrating laborers, 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, right?
The plan is we need to get out of the South.
Jim Crow is too horrifying.
I'm going to take this gig.
A lot of them bring their families with them, right?
Because they're like, I'm going to take this gig.
I'm going to make enough money and then we'll get set up in some nor in, you know, we'll get set up in like New York or wherever, right?
That's the goal is to make money that'll allow them to get to a place where they have some kind of hope of a future as opposed to staying in the Jim Crow South.
But one of the issues this causes is that like there's nowhere for a lot of their families to stay.
They're not allowed in the 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 Gali Bridge as well.
The urban population, the people who actually live in this town, consider themselves, there's a conflict.
Because being miners and being these like, you know, industrial laborers 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 bad for 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 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 is their own fault, right?
That is a conflict that exists in this situation.
It's not one that I think gets 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 12 feet by 15 feet, but that's where the similarity ends.
For white workers, these 12 foot by 15 foot shacks are divided into two rooms and there's two workers living in each room, right?
Their shacks also have electricity, so they've got lights and stuff.
The shanties for black workers are very different.
For one thing, they have no electricity, although they have to pay the company a fee for electricity.
The company's literally making them pay out of their paychecks for nothing.
Their shacks are also more than twice as crowded.
While an entire shack would hold four white workers, there were often 10 to 15 black workers in the same space.
I'm going to 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 40% 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 nearly 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 Cherniak's 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 pay period.
Between these times, the worker had to pay a 10% 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 racist, right?
And again, Cherniak will note, this is not uncommon for the time.
I don't want to be glib here, but I find it fascinating that that old song from the 40s, that 16 tons song.
Yeah.
You load 16 tons of money.
What do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
The fact that that song paints a much rosier picture of mining than this reality of the story we're telling here.
Songs That Paint A Rosier Picture00:03:04
Like that's almost a romantic version.
It's literally about a man who can't go to heaven because he owes his soul to the company store because he's so much, because he's only getting paid in company store credit and it just keeps getting worse every day.
It's like, yeah, even that song actually paints kind of a sunnier picture than what actually was happening.
Yep.
Yeah.
It's, I mean, there's really no bottom to it.
But speaking of things there's no bottom to, there's no bottom to the love I have for the courageous corporations that sponsor this podcast.
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It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
Realizing Dangerous Working Conditions00:13:54
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Oh, boy.
Good times.
We're had by all.
I'm feeling happy.
Yeah.
So before we get much further, I think it'll be valuable to give the listener an idea of precisely how the work proceeded on this project.
Since I, based on, and our data isn't perfect here, you know, it's been a while since the last listener 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?
I think it's about 32%.
Yeah.
And that's a big difference for Jason and I, because Jason, if I'm not mistaken, about 70% of the audience at cracked were professional tunnel diggers, right?
Yeah, that's why we had so many articles on the subject.
It was like the six funniest things about when your mine cart overturns at the end of your shift.
And everybody nodded.
Everybody nodded and knew what we were talking about.
Eight things you learn getting black lung.
So here's Cherniak describing this is like what the daily workload looks like for most of these tunnel guys.
Drilling preceded by the standard heading and bench method, named for the vertical and horizontal planes of the drilling axis.
Routinely, 16 drills were in simultaneous operation, 10 boring horizontally into the heading face and six into the bench or stone platform as yet unexcavated, on which all the drillers worked.
Holes were drilled for 10 or 12 feet and packed with dynamite by powder monkeys.
Typically, a driller would drill 250 feet of drill steel in a shift, about 20 holes.
Although the 80-pound Ingersoll 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 5 to 15 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 operation.
So that's basically how it works, right?
That's physically like kind of what's going on here, right?
You drill holes, shove dynamite 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 3% or 4% 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 hawksnest tunnel is almost 100% 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 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 Appalachian 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 decide, 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, Reinhardt 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.
Here's the thing.
Now that they realize that the rock they're getting out of there is an actual valuable substance that they are going to use, this, of course, becomes a mine.
And I'm sure they filed the paperwork saying, hey, guys, I'm sorry, this is a mine.
We're mining this stuff, like the tunnel we need, but also this is functioning as a mine.
Let's go ahead and please saddle us with the additional regulations because it would be irresponsible otherwise, because this is clearly a mine at this point.
We are mining silica for use in a factory.
No, unfortunately, from what I can tell, it seems like you don't have to be regulated as a mine if the mining you're doing is a happy accident, right?
If you get lucky, then no regulations at all.
That's how the industrial code was written at the time.
That's certainly how Union Carbide are acting, right?
But does the silica dust know that it's not in a mine?
Yeah, it doesn't seem to because it's getting everywhere here.
And they're not, part of why it's getting everywhere is they're not wet drilling, right?
Because that's going to slow progress down.
So Reinhard and Davis are like, don't wet drill.
And they also decide we're not going to give these tunnel, the black tunnel laborers are low-skill laborers respirators, right?
Because that's going to be too expensive.
Now, when this, a lot of people die later, Union Carbide will say, well, there were no approved respirators for combating 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 a thing that they did.
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 kind of like this little jink in the wording of the law that we can get around, you know?
And any one of those people, if they had to send their own son or brother or best friend into that mine, would not dare let them go in without something.
Like on a human level, that's the whole thing about all of this is it lets you completely detach yourself from the humanity of the decision and also the fact that one load of the silica they hauled out of there would have paid for the respirators.
Oh, but the amount of money they made from just one batch of that probably would have covered the equipment.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, further to your point about like if they were sending their loved ones and they would have respirators.
All of the skilled white workers, right?
The machine operators and stuff who are doing these high-skilled jobs, the engineers that are overseeing it and the management who are coming in to like check in on the project, they are all issued respirators.
It's just, it's basically just some of the unskilled white workers and all of the 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 fills the tunnel with dust, right?
So this is a known problem.
This is a known 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 250 bucks a day the faster you work, Reinhardt 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 30 minutes, supervisors often sent the next shift 300 to 400 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.
We cannot convey how nasty this dust is.
Like there's dust.
We've all had to breathe dust.
We've all had to breathe smoke.
This is a nasty brand of dust.
Like that wording that it like as like glass just slashes at your eyes.
Like it's tiny little razor sharp microscopic particles.
Yeah, I cannot imagine.
You're just inhaling little razor blades almost, right?
Like that's the degree of like damage this is doing to you.
So it shouldn't surprise you to note that after a fairly short period of time, the men working in these tunnels realized that they had been put in a very dangerous situation.
They attempted to force the company to let them wait longer after blasts to avoid exposing themselves to dust.
Reinhardt 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 drillstead and knocked them in the head with it.
So pretty horrifying.
And obviously, I talked about how with coal, I think you're looking at 2% to 4% 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 progress 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 ship kills, right?
You know, you're not talking anything like normal miner's lung.
People are dropping right after they start before they really even get settled into the job.
I mean, there's no way that they're not coughing the entire time they're in there.
There's no way that they're not coughing up blood at some point because that's what happens when you cough long enough.
You start to tear up your esophagus and your lungs.
Like if you're inhaling enough to give yourself silicosis after a couple months, that means you knew you were breathing air that burned when you breathe it.
Like everyone in that tunnel, everyone 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 don't need to be a doctor.
Like any ignorance was claimed later is laughable.
Yeah.
And we will talk about the company doctors in the next episode.
But one of the things I should note is that not only is this obvious, as you stated, there's a diagnosis of what's killing these men very quickly.
There's a company mortician, the first 12 deceased workers that he gets in his office, he cuts into their lungs and he diagnoses them with silicosis.
This happens very quickly.
And when it happens, panic discussions erupt among Reinhardt and Morris officers and as well as the union carbide 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 got all 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 mine.
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 are we feeling?
Well, again, I know that this episode ended on a downer, but I'm sure that in part two, all of these people making these decisions, they're going to get what they deserve.
Like they, they're going to regret, they're going to rue the day they didn't try to be human beings for once.
Yeah, this is the one episode of our show that's going to end with justice for the aggrieved.
So everybody look forward to that in part two.
Rushing To Finish The Project00:02:37
We're not lying to you.
This is not all a con.
Another thing that's not a con, Jason, is your new book.
Do you want to talk about it a little bit as we close out here?
Yeah, it is.
Zoe is too drunk for this dystopia.
These are science fiction novels.
The first two, the first one is called Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits.
The second one is called Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick.
The first two are available on Kindle Unlimited.
If you're one of those people, it would be free.
Otherwise, you can probably get them at a used bookstore for dirt cheap.
Yeah, if you're just steal a copy from somewhere.
Yeah, jack it.
You know, if you're listening to this show, you like dystopias.
You're fascinated by collapse, and you're probably interested in the idea of a weirdo libertarian future independent city-state in the desert with post-humans and high technology nonsense.
It's good.
You'll love it.
I do.
So check out Jason's book.
And it is about a young woman who inherits a corrupt company.
I chose the subject for this podcast on purpose because she finds herself at the wheel of a corrupt capitalist system.
And it's like, okay, how do you fix this?
And it turns out, not easy.
Yeah.
Well, there we go, everybody.
That has been the episode.
So let's all have a happy time.
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