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

Robert and Jason continue their discussion of the deadliest workplace catastrophe in U.S. history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Who Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards show,
where I enunciate the title slightly differently so that you
stay interested and don't slip into a belief that you
all of these episodes are just kind of like one
long episode and you're just sort of like lost in

(00:24):
space consuming it. Anyway, that was that what you were
going for there, buddy? Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like
a k hole but for your ears, speaking of while
not really speaking about ketamine, but anyway, Jason pargin.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Part two, The Triumphant Part two, the first part kind
of ended on an Empire strikes back a down note.
This is going to get us through to the Return
of the Jedi, when the Empire is finally finally going
to fall in. This company, this evil corporation behind this
disaster going to be dissolved. That they could clearly not
still in business after nineteen thirty whatever, once this stuff

(01:01):
all comes out. I'm sure I've not looked it up.
I'm sure they were not allowed to operate anywhere in
the world after this.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
I've forgotten most of what I wrote here, but I'm
sure you're right on that one.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Jason.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Now, Jason, are you do you have a thing that
you've got a plug here that you yes, yeah, moving.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
The new book is called Zoe is Too Drunk for
This Dystopia. Add in all formats on October thirty first,
twenty twenty three. If you are listening to this after
that date, it should be out wherever books are sold
in any possible format. If it is not out, boy,
google my name, because something terrible must have happened. I

(01:42):
can't imagine. It must have gotten canceled and pulled from shelves.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yeah, Jason got canceled for his clandestine work in Nicaragua
in the nineteen nineties or something like that. Look, we
all have we all have a dark history of clandestine
work in Latin America at some point in the nineties.
You know, don't don't be judgmental people, they'll come for
you next. This is the problem with cancel culture.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
And also that does not get you canceled. Those people are.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Those people are very much you know, they're all fine.
So let's talk about another kind of canceled silicosis. So
one of the you know you mentioned there's not a
lot of sources on this. There there are some very
good sources on this, but they are kind of obscure
and buried, and honestly the very best, like early like

(02:34):
the the in terms of like stuff that how close
it is to the actual disaster, probably the best overall
work kind of covering this at least that that's kind
of contemporary to it. Happening is not a piece of
traditional journalism or like a traditional nonfiction book. It's a poem,

(02:54):
an epic poem. So we're not talking about like a
little rhyming thing. We're talking about almost like the Illea
or the Odyssey. Right, there's an epic poem about the
Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, The Book of the Dead, written
by Muriel Rukeiser. She was, you know, someone who grew
up soon after the disaster and came to west you know,
this part of West Virginia and was able to meet

(03:16):
and interview a bunch of the survivors and their family members.
And so it's this mix of you know, art where
where she is, you know, using kind of the medium
of poetry to talk through, to kind of set the
scene and to talk through you know, how horrifying this was.
But also large chunks of it are straight up interviews
with survivors and their family members that have been kind

(03:37):
of set to meet her in order to fit into
the work. I haven't ever encountered anything like this before actually,
and within sort of West Virginia, you know, academic spheres.
It's a pretty famous book. I had to, you know,
actually buy a physical copy of it because it's not online.
But it's it's very good. It's it's really remarkable, and
it is considered one of the more important pieces of

(04:00):
kind of labor journalism of this era. I think it's
been forgotten by most people now, but it shouldn't be.
It is a pretty remarkable work of art. So I
do want to encourage people check out Muriel Rakaiser's Book
of the Dead. We're going to be quoting from it
a couple of times here because it contains interviews with
people from that period of time.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
In the last episode, we kind of joked about the
fact that I'm mostly known for TikTok, which is true.
Far more people have watched my tech talks and have
read any of my books. But I on there, I
talked about the HBO mini series they did about Chernobyl, Yeah,
and I talked about how they made it not as
a documentary or as a docuseries or anything like that.
They made it as a horror movie. Yeah, Like it

(04:40):
is highly stylized, and I was in that technok. I
was defending that choice because I was like, you can't
convey the reality of Chernobyl without trying to convey the
fact that it played out like cosmic horror to these people,
that you had this church demon thing you brought into

(05:02):
the world, and that everyone who looked at it their
flesh started melting off their bones. So it is highly
stylized because that's the only thing to really drive home,
Whereas if you just try to convey it as a
clinical piece of journalism, it doesn't hit the same way.
It is trying to bring you into what it was
like to live that situation that no one had ever

(05:24):
lived through before. There had never been a meltdown before.
Where here, I think it's the same thing if you're
trying to convey the actual horror of what occurred. Because
this mind, as we described in the previous episode. Please
go back to listen to that one if you have
not yet, it was hell on Earth. Yeah, Like you're
in this dark space that is cramped. Even if it's

(05:45):
a spacious mind, you're still you know, it's now far
enough that you're long out of the sunlight, and the
air is burning you. It's burning your eyes, it's burning
your nose, it's burning your lungs. It's probably burning your
skin like you're the teeny tiny pieces of glass. An
epic poem is as appropriate as anything as I can

(06:08):
think of to try to convey that this is an
epic tragedy. It's so easy to talk about this in
a way that we talk about numbers in the science
of it that doesn't convey what it was like to
get up and go to work in this place every day.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, Yeah, absolutely, And I think Rukeiser does a really
admirable job of that. One of the accounts that she
provides is from a woman, and this is from one
of the relatively small number of laborers who were from
the nearby town of golly Bridge. This woman, this mother,
is named Absalom, and she has three sons who all

(06:46):
go to work in this tunnel. They had been coal
miners previously, but work was uneven, and as ru Keiser writes, quote,
a power company foreman learned that we made homebrew. He
formed a habit of dropping by in the evenings to drink,
persuading the boys and my husband to give up their
jobs and take this other work. It would pay them better.
Sureley is my youngest boy. He went into the tunnel.

(07:07):
I saw the dust at the bottom of the tub.
The boy worked there about eighteen months. Came home one
evening with a shortness of breath. He said, mother, I
cannot get my breath. Shirley was sick about three months.
I would carry him from his bed to the table,
from his bed to the porch in my arms. So
that's terrible, but it's also worth noting Absalom and her

(07:27):
family are kind of among the luckier victims in that
her kids and her husband, when they get sick, they
have a home in town that's stable, they have family
to take care of them. They're not completely in the wind.
So when Shirley gets sick, he's able to stay with
his mom and get care from his mom. This does
not ultimately save his life, but it's a less horrific

(07:48):
experience than a lot of these black laborers are forced
to endure. I want you to imagine not just the
tunnel horror, which Jason just described pretty ably, but living
and working in a camp outside the dig project. Right,
you're in these cramped quarters. You're in a tiny box
of a room with ten to fifteen other guys. None
of you are able to There's not hygiene facilities that

(08:09):
are good or super regular, so everything reeks. There's also
this chloeing silica dust that you just can't get all
the way off you. It's always on everything, and one
day you find that you just can't draw in breath.
It feels like a flu at first, maybe that's what
it is, you think, and you start coughing incessantly, But
the misery is so intense eventually that you stop being

(08:31):
able to work, and you can't sleep at night. Right,
So in the morning when it's time to go in,
you're not like you can't function right, you can't go
in there and do your job. You're coughing up a
lung and you haven't slept in days. This is an
experience that happens to a lot of these guys. In
nineteen thirty six, a newsreel interviewed one of these hawks
next workers after the fact, who claimed, quote, each and

(08:54):
every day I worked in that tunnel, I helped carry
off ten to fourteen men who was overcome by the
dust now there's no sick days in this period of time,
especially not for black migrant laborers in the midst of
a massive labor surplus. From Maine harton Davis's perspective, right,
the contractor union Carbide is directing to do all this.
Workers staying in their shanties are taking up space, and

(09:16):
if they're not working, that space has to go to
someone who will. So they hired security from the nearby
town to go through the camp after everyone had left
for work and hunt down the sick people who might
be like hiding, trying to like sneak a day sleeping
or something while their lungs rot in their chests. Cherniac
writes of this quote, Ryan Hart and Dennis retained as

(09:37):
an enforcement officer and formerly called a shack rouster. A
Georgian named McLeod, who was assisted by a black camp
overseer called Big John McLoud, carried firearms in a club.
With these, he is said to have forced black workers
to vacate the camp at the start of each work shift.
According to a surviving black tunnel worker, beatings were routinely
administered as part of this early morning ritual. The camps

(09:57):
of the colored men we're not close to the camps
of the for the white men. If a colored man
was sick and really couldn't go out to work in
the morning, he had to hide out before the shock
rouster came about. That fellow had two pistols in a
blackjack to force men to go to work. And it's
worth highlighting here the two pistols because rousters there's other rousters.
They're usually listed as carrying one. McLoud is carrying two.

(10:20):
Because the only reason to do that if you're in
this situation is if you're worried that you might find
yourself at the center of a mob of angry, sick
workers and need to kind of blast your way through
a bunch of people. Right, that's the only reason you
would need that for this job, which is basically just
like poking people in their bed and getting them up,
so kind of let you know the quality of dudes

(10:43):
who are doing this job.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
You made a mention that these are very replaceable workers
because there's a labor surplus, and this is something we
imaged the first episode. I really want to reiterate this context.
There are so many people out of work and so
many people desperate for work. Again, at a level of
abject poverty that we kind of don't have anymore in America, Like,

(11:07):
no matter how bad it gets, it doesn't get bad
like this was because again, they didn't have the infrastructure
back then. So the fact that it is so easy
that when somebody dies or somebody is incapacitated, that you
can drag them away and know that when you post
that job you will have one hundred guys or migrants
willing to come in and fill it. The value of

(11:30):
a human life drops blow zero because they're costing you
money for every minute they're not up and working. It's
that is the context that they know they can replace
these people, because it would be different if you were
talking about a core group of guys who have been
trained for months and had to do a job, and
then when one goes down, the productivity drops. Now you

(11:51):
have to be concerned, not at for humanitarian reasons, but
for productivity reasons, like if they're all sick, like we
got to fix this, We got to get them because
they're not working. It's not like that they're all so
interchangeable that when one of them drops, they can just
plug another one in.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah. Yeah, And that really is the core of like
why they're able to get away with a lot of this.
So there are reports that sick men were sometimes even
killed by rousters for refusing to leave. MacLeod and his
men were essentially immune to the consequences of whatever actions
they took. He had been deputized by the Sheriff of
Fayette County, so he's legally a law enforcement officer. This

(12:28):
like maniac who's like rolling into shacks full of dying
people with two handguns to like force them out, is
a cop at this point in time too. He's in
the pay directly of the Union Carbide Corporation. And McLoud
also runs a Saturday night saloon. It's illegal to drink
and gamble in this area at this point, but you know,

(12:49):
he's a cop, so he's able to get away with it.
And it was specifically a Saturday night saloon for black laborers.
So McLeod is kind of getting you know, when these
guys get out of work exault, they need something to
distract them. He runs this thing that takes their money
for booze and for gambling. And then when they're out
of work and they're sick, or when they're out of
money and they're sick. He'll make money kicking them out

(13:13):
of these shacks that they stay. And it's also when
he does this night saloon, most nights will end with
a raid and a mass arrest because he's. Part of
why he's allowed to do this is he's coordinating with
the sheriff of Fayette County and the sheriff of Fayett County.
When they arrest these guys for gambling and drinking, they
don't take them to jail. So that's good because that
would hurt Union Carbide, right, that would slow down production.

(13:34):
They find them all right, so they just take money
from them because they got caught drinking at this thing
that the police are basically helping to run. It's just
like these black labors are being so comprehensively mined while
they are mining. Right, That's one of the things that
is kind of worth acknowledging about how unjust this situation is.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
A corporate world, they call this synergy.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah, this is synergy.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
There's snitchs all possible angles to make sure that you're
maximizing the every possible dime you could squeeze from this
human being before they can no longer stand up.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
And again you couldn't do the sheriffa Fayette County wouldn't
do this to a workforce that was local, right because
number one, those are your voters, right, And number two,
that'll endanger you. Someone's got to kill you eventually for
doing that in town if you're doing that to your neighbors.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
Right.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
But these guys they're not from town. They're black, and
they're dying so quickly that there's very little institutional memory
that can protect them from scams like this, right, by
which I mean you get in there and maybe your
fellow workers have only been there for a couple of
weeks because people are turning over so quickly, so like
nobody really knows how much they're getting fucked with, so

(14:48):
there's not much warning to get There's not old timers
in a lot of cases, right, because they die so quickly.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Now.

Speaker 1 (14:55):
Cherniac is also careful to note that racism was experienced
by black ow workers, often at the hands of their
fellow victims, white tunnel workers who are also getting silicosis.
So you know that is a dimension here. Quote discipline
of blacks by whites is similarly recalled by a gully
Bridge man whose elder brother worked on the tunnel and
later died from silicosis. He described his brother as not

(15:19):
liking the and then he uses a slur, an attribute
which apparently served to qualify him as a foreman for
Ryan Harton Dennis. He routinely attended to his duties in
the tunnel armed with a baseball bat. And again he
was one of the guys. He's forcing these black laborers
forward into this dust cloud, but he is also entering
the dust cloud without protection. So that's a decent number
of the men who die are the guys who kind

(15:40):
of do this and don't realize that, like, as they
sign the death warrants of these other men, they're also
killing themselves.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
I realize that it sounds like we're making some sort
of a ham fisted metaphor that these guys don't realize
they're breathing the same they're all breathing the same poison
air that, like their race, convinces them that somehow they're
coming out on top, even though the bosses equally don't
care about their lives. Really, but it's not really a metaphor.
It's just a thing that's literally happening.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
In this case. It's just what's going down, Yeah, Joe,
it's yeah, cool stuff. Sometimes reality provides us with those moments.
I guess, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Do you think there would be a solidarity in those
tunnels with those white guys saying, hey, I now kind
of get it. I get it. I see we're on
the same team against the people who control the capital.
Maybe we should all join up together. It's like, no,
as long as I have my racism, I don't need
clean air.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, it is it. Really, there's a lot to dig
into here. This is part of the way I think
this is such a worthwhile moment and disaster for people
to know more about. Like, it really is important for
people to be aware of this history, and that's one
reason why. So Also, you know, if we're talking about
outside of the rate and the speed of silicosis here,

(17:04):
these are all things happening in other minds and industrial
construction projects around the country, right. The use of white
workers to do violence to black workers to force them
to labor. You know, these kind of like cops basically
hired by these companies to enforce their who take advantage
of them, rob them, beat them, kill them. All. All
of that is common in other projects. The difference here

(17:27):
is that at Hawk's Nest, they're doing it to men
who are dying in a matter of weeks, sometimes of
an easily preventable illness caused by the labor. Right, sixty
percent of the men who work in this tunnel last
less than two months. Eighty percent lasts less than six months.
Virtually everyone quits, dies or becomes too sick to work

(17:49):
in less than a year. You know, when we're talking
about these low skilled, unprotected workers, right, almost no one
makes it a year. Right again, sixty percent less than
two months. Now, a lot of those guys are leaving
because they're like, maybe they've got a little more options,
they've got some money, and they're like, well, this is
a death trap. I'm not going to stay here. But
a significant chunk of that sixty percent are getting sick

(18:10):
and eventually dying, you know, after just a couple of
weeks of labor. Absalom's son, Shirley, who we heard from
earlier from that poem, was one of the first to
fall ill before the company admitted any awareness to the
dangers of silicosis, and before the local medical community realized
what was happening. Her story lays out in horrifying detail,

(18:30):
how frustrating the process of trying to find any answer
could be quote, and this is Ruke Heiser kind of
quoting from her interview of this mother. When they took sick,
right at the start, I saw a doctor. I tried
to get doctor Harlest to x ray the boys. He
was the only man I had any confidence in the
company doctor in the Copper's mind. But he would not

(18:52):
see Shirley. He did not know where his money was
coming from. I promised him half if he'd worked to
get compensation, but even then he would not do anything.
I went on the road and begged x ray money.
The Charleston hospital made the lung pictures. He took the
case after the pictures were made. After two or three
doctors said the same thing. The youngest boy, Shirley did
not go down there with me. He lay and said, Mother,

(19:13):
when I die, I want you to have them open
me up and see if that dust killed me. Try
to get compensation. You will not have any way of
making your living when we are gone, and the rest
are going too. And what surely means by that is
her husband and all three of her sons are in
this mine, and as he gets sick. Shirley realizes we
are all dead. Mom's going to be alone. She'll have

(19:36):
no like the only hope of support is for us
to get compensation through some sort of lawsuit right for
our deaths, because we're already dead men. That's about as
bad as it gets already.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
I think there are some listeners out there who are
feeling a sense of dread because at the very top
of the first episode we mentioned how the death toll
from this disaster ranges from a couple hundred to two over
a thousand, and I think there are some people saying, well,
how can they not know? Like, you've got doctor visits,
You've got aren't there records? Aren't there records of who

(20:10):
joined the project and of what happened to those people.
We're going to get into that because the answer of
how you can lose hundreds of dead people, this is
something that you could do in the nineteen thirties. You
could not do now because everyone has tracked, everyone has papers,
everyone has a social security number, driver's license, on and
on and on. This was an era when that stuff

(20:32):
did not exist to a very large degree. This was
an era when if you wanted to leave and abandon
your family. You could just move like five miles down
the road and you just tell people you went by
a different name, and that's it, Like there was there's
esuchally as photo ID is. So you could just lose people.
And I do not think people appreciate the opportunities it

(20:55):
creates for everything from serial killers to industrial disasters, that
you could just pile people in a mass grave and
literally nobody knows what happened to them. Somewhere in another state,
in Virginia or Tennessee or North Carolina. You've got some
family and they know that this guy went off to
go take a job in West Virginia and he just

(21:17):
never came back. And you don't know if maybe he
just stayed there, maybe changed his name, maybe passed some
unrelated reason. Maybe he moved and now he lives in Montana.
You just didn't know.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah, And it's you know, it's it's it's particularly like
fucked up that like that story we told of Absalom
horrible because she's a local, because she lives, she's part
of a community, she has some stability. She's going to
be able to like sue and stuff like that. That
is how this gets out like when this becomes known,

(21:50):
when there start to be news articles about it, when
there's investigations. It's because of the fairly small minority of
locals who lose family members. These black were are like
you said, they don't exist once they reach the mind right,
like they die, and you as we'll talk about like
you can kind of make them disappear so that there's

(22:10):
not going to be any kind of like justice for
most of these guys. Their families never find out what's happening.
Now when it comes to the rate at which sort
of it becomes obvious what's making these people sick, there
is that mortician who finds out earlier that doesn't get
out very far past. Like executives at the company, Ryan
Hart and Dennis employed two physicians in order to like

(22:31):
watch over the workforce, take care of people who get
sick and injured, and both men primarily existed to deny
sick workers that their ailments had anything to do with
the tunnel project. They would usually say it was pneumonia
or some other communicable disease. They would tell people to
keep working. They would tell them that they did not
need any protective gear, and then they would give them pills.

(22:52):
These two guys, doctor Simmons and doctor Mitchell, their primary
path like method whenever someone comes in with silicosis is
to give them and these pills called little black devils,
these little black pills that are just their placebos. It's
baking soda covered in sugar. Like they know that they're
not giving people real medicine. It's a delaying tactic. And
another thing you have to realize when it's like, how

(23:14):
did this they get away with this? This is all
taking place pretty much in a year or so, right,
eighteen months for some of the work, I think, but
it happens very quickly. So both Union Carbide and Ryan
Hart and Dennis know all we got to do is
push through to the completion line and then our lawyers
can handle the fallout. Right, So give these guys some
fake medicine. Maybe that'll keep them at Bay another couple

(23:37):
of months. A lot so many of them will die
that then we won't have to deal with those guys.
And like, every week we can put this off gets
us closer to the finish line.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
There's also you know a decent amount of ignorance basically
among the local medical community, and it's not because they
don't know about silicosis. As I said, this is a
really well known illness, but it normally takes years, even
decades for people to get black lung of this severity.
No one has mined silica this peer and this quantity before,

(24:09):
Like it's pretty much unprecedented. I don't think there were
really any minds of this size dealing with this quantity
of pure silica. So there there are doctors who know
about silica who are not you know, unethical men, but
they're just seeing how much this is. This is hitting people,
killing them, you know, three four, five hundred percent faster

(24:31):
than they're used to. So they don't they don't necessarily
know that. They're like I have, I don't. Maybe this
is something different, right, Maybe this is some new virus
that's sweeping through town. So there is among some of
the medical professionals who are trying to puzzle this out,
there is reason to be consumed concerned, right, But within
the company doctors, there's there's evidence that the company has
access to that makes it much clearer what's happening, and

(24:54):
that would have made it clearer to everyone earlier on
that they delect, like deliberately keep away from people, right,
So yeah, further evidence for this comes from the fact
that company policies on stuff like wetting the drills would
change depending on whether or not government observers were in
town to monitor the work. Right when people start dying,
the government sends in teams to like monitor, and so

(25:17):
Ryan Hart and Dennis will say, Okay, everybody, today, we're
going to wet down the drills and we're going to
wait two hours after blasting to send new teams in.
And then when the government observers leave, they go right
back to the old procedures that are much faster and
much more dangerous.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
You know.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
Again, you can't just like regulate by having a guy
come by once to check something like this. That's easy
to deal with.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
There's Yeah, there's a very much things worked on the
honor system in that era. Like there may have been
a perfunctory check or whatever, but if they had really
wanted to make sure they were, you know, abiding by
the rules, there's ways you can do it. You can
plan somebody there for a week, like you know, make them,

(26:02):
make them do it the whole time you're there, and
pay attention to do They seem to have respirators for
everyone because the inspectors wore them, is my understanding. When
they showed up to take a look, they did not
go in that mind without breathing equipments like what are
you nuts?

Speaker 1 (26:16):
Yeah, yep, so yeah. It seems safe to say that
Union Carbide deliberately avoided acquiring information that would have forced
them to improve safety practices and thus slow production. The
American Society of Safety Professionals their analysis, notes Union Carbide
had taken core samples along the course of the proposed
tunnel before construction began, and knew the rock was extremely

(26:40):
high in silica. Despite the generally well understood relationship between
exposure to airborne silica and death by silicosis, neither Union Carbide,
New Canawa Power, nor Rhin Harton Dennis ever measured dust
levels in the tunnel. Rhine Harton Dennis only conducted two
tests for carbon monoxide during the seventeen month duration of
the dig. A proven technology existed to measure clouds of dust.

(27:01):
The impinger was developed in nineteen sixteen by the US
Public Health Service. Impingers, also known as bubblers or small bottles,
used with an air pump to collect airborne contaminants into
designated collection liquids for later laboratory analysis. So they again
this is not don't just because this is ancient. They
have the ability to test and know their silica in
the air. It is standard on mines. But this isn't

(27:23):
a mine, even though they're mining, it's not a mine.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
But also it's it's absurd because the idea of saying that, well,
we never got a chance to bring the instruments in
to see if the air was bad. That would be
like a house fire, and like, well, I never put it.
I never took up therrometer in there. See It's like, well, okay,
it was not there was no visibility in the tunnel
for the dust. Yeah, So like that, even that's not
an excuse. I get what they're saying is ludicrous.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
Yeah, it's it's it's obscene. And what's also obscene are
the low low prices our advertisers have or their product. Ah,
we're back back from that glorious pivot. So as the
death toll starts to accelerate, which happens again that first

(28:09):
start dying after two months. By the six month point,
a lot of people are getting sick and dying, and
Ryan Hart and Dennis find themselves with a new logistical problem,
what do we do with all these corpses? Right, white
workers could be buried in local cemeteries pretty easily, especially
local workers who died, but most of the workers dying
are black laborers, and these white you know, the cemeteries

(28:32):
in town are whites only establishments. Right, They're so racist
that it's like, well, we're not going to let black
people into our cemetery. So at first, the majority of
these black tunnel workers who have died are are sent
to like a local cemetery. Specifically, it's an old local
slave cemetery, right, Like that's literally where they are burying
these men. Records suggest that only ten of the black

(28:55):
of the hundreds of black laborers who die on this
project are shipped back to their homes after death. So
the vast majority of these guys, to all their family knows,
just disappear forever. This leaves hundreds, you know, the fact
that you fit I think a couple one hundred in
the slave cemetery, but there's still a lot more people
who are dying. So rhin Hart and Dennis, you know,
they've got the resources obviously to transport all these buckets

(29:18):
of silica, but they don't want to use their own resort.
They don't want to like deal with the dead people
that they're creating themselves, So they have Union Carbide pay
contractors to deal with all of the dead people. And
the contractor that they hire is a local undertaker named
Hadley White. They pay him fifty five dollars for each
body he will take out of their hands and bury. Now,

(29:41):
Hadley is running the same calculation as every other unethical
contractor and company in this. They're paying him to bury
people in theoretically in coffins in a cemetery, and he's like,
you know, it's cheaper than a coffin is throwing people
in a bag and putting them in a mass grave.
That's much less expensive, right, So Hadley is going to

(30:02):
transfer pretty rapidly from burying people the way that he's
being paid to to you know, doing a mass grave
kind of situation. So once they run out of room
at that old slave cemetery behind the church where the
behind a local church where his company is located, he
starts driving the corpses forty miles away. He will just
stack them. It's often described as being stacked like cordwood,

(30:24):
like firewood. In the back of a truck, like just
this kind of like wrap stuffed in the clothes that
they died, and stuffed into canvas bags and thrown into
a mass grave in Somersville out of you know, within
hours of dying, right, like just kind of taken immediately
off the line, or you know, in their beds where
they pass thrown into a bag, stuck in a truck

(30:47):
and then tossed into a mass grave again within hours
in a lot of cases. In the Book of the Dead,
Rukaiser cites the testimony of a worker named George Robinson
on this matter, quote, I knew a man who died
at four in the morning at the camp. At seven,
his wife took clothes to dress her dead husband. At
the end at the undertakers, they told her the husband
was already buried.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
So like.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
That's you know, how they're treating It's just like trash, right,
that's how they're treating these these people Like we're not
even going to wait for their loved ones to you know,
have any sort of like when they have loved ones, Like,
we don't even care to know if there's anyone who
like will want to do a funeral. We're just going
to toss them in a mass grave and sorry, your
husband's gone already.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
You know, maybe what I'm about to say is obvious,
But this was not that long ago.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Now there's people alive from then.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
Still, there are people alive from they're very old, but
there were people that were born in this Sarah that
are still alive. This was We are talking about this
like it is another planet that something like this could happen,
and could happen in public, in broad daylight. And that
mostly to the indifference of all the local officials and
everyone around there living there, because at this point a

(32:07):
lot of people got to know. You have a lot
of dead people. Now, a lot of those bodies have
passed through a lot of hands. A lot of people know,
and this is just the kind of thing that happens
at this time and in this place. And it is
not that long ago. It's one long lifetime ago.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
Yeah, if you want an idea of like how recent
this is, this is all happening about five years before
Hunter S. Thompson is born, Right, He's not a figure
from the distant past, you know, Like this is like, yeah,
I think that is important, Like how how kind of
directly connected this is to us. You know, it's like

(32:48):
treating people this way does not seem like a kind
of thing you would get away with. But there's not
a lot separating us from a period of time in
which people were getting away with this directly, just kind
of literally treating these people like like a fucking sprocket
or something that breaks in a machine and he just
toss in the trash. You will not be surprised to

(33:10):
hear that. The exact number of workers who die this
way is unclear. About three hundred certainly are buried by
Hadley White, maybe significantly more, we don't know. It might
have been a couple one hundred more than that. More
lingered on sick in the town of Gawley Mountain, or
they either had to rely on the family members or

(33:30):
the kindness of strangers. So many pale, gasping men spent
their last years shambling around Golly That acquired a new
nickname among locals, the town of the living dead. That's
like what they would call this place because of all
of the fucking black lung sufferers. No effort was made
to inform the family of dead migrant workers, and this

(33:50):
is shown well by the story of Dewey Flack. Dewey
was a seventeen or eighteen year old black man who
left his home in North Carolina on a one way
train ticket to West Virginia Yea. The last his family
saw him, he promised to send back the money he
made to help them. Quote from an article in NPR,
Flak died on May twentieth, nineteen thirty one, two weeks
after his last shift in the tunnel. His death certificate

(34:13):
said he died of pneumonia, but according to Cherniac, company
doctors often misdiagnosed workers' deaths or attributed them to a
disease they called tunnel ititis. The company would later use
those death certificates to prove there were few, if any,
silicosis deaths in the tunnel. NPR did find one relative,
Sheila Flack Jones of Charlotte, North Carolina, who was Dewey
Flack's niece. My father mentioned when I was younger that

(34:35):
he did have a brother, but the brother he thought
he'd run away, Black Jones says of learning her uncle's fate.
I'm heartbroken that my family died thinking that he had
run away, and they never knew the real truth. And
I think that Dewey's death here kind of stands in
for hundreds of these black migrant labors. You know, you
tell your family you're going. I'll send back money, you know,

(34:55):
I'll try to set up a place, you know, get
money so we can move to this northern town, and
ever hear from your husband, your son, your nephew, ever again,
Like that's the reality for a lot of these people.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
What was the specific year you just mentioned there.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
I believe he's nineteen thirty one. Yeah, May twentieth, nineteen
thirty one.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
That's the year William Shatner was born, right, right, So
Clint Eastwood was one year old by the time this happened. Again,
they they lived long enough to see a world where
this happened. I brought up this thing about this not
being that long because I knew that thing about the town,
this village of the walking Dead was coming, because that,
to me, is the most nightmarish part of this, because

(35:35):
eventually you had these people in no place to go. Yeah,
they couldn't afford to travel, they were kicked off the
job site, they couldn't work, and so they were just
sent back to this town. As town started to become
overwhelmed of these people who were just walking around drowning
in the air, like they can't gasping for breath, and
they're getting sicker and just kind of shambling around this town.

(35:56):
And you have dozens or hundreds of them, we don't
know how many. They just had nowhere to go and
they're human beings and there's no support system. There's no
support system. I don't know how to convey that to people,
like they had no one to go to for help.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, it's hard to imagine a situation that, like anything
worse than that, right, Like that's as desperate as it
fucking gets. So disinformation about the causes of the illness
and the demographic realities of the workforce delayed the coalescence
of any sort of effective resistance to what was happening
by workers. The first public warnings about what was happening

(36:37):
came courtesy of the local radical press. And we're talking
unions off and run newspapers here, so some of this
is coming out through that. And there's like socialist papers
in the area, and these are the first people to
start reporting on this sickness sweeping through the camps. As
one of these papers, this is like a very new
deal supporting like left wing paper The State Sentinel warned,

(36:57):
quote strange and weird tales are a concerning the number
of fatalities. They are said to number four a week.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
Now.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
Radical papers kind of different in how radical they were.
In the case of the State Sentinel, they do note
later on that they were sure Union Carbide was in
a sense of any wrongdoing because Ryan Harton Dennis had
been contracted to handle the actual construction. It's worth noting
people that's not necessarily them trying to protect Union Carbide
at this stage. These random little papers you don't know

(37:27):
necessarily the relationship between these two companies. It becomes obvious
later that Union Carbide has engineers who are their employees
on scene, they are directing rehin harton Dennis, they are
in charge of the project, right, But that's not really
known necessarily to all these papers at the time. So
I don't think it's really anything against them. It's worth
noting it is through these little radical presses that like,

(37:49):
that's where this story gets out to start. It will
eventually be picked up by kind of larger news organs.
Lawsuits start to fly, and from mid to late nineteen
thirty two. This is late in the construction process, more
than eighty separate claims are filed from workers seeking compensation
for silicosis. Cases start winding their way up rapidly to

(38:09):
the state Supreme Court. There's a case there. They rule
on it and it opens. The ruling that the Supreme
Court gives basically is that you can sue rhine Hart
and Dennis for your silicosis. Right. So after this, this
kind of opens the floodgates and this ocean of new
claims start to flood in several hundred, eventually totaling two
point seven two five million dollars in damages is what

(38:33):
they're requesting. That's a lot more money. Back then, rehin
Hart and Dennis file injunction. After injunction, they're trying to delay,
and this is they know they're going to have to
make some sort of payout right. They know they can't
avoid this. This was kind of always in their calculations,
but injunctions delay sort of the start of that process,
and it allows them to Again, the whole goal is

(38:54):
as long as we finish ahead of schedule, we get
enough extra money to make this worthwhile, right, So that's
what they're doing. Union Carbide also starts hiring rein Hart
and Davis executives away from the contractor, right, and these
guys are still doing the job they were doing from
rein Hart and Davis. They're just Union Carbide employees now.
And the reason that Union Carbide is doing this is

(39:17):
that when you have these guys in house, you have
legal excuses to talk them through and direct their court
because you shouldn't be directing their responses to their court case.
But once you bring them on, you have all these
sort of excuses to talk to them. You can have
your lawyers represent them. It's just another way to kind
of protect the bag, right, And it's more evidence of
how closely tied these companies really are. So yeah, there's

(39:40):
also significant evidence that they bribe government officials. Union Carbide
does in order to try and delay the start of
any kind of like accountability. After this first wave of
lawsuits hits, the Department of Minds sins in an inspector,
a guy named Robert Lamby to investigate conditions at the
tunnel complex and particularly the death of black workers. Lamby

(40:02):
carries out a full inspection and he's pretty critical of
the mind There's like a lot of people see him.
He's yelling at a company for men about how unacceptable
this is. He's like, it seems for a little bit
like oh, the government sent a man. He's seen how
bad this is, and something's going to get done. And
you know, he does act. Initially, he sends a letter
to an executive at the New Kanawa Power Company, which

(40:23):
is again remember that's Union Carbide, and he lays out
like this is dangerous. All you need to do all
this stuff to make it safer, you have to start
issuing respirators to your men. He orders them. This is
a government official ordering New Canawa to put respirators on workers,
and New Canawa just says, now, we're not going to
do that. They ignore it, and they continue sending unmasked

(40:44):
workers into the tunnel. Now this should be pretty damning
for what happens in court. But two years later, you know,
after Lamby gets there, and after some five hundred lawsuits
from survivors are kind of churning their way through the
legal process, Lamby gets called into court and you would
expect him to be a pretty devastating testimony on behalf

(41:04):
of these miners. I told them to give respirators to
these guys, and they did not write. But he behaves
very differently once he's in a court room, as Cherniac writes.
Testifying on behalf of Ryan Hart and Dennis for a
whole day on tenth of April nineteen thirty three, he
described exemplary conditions in the tunnel, where air was supplied
at a face velocity of twenty seven miles per hour,

(41:26):
visibility was to f from five to seven hundred feet,
and water was constantly used to suppress dust. Vigorously cross
examined about the extreme inconsistencies between this testimony and his
earlier condemnatory letters, which had been read into the court
record by the attorney for Raymond Johnson, that's the miner
in this case two weeks earlier. Lamby blamed an accurate
information supplied by his staff. Although he conceded that he

(41:48):
had ordered respirators in writing, he said that he had
later countermanded this order orally when he better appreciated the
excellent working conditions and clearness of the air in the tunnel.
Two of Lambie's staff inspectors, who had originally filed highly
critical reports, now shared in their director's change of heart.
Testifying on The following day, C. B. Bishop and D. R.
Sullivan joined him in tribute to the admirable conditions at

(42:09):
Hawk's Nest. They indicated that Ryan, Hart and Dennis had
always cooperated fully and repeated Lamby's praise of the freedom
from dust and wet drilling. They described the reports they
had made in nineteen thirty one as purely precautionary and
unrelated to actual conditions. Lamby's startling about face was never
explained to everyone's satisfaction. Less than a week after his testimony, however,

(42:30):
the Charleston Gazette reported a remarkable coincidence. The former director
of the West Virginia Department of Mines had just opened
his doors to the prestigious Canawa Valley Building in the
capital city as a private consultant to the leading mining
and industrial corporations of the state.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Now, fortunately, that kind of revolving door is long in
the past. Like that's the kind of thing that today
would be outrageous to even.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
And you know, as an aside, don't look up people
who have been a poor pointed in the last twenty
years to had regulatory agencies and what they did after
the period of time at which they headed those agencies.
Don't go Google in that because there's nothing to find, right,
that never.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Occurring to your results.

Speaker 1 (43:13):
Yeah, serier results. So yeah, construction on the Hawk's Nest
tunnel was completed by nineteen thirty two. This is about
twice as fast, a little less than twice as fast
as had been initially expected. So that's a lot of
extra money for rehin harten Davis. By all accounts, it
was a marvel of engineering and craftsmanship. It is still
in works today. It's considered an exemplary I forgot how

(43:36):
to pronounce a word I've known since I was a
small child for just a second. There. It's considered to
be an exemplary piece of construction, and Union Carbides shareholders
make a fortune the equivalent of many billions of dollars
in modern money from the subsequent projects that this enables.
For the families of the men who die, though, money
is a lot harder to find. And we're going to

(43:57):
talk about that, but first maybe an ad product service
or too, you know. Yeah, and we're back. So for
the families of these guys who died, money is going
to be a lot scarcer than it is for the
executives who will spend the rest of their lives and

(44:18):
their grandchildren's lives profiting off of this project. There are
two massive state trials in nineteen thirty three and nineteen
thirty four, but only a fraction of the requested damages
or ever paid out in settlements, about two hundred thousand dollars.
And I should note here the amount of money awarded
to black laborers for the same ailments as white labors.
It's about half. I think individual awards are anywhere from

(44:41):
thirty dollars to sixteen hundred dollars, which is minimal, I
would say. But Union Carbide executives still complained was ruinous
to them. They described sick workers as mooches seeking to
get rich out of frivolous lawsuits. The West Virginia Encyclopedia
notes of this case, the largest trial ended with a
hung jury, evidence of jury tampering, and generous compensation to

(45:03):
the plaintiff's attorneys. It's you know, this is corrupt as hell.
This whole thing is just pretty fucked. That said, the
story does not go away, and over time, you know,
it starts in these radical papers, but it starts to
get coverage from like large from like the New York
Times and shit, like their big journalists start to cover this,

(45:24):
it becomes kind of a cause celeb among a lot
of the left. For I think there's you know, a
period of a couple of months or so where like
this is sort of the big thing if you're like
a Northeast liberal elite to be really angry about. And
I'm not saying that to be like, you should be
angry about this, and because of how angry people get
about in nineteen thirty six, which is kind of five

(45:45):
years after the first men start dying, and thirty five
thirty six is really when sort of the media attention
around this starts to starts to hit critical mass. The
House of Representatives holds their first inquiry into the Hawk's
Nest Tunnel disaster. NPR rights vote. Representatives from the tunnel
companies declined to attend. One submitted a letter that called
witness testimonies slanderous rumors and hearsay. We know of no

(46:08):
case of silicosis contracted on this job, the letter concluded.
The Congressional committee said the tunnel was completed with grave
and inhuman disregard for all consideration for the health, lives
and future of employees. Congress took no action against the companies,
but that same year it passed a law requiring the
use of respirators in dusty working conditions. So they don't

(46:29):
penalize anyone. But this is where we get the legal requirement.
It's no longer an option. You have to give respirators
to your guys if they're working in the dust. So
it took a lot of death, but we got a
single regulation, hooray.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
And most regulations that we have in workplace protections.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Yea.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
There is somewhere at the bottom of it are bones
and ash and of dead people who died in order
to It would be grotesque to say they sacrificed themselves
so that we have these regulations, because they did not
do that. They were trying to.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
Work so that they wanted to make rent.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
Yeah yeah, and and not to get rich either. They
were taking the only work that was available. But you
know that, and then that's one good thing. And then
of course knowing that Union Carbide was surely ruined as
a company and does not Yeah, it never did not
exist after that because as they mentioned, these payouts, you know,

(47:27):
of course they could not afford it financially. Must have
crippled them permanently. They probably had to sell off all
of their factories, all of their real estate, all their machines.
Probably they had to sell them all just to pay
off these ruinous thirty and forty dollars payouts.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
That's why the town of Bopaul, India has a reputation
for being the least polluted town in India and the
town motto twenty thousand of us didn't die and an
industrial accident costs by union garbide great place to go
visit check it out. So, speaking of death toll, which
we're obviously talking around, it's kind of hard to determine.

(48:04):
The Congressional Inquiry estimates a little short of five hundred,
four hundred and sixty four deaths that they estimate cherny acts.
So the two books I read for this are Murial
Rakaiser's The Book of the Dead and then The Hawk's
Nest Tunnel Disaster by this guy Cherniac, who is He's
not just a journalist or a writer, he's actually an epidemiologist.
So when he makes a death toll estimate, this is

(48:25):
not just some like reporter interviewing people and kind of
making a guest This is a guy whose professional job
is to try to calculate this sort of thing. So
I give, I lend a lot of credibility to cherny
Act's estimate. He suspects somewhere north of seven hundred and
fifty people died as a direct result of silicosis from
this tunnel. There are some more modern estimates that will

(48:46):
suggest an overall death toll. The highest I've seen is
about two thousand, right, Because people take a long time
to die, it can be kind of hard, especially as
undocumented as a lot of these dudes are. But between
seven hundred and fifty and two thousand dead is what
we're looking looking at for the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster,
which is you know, again that's in access of the
Chernobyle death toll. You know, that's a lot of fucking people.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
This was. Yeah, even with modern record keeping and computers
and everything in databases, it's extremely difficult to for example,
with the you know, the COVID pandemic and the death
ranges worldwide are swinging wildly because you have a case
where if someone got very sick and they got over

(49:29):
and then two years later they got pneumonia, that killed
them because there's weak their lungs had been so weakened
by the COVID that they had recovered from. It's like, well,
do you count that as a COVID death or not?
And here I think it's kind of the same thing
where if you had someone who's lung capacity was damaged
by eighty percent due to the you know from this mind,
and then three years later they got you know whatever

(49:53):
pneumonia or something that that finally put them away, well
there's no way that's going to get recorded as a death.
But it absolutely was like this person, it doesn't die
without the damage. It's just that if they didn't die
on site and then have me buried nearby, if there's
not a grave you can find. It's so hard to

(50:14):
know because again, somebody could have went off and then
died in nineteen thirty eight living in some rural part
of Montana and to even their family would not necessarily realize.
They just knew that they were very frail ever since
they took that mining job. So yeah, the amount of
investigative work it probably took just to arrive that number
is probably extraordinary, just trying to track down just all

(50:38):
of the old documents and the movement of these people
and then trying to figure out where they eventually wound up.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Yeah, I mean it's a cherniac puts in. I mean,
his book is remarkable. It's both very readable and like
a very kind of scientific forensic analysis. Whereas Rukeiser number one,
it's kind of actually we're about to talk about her.
It's a very direct source and a little more emotional.
I think both together give you a pretty comprehensive understanding
of what happened here. And I did think it's worth

(51:06):
talking a little bit more about Muriel Rukaiser because there's
a lot, there's a lot to say about our country
and her specific story here. Muriel is one of the
first people outside of the Galley Bridge area to learn
what was going on. At twenty three, she was a
budding author and journalist and an avid leftist. She learned

(51:26):
about the disaster from radical publications at the time. In
nineteen thirty five, when one of these magazines puts out
an article about Hawk's Nest, it goes viral among kind
of the New York intelligencia set and becomes this, as
I said, this kind of big cause celeb for the
while and for most people it's a thing, you know,
maybe you'll do a little march or something on it,
you'll try to raise some money, and then kind of
it goes away and you move on to the next thing.

(51:48):
Rukeaiser never does. And you know, she watches this congressional inquiry,
and the Congressional inquiry when it ends, it's pretty it
condemns Union Carbide, and it says we should have a
full federal investigation. But they never do it. There's never
any official, full federal investigation into this disaster. And Muriel

(52:08):
is she's not just furious about that. She's the kind
of person who is like, she's angry and she's gonna
fucking do something about this. And so she drives down
to gally Bridge with a friend to investigate on her own.
She kind of takes this like road trip, one of
our country's first great road trip stories. You could say.
Now at this point, Muriel's not a nobody. She is

(52:29):
already a celebrated poet for her first book, Theory of Flight,
which had won a Yale Younger Poets Prize, and the
Book of the Dead is kind of based on this
road trip she takes through Fayette County and all of
these people that she talks to. It's this very remarkable
synthesis of gumshoe reporting and high art. It's worth noting

(52:50):
that much of what we know about ru Keiser's life
and why she did all this comes not from anything
she wrote, but from the FBI. J ed Grew Hoover's
civically gives orders for this woman to be followed and
I'm going to quit from an article in the Oxford American.
Here in nineteen forty three, j Edgar Hoover authorized his
agency to spy on the poet as part of a

(53:11):
probe to uncover Russian spies. Her communistic tendencies placed her
under suspicion of being a concealed Communist. When the investigation began,
she was noted as thirty dark, heavy with gray eyes.
In nineteen thirty three, the report reads, she and some
friends drove from New York to Alabama to witness the
Scottsborough trial. When local police found them talking to black
reporters and holding flyers for a Negro student conference. The

(53:34):
police accused the group of inciting the Negroes to insurrections. Then,
in the summer of nineteen thirty six, after her trip
to Galli Bridge. Rukaiser traveled to Spain to report on
Barcelona's anti fascist People's Olympiad. In the process, she observed
the first days of the Spanish Civil War from a
train before evacuating by ship. Her suspicious activities in the
nineteen fifties included her appeal for world peace and her

(53:55):
civil rights zeal. The FBI mentions The Book of the
Dead only once, in passing as a work that dealt
with the industrial disintegration of the peoples in a West
Virginia village riddled with silicosis. I find a lot interesting there.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
And it's hard to overstate the degree to which anti
communist stuff was really just anti labor stuff, because if
you were any kind of like, you didn't have to
be that much of a radical to be frank, before
they would start looking at you as like, well, you've
got communist ties, you got socialist ties. You sat in
on this meeting, and in this meeting were some communists,

(54:30):
and it's like, well, yeah, because there's overlapping. There's overlap
between activistsho are trying to, you know, pushing for better
labor rights and everything else and people who wanted to
take it Further so, a lot of the persecution of
communists was really just people that had spoke out on
behalf of labor. It became a very convenient thing for

(54:51):
people to do.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
And I also find one of the other things I
find interesting here is like just kind of the disinterest
with which her report sums up the Book of the
Dead and the disaster that it's reporting on, right, because
I think that's obviously the FBI is concerned in other
stuff here, But like, I do think that kind of
disinterest you see there is emblematic of the overall attitude

(55:15):
the federal government has to what happened here, right, And
it's worth noting like there are not like all of
the people killed by anarchist bombers or whatever in this period,
and fuck throw in bank robbers there too, right, which
is another thing the FBI deals with, do not equal
the death toll of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (55:34):
This is a much bigger danger to American citizens by
any rate than like, I don't know, the fucking gangster
robbing banks and shit in this period.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
Well, nobils to do the math during Prohibition, the total
number of people killed by say al Capone's gain it
wasn't a thousand.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
Yeah, of course, No, you can't make a business doing
that like I guess the cartels do. But it's a
different era.

Speaker 2 (55:59):
Yeah, the way we treat different types of crime and
the way one thing is like a crisis that we
need to completely overturn the entire system to address, versus this,
where the amount of disinterest is kind of shocking, like
even to this day, like the memorials for this, it's

(56:19):
just such an afterthought. The combination between the suffering that
was caused the number of people to suffer versus the
reaction to it is just so out of whack. It's
so crazy the things that we choose to be frightened of.

Speaker 1 (56:37):
Yeah, it really is so. One of the articles that
I came across in my research was a twenty eighteen
in PR Frontline investigation. This was not about the Hawk's
Nest Tunnel disaster, but was analyzing decades of regulatory data
from dust collection monitors in coal mines modern coal mines

(56:57):
operating today, and they found evidence that government regulators have
had half for the last fifty years. Basically, there has
been hard evidence that silica exposure in about fifteen percent
of US minds vastly exceeded safe levels. This means that
regulators had evidence that a significant number of workers were
in unsafe conditions where they would get sick and die,

(57:20):
and that our regulators failed to step in and demand
direct steps be taken to mitigate this danger. Celeste Montfornton
weird last name Celest Montfornton, who is a former MIND
safety regulator under Clinton, said this, we failed. Had we
taken action at this time, I really believe we would
not be seeing the disease we're saying now. And what

(57:41):
he's talking about is what the National Institute for Occupational
Health and Safety has described as an epidemic of silicosis
among miners today. This is happening right now as we
as we say this, unless you're listening hundreds of years
in the future, it's yeah. One of these epidemiologist Scott
Lany is quoted as saying, we're counting thousands of cases,

(58:03):
thousands and thousands and thousands of black lung cases, thousands
of cases of the most severe form of black lung,
and we're not done counting yet. One culprit of all this,
one reason this is happening, is that the best and
biggest coal seams were all mined out generations ago, so
modern coal miners are often drilling thinner seams that are
laced with sandstone, and sandstone has a high and elevated

(58:24):
silica content. Not as high as what they were removing
from the Hawk's nest tunnel, but elevated, and that means
people get sicker faster, NPR writes quote. The NPR Frontline
investigation found thousands of instances in which miners were exposed
not just to col dust, but to dangerous levels of
toxic silica dust. The Federal Mind Safety and Health Administrations
own data chronicles twenty one thousand instances of excessive exposure

(58:47):
to silica since nineteen eighty six. At the same time,
NPR identified black lung diagnoses involving miners in their thirties
who also experienced rapid progression to the advanced stage. Smith
says he was diagnosed at nine. NIOSHA has confirm this
trend in its studies. I don't have an exact death
toll for you. Now. Obviously there are more things to
keep people alive, you know. Now, as Jason keeps saying,

(59:10):
there's a lot more these people are. This is a
bad situation. It's terrifying, but they do have like much
more in the way of support than the folks suffering
a hawk's nest. But we are talking thousands and thousands
and thousands of cases of people dealing with black lung
right now that they didn't need to be dealing with that.
The technology existed warning the situation was unsafe, and they

(59:32):
were not given the proper equipment. Air circulation systems were
not installed, mitigation efforts weren't taken because it would have
cut down on the profits of the mining company. You know,
that is still happening today. I will say one thing
that's good is that there have been some lawsuits, particularly
against One of the issues here is that like a

(59:52):
lot of dust masks issued to miners were found not
to work the company's figure. I think what happened is
that some of the masks suppliers just assumed, well, our
air circulation shit, the mitigation stuff is so good, nobody's
going to know if we kind of cheap out making
these masks, these safety masks. And a huge number of
miners have actually sued several masks suppliers, filing product liability lawsuits,

(01:00:17):
and there have been a like multi billion dollar verdicts
in this. So one of the good things is that
there is much more of a protective apparatus. I shouldn't
say protective, because it didn't protect these guys they got sick.
But there's more of a I guess, apparatus of vengeance
to where this is not. You know, when you're talking
a multi billion dollar lawsuit, you are talking about something

(01:00:38):
that significantly more of an issue for these companies to
deal with than the kind of money that Union Carbide
had to pay out. So I'm not gonna say you
should take too much be too happy about that, because
again it's still fucking happened. But I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
That's what I have to say.

Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
One thing that is very that has not change since
those days, has not changed the last couple hundred years.
Our entire civilization exists because of mining. Everything you have
change from a mine. Everything runs on mines. Everything in
your phone came from a mine, everything in your PC,

(01:01:17):
everything in this microphone. I'm talking into everything in this chair,
I'm sitting on all of the metals, all of the steel, everything,
all of the silica. Everything came from a mine. And
I don't think on it today. Basis we appreciate this
that if the miners went away, all of this stops
all of it, because you can't you can't walk two

(01:01:37):
feet without walking on something that came out of a mine.
The green energy revolution that we all want with the
solar panels and whatever nuclear power plants or fusion plants,
or when all of that stuff, the windmills, all of
that stuff came out of a mine.

Speaker 1 (01:01:56):
Yeah. And the degree to which these are yeah, just
disposable people still, I think that's kind of important to
note that, like the disposability of the folks who make
every aspect of society possible is uh. I mean, I
would say it hasn't changed, but it's they're not not

(01:02:18):
disposable still. And by the way, I should also highlight
here we're talking about the miner when we say miners
are what makes the world possible. When it comes to
like the shit mind in your computers, that's not some
like hard work and you know man with the fucking
creases on his face and whatnot and a big old
helmet and the light working in like West Virginia, that's
like an eleven year old in Central Africa. Mining mirror

(01:02:41):
rare earth minerals to a significant extent. Right, This is
one of the problems with the production of smartphones and
computers and stuff is that, like it, there's basically inevitable
that there will be human trafficking at some stage of
that because some of the critical environment, like ingredients to
these machines are only mined through means that are illegal internationally. Right,

(01:03:03):
It's just one of those things where there's so many
layers of separation and shit that like you can get
away kind of with Nobody wants to talk about where
the cobalt comes from or whatever the fuck, Like this
is just the way it is, and that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Will always be dirty work. It will always be dangerous work,
and we are so disconnected from it, especially people like me,
even people who are very progressive. But we work office
jobs and we send our emails and we sit at
our laptops and really do not think of where that
stuff inside the microprocesses came from, because at the end
of it is a very dirty mine in a very

(01:03:40):
dark place and someone working very hard, probably in pain.
Like you can technology until you have a mind that's
entirely run by robots, but even then, the stuff that
the robots are made of will have come from a
mind like at the base of everything we do, no
matter how high minded and sophisticated. When we land a

(01:04:01):
robot on Mars, that robot is made out of materials
that came from a mine. Like there's somebody in whatever
West Virginia or Africa or somewhere that dug it up
out of the ground and put it at a cart
and shipped it across the world. Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
And I guess that's a good place to end, Jason,
you want to plug your book.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Well, just one final there's one kind of post mortem.
The Union Carbide Company. Of course, now as of I
try to look them up and see when they went
out of business. It turns out that in twenty nineteen
they had four point four billion dollars in revenue. Great,
but they have now been they've now been swallowed up

(01:04:46):
by the Dal Chemical Company, a small company, a family
owned operation that it has a market cap of thirty
six billion dollars I believe, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:55):
And is not involved in anything horrifying in history. Don't
look at don't google down chemical Vietnam right like, there's
no reason to do that whatsoever.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
We are a very forgiving society. Don't you see when
people reform themselves as long as you are a gigantic corporation,
it's all about second chances in America. Yeah, we're willing
to let you turn your life around. Yeah, anyway, yes,
thank you. If you want to find me on TikTok,

(01:05:29):
I am Jason K. Pargan. We have repeatedly made jokes
about me being reduced to a TikTok person. I have
three hundred and thirty thousand followers on there. I'm primarily
a TikToker. The author stuff is now just a trivial
footnote in my biography. My gravestone will say he was

(01:05:49):
a beloved tich talker and.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
Prominent talker, prominent TikToker.

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
I'm Jason K. Pargan on TikTok. Also that same thing
on Twitter, SAH. Also the same thing on Blue Guy
and threads and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and some
others that I don't remember to update because there's too
many substack, all of them, all of them. Jason K.
Pargin P A R G. I N thank you. You know.

(01:06:17):
I do.

Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
We shit talk TikTok a lot us olds, but I
will say it's actually kind of helpful that that's how
you initially learned. It's kind of hopeful that that is
how you found out about this because this is like
so important, right, this is like critical history. It's critical
for understanding a lot of things about this country today.

(01:06:39):
And it's just critical because you need to know about
what happened to these people. And the fact that this
story spread widely on TikTok, I think is pretty rad actually,
so that's good, that's.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
Nice, and to be that serious. There's a lot of
really cool stuff on TikTok, and it's it's not fifteen
second long clips of like teenage girls asy and people
will hear that I'm on TikTok. They think, oh, so
you're on there with the fifteen year old girls, that's
your thing. It's like, no, TikTok. Now, there's long form

(01:07:11):
stuff on there. Let's say long form, I mean seven, eight,
nine minutes long for TikTok getting into subjects like this.
Because this video had a lot of views on it,
that's how I saw it. That's what cued me into this.
And then when I went to look it up found
out that there's barely anything on Wikipedia because it's kind
of flew under the radar, and so that inspired me

(01:07:32):
to see if we want to do an episode about this,
because I suspected that there was a lot to unearth.
It was worse than I thought, as it always is
every time I come on here. The details are always
worse than what you've heard. But this is the kind
of story. For whatever reason, we love to make movies
about serial killers that killed five people, but a corporation

(01:07:55):
that kills a thousand through being exactly as cruel and whatever.
We kind of just like, well, yeah, but their job creators,
and they made that tunnel, Like, don't they get credit
for making that.

Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
Tunnel solid tunnel?

Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
Yeah, it's like they didn't make. A whole bunch of
people whose names you'll never know made that tunnel. Yeah,
and they broke their bodies to make it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
Yeah, So I don't know, go off into the world.
Buy Jason's book, Remain Angry at Union Carbide. Definitely do that. Okay,
that's the episode, Go away now, everybody. Hey everyone, Robert
Evans here. As we mentioned in the first episode, Jason

(01:08:37):
asked for this as the result of a TikTok that
they'd seen. I'm not waunch of a TikTok guy. So
I just kind of went on and did my research.
But I've been informed that the person who put together
this TikTok, which is an account called Schoolhouse Clock like
like the buildings supply c a ulk. Schoolhouse Clock, who's
creator is a fellow named Michael, put out a video

(01:09:00):
specifically talking to us. He wanted to let us know.
There's a website hawksnest names dot org that was created
quite a while ago to try and put together an actual,
definitive list of the men who died as a result
of this. They've got both a list of death certificates,
worker names, some reports on you andion carbide, and some

(01:09:21):
other information. Really good info if you're interested in this,
and you can also if you're someone who may have
lost a family member obviously a long time ago in
this disaster, there's a way for you to kind of
reach out to them and try to add that name.
That website was offline for a while, but then Michael,
the fellow with the TikTok apparently was able to raise
some money through his viewers or listeners whatever you call

(01:09:44):
them on TikTok to put it back up, which is great,
and so they he asked that we put in a
shout out, which I am doing now. So please check
out hawksnest names dot org for more information on this disaster.
Thanks everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our

(01:10:06):
website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.