Behind the Bastards - Part One:The Deadliest Workplace Disaster in U.S. History

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Robert and Jason Pargin sit down to discuss the Hawk's Nest Tunnel project, the deadliest industrial disaster in U.S. history. (2 Parts)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A brand new historical true crime podcast. When you lay suffering a sudden brutal death, starring Allison Williams, I hope you'll think of me. Erased, the murder of Elma Sands. She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl. Let's go up here! Until she met that man right there.

Written and created by me, Allison Flop. Is it possible, sir? We're standing by for your answer. Erased, the murder of Elma Sands. on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. When Tracy Rekel Burns was two years old, her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident. Her parents told police she had killed him.

I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for burden of guilt, the new podcast that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who is framed for murder. Listen to burden of guilt on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mo'Raca, and I'm excited to announce season four your podcast. figures who died on the very same day. To the things I wish would die, like buffets. Listen to MoPituaries with MoRaka on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, it is a podcast that you're listening to right now behind the bastards. That's the one we're here. We're on the air and in the sky and around you. Jason Pargin 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 in K 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 control and 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 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.

It's that. No, this is, 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 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 it was a 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. We say that I read a book about it. Now, 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 credit with the with the Gen Z kids more than than getting news from TikTok. Um, yeah, we are going to record a multi-part podcast episode just on that three minute TikTok. Like, break it down. Now, 40 seconds in that he says this, no. So anyway, yeah, I heard about this on TikTok and then looked it up and then found that the its Wikipedia page is like 900 words long. It's almost a stub. Yeah, 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 Like, in school, I heard about the Triangle shirt waist factory fire. That is a famous example of a gross negligence at a workplace.

And that killed like 150 people. Yeah. Yeah. This was much, much worse. The Triangle shirt waist, 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.

It's been books written about it. This thing got swept under the rug so efficiently. And there is 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 hawks nest tunnel disaster which I also had not heard of at all until you sent me that TikTok, Jason.

And a lot of people when you hear the term hawks nest tunnel disaster, you're picturing people being attacked by a giant swarm of hawks. Yeah, that's not what happened. Yeah, like a bunch of cavers like find their way and do a tunnel and it winds up being like filled with With some sort of like eyeless featherless like underground night hawk that that only hunts I'm imagining basically the creatures from the first riddock movie If you if you remember that listeners No one no one on tiktok is watch 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 of that summer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and I do think we should have a statue dedicated to the first riddock movie, but that's that's a separate matter. So we're going to get into this story. And it is fucking wild. But 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 Zoey is to drunk for this dystopia. It's the latest in the Zoey-Ash series. It is out October 31st in every possible format, including print and audio.

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 can be beamed directly into the brain of a nirrelink patient. They instantly know everything that you've written. We can really save a lot of time with just kind of cutting out the joy of experiencing the story, um, 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 loss to time, let's get in to the hawks

nest tunnel disaster. So most people listen, everyone listening to this knows about chair noble, 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. It's 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 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 of one thing, the worst industrial disaster in history, which was the Bow-Paul 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 Bow-Paul. 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 BOPAL, is the hoxness tunnel disaster. And one of the things that ties it to Bpoll is that the Bowpoll 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 direct death student negligence. And so today we're gathering to talk about another union carbide disaster because the hoxness tunnel disaster is all on union carbide. They are the guys behind this. And it's interesting. As you noted, you brought up the triangle shirt waste fire at the start of this Jason.

If you combine the death tolls of the triangle shirt waste fire, the sunshine mine disaster, and the Farmington mine disaster, which are three of the most famous 20th century industrial disasters in the US. They do not equal the death toll of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, which by the way exceeds chair noble. 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 of 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 no, no, no questions about any of the other products that they've put out. 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 the history of industrial, it's basically part of a hydroelectric system

that's still functioning today. So one of the things that's compelling to me is that this was not the result of 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 Does it have you ever heard prior to this Jason of silicoces?

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 looking. The idea of breathing too many of them, I just imagined 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 silicaosis, you got 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 auto-lases, 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. Encilicosis, 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 gonna get into it. They knew Right away. Yeah, this is not a thing like, like a spestus where it was something that was widely used and then a long time later, you started to get realized, oh, we shouldn't have been using it like that. No, they knew. Yeah, the timeframe on this is crazy. And the time frame on silicosis can vary, right? If you're, this is a thing that you can get a lot of people who got silicosis in the ancient world where like, you look at all those very pretty marble structures in like Greece today, right?

I'm the part that on. 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 miners 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 minors 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 minted. 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 and dust. 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 coughed in those my nose, and that 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 minds. They're inhaling silica dust and their lungs to gest themselves. That is like what's actually going down. We're going to get into this as they're working. It's going to become queer. 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. Are you? You couldn't have known. It's like, no, your inspectors were wearing protection when they came to look at it, knowing that the workers were not. But we all get into all of that. But 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, 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 the 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 Cherniac. In the 1800s, silicosis reached epidemic proportions among British potters. Vernacular terms for the disease, grinders rot, potters rot, and miners' pathisis 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, dried 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 mine 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 are like, ban this because it's inhumane, dried drilling. So the US 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 minds that are dealing with the laborers who are encountering

silicauses, 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. 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 got to fill out 300 forms and get a license for the oven and done it. I was like, okay, I get it. If you've ever tried 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. It is, 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 the, why that, why that there's not like any kind of consistency

with that viewpoint among a lot of people, not everybody. But 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 are you looking at those executives and 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 them out. There's like, okay, but do you understand there are some corporations where it's too unsafe to have a mouth. There's like, okay, but do you understand there are some corporations where it's too unsafe to have them operating as a corporation?

Like, why don't you have that same knee jerk reaction of, 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 and enough of a scale, then it's like, all right, well, we're gonna sell off your assets, your executives get nothing. Like this is the penalty for certain levels

of irresponsibility, but we don't even really manage anti-trust that well. So that's probably a, and I'm not a law-noir guy, so I'm sure that that's illegal for a thousand different reasons. But we should get back to the story fundamentally here. So, sorry. Yeah, no, no, no, no. I mean, 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 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. 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 uprising. 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 courts minds 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 and Missouri suffer high what 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 US

and around the world, by the start of the 1930s, mine operators have three major methods of reducing the lethality of their minds. Number one is wet drilling, which we've talked about already. Number two is providing ventilation, installing ventilation ducts in mines in order to get like bad air out. That should be pretty obvious. I don't think people need explanation as to why ventilation helps. And the number three is issuing respirators from miners to where, right? These are, this is like a more primitive version

of the respirators, a lot of us war and wear as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The year as, and I actually didn't know there were functional respirators this far back, but the US 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 Gauley 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%, which is, I don't think it's like exaggeration to call that like neorepocalyptic, 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, 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 core. 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, I exaggerating here, at 40% unemployment in the US, 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 the systems 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 did they go to the press? Or why did they complain to this? The labor relations board, God, 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, it might seem like the world's ending. Things are so, so bad. So part of why they are so bad, why unemployment 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 under regulation in that particular state, its minds 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 Mineworkers 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'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 counter-vailing force to the bosses that are going to be running this project. But you know what does provide a counter-vailing force to this podcast, I suppose, is ads. A brand new historical true crime podcast. The year is 1800 City Hall, New York. The first murder trial in the American Judicial System. A man-sense trial for the charge of murder.

Even with defense lawyers, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr on the case, this is probably the most famous trial you've never heard of. When you lay suffering a sudden violent brutal death, I hope you'll think of me. Starring Allison Williams. I don't need anything simplified, Mr. Hamilton, thank you. With Tony Goldwyn as Alexander Hamilton, Don't be so sad that front, it doesn't suit you. Written and created by me, Alison Flock.

Listen to E-Raced, the murder of Elma Sands. She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl until she met that man right there. On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Choose business not boring with programs ranging from fashion to finance, culinary to commerce or golf to global business. Apply now at Humber.ca slash business. When Tracy Rakell Burns was two years old, her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident. And no one really talked about it.

Her parents told police she had killed him. Medical records fed that I killed my baby brother. I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for burden of guilt. The new podcast that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who was framed for murder, and how she grew into an adult determined to get justice and protect her family. While we had prosecuted some cold cases, this was the coldest, this was frigid. But how does a two-year-old get blamed for murder? She said, we wanted a new life.

You just don't know what it's like when you'll do anything for somebody. Listen to Byrdon of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Ugh! 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 electro-middleurgical company, the start of the century, starts building hydro power capability in the state, and they start buying up smaller companies who are involved in 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 US part of World War II possible, right? You need a lot of metals that you 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, Canowa 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 electro-medallurgical 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, and carbon corporations. 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 flushed 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 of core 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 the 1919 when it's done They reach out to the government 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 you these regulators are able to like say all the right things like 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 fucked 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 Canawapower company. And so this is going to be a project of this company called the new Canawapower 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 up onto people killed, it's a kind of thing that

corporations don't do anymore, right? Obviously, that would be an idea. 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. And we can always like apologize later, we'll pay whatever fine, but we're just gonna take off and do it. But because that's how innovation happens. We're not gonna worry about all of these little rules, all this stuff.

We're gonna launch our rocket. We're not gonna worry whether or not debris reigns down on houses for six miles in every direction. Like we'll just, what matters is we achieve the rocket launch. And then all this other stuff, we can smooth it over a smoother 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 gonna do? Fill it back in. It's like, no, most likely they'll just shout out it's a little bit or even if that. And then we'll have our thing. We'll have our damn. 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? 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'm just going to say, likewise, if you compare the sides of the fines for, say, the opioid epidemic to these pharma companies versus the amount of profit they made, sell 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 a kind of thing. You'll hear debate a lot when people talk about like

in-ron, 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. Wouldn't have hurt to try in 2008. It wouldn't have hurt to try in 1930 with this thing,

you know, treating these crimes that have much higher body counts than like bank robbers do with a similar degree of severity. But that's not gonna happen in this case. So I guess we should just move along. So this new plan for this massive, massive hydroplan involves the creation of a 16,240 foot long tunnel. They're going underground to divert

water from the new river through a mountain, Gauley mountain. And because of 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-substitiary that exists within union

Carbide this is not a mining project technically, right? 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 Reinhart and Dennis, one of the few construction companies able to manage such a large project. During the bid process, Reinhart and Dennis reported having built 51 tunnels in the past 35 years. Engineers from New Canowa Power were to design and oversee the operation. The contract specified that Reinhart and Dennis would assume all liability, thus Union Carbide was shielded.

The contract included a clause that allowed engineers from New Canowa Power to force changes into the contractor's procedures if injuries were caused by negligence on behalf of the contractor. But New canowa power never intervened. The contract also called for Reinhart and Dennis to furnish an equipment on site hospital, but only four first aid stations were provided, one at each dig. Workers sustaining major injuries were transported to Colvalley 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, Ryan Hart and Dennis is going to further cut costs, right? Because they're trying to maximize what they get from union car buy and actually get

to take home. Union car buy 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- And 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 labor 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, governed 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 like I am, I'm not I'm not sure about you Jason, but like reading about that stuff when you look at the maps of like civil war battles, right? There's just it's 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 got 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. That's what you're seeing is like a record of a conflict that is fundamentally over 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. It's like, do I need to, I, this documents 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. 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 Reinhart and Dennis aren't just devoid of protections. They're also being thrown into a working environment 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 drilling. I think it's like half as fast as dry drilling. So I just want to keep in your mind right now, Ryan Hart 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 31, 1930, a Union Caride executive pilot sustained shovel to dig the first load

of Earth away from what will become the hawks nest tunnel. This is purely a media gesture, and I think there's also 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. Ryan Hart 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. Tunneling like this requires a huge number of people.

Now, and only some of the jobs are what are known as high-skill position. So a high-skill position in an operation like this is manning a drill. There's machines to suck extra, 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 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. Experience 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 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. 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. Gauley, the town that's nearby, some of the reports I've read from the interviews with black laborers say that 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, 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 all from like the Carolinas or whatever to, um, to work on this project, you're, you're, you're kind of in space, right? Like you, you're 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 gonna read another passage

from Martin Cherniac'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 Reinhart and Dennis on seasonal jobs in the Carolinas. He first heard of the tunnel through a work acquaintance,

a company's stringer who was supplied with bus fare and a stipend to promote employment among southern blacks. The boy paid his own fare to Gauley Bridge. He was immediately added to the roles because he was known to several of the contractors for men. 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 Cherniac's book is 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, Cherniac 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, the subcontractor that actually did the work, we didn't tell them

to do dry drilling. We didn't tell them, like, no, but you set an incentive and a deadline that they couldn't meet unless they did. But you gave yourself the night ability 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 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 X, Y, Z and X, and X, Y, 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. We did not like some of these other minds where they literally made them work at gunpoint. These people came here voluntarily, and they got paid. And they could have, they didn't like it. If they felt it was unsafe, they could have they didn't like it if they felt it was unsafe they could have quit and it's like In district a sense maybe but not as a practical matter no Yeah, and Yeah, it's it's a what 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 know that a 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 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 gonna take this gig, a lot of them bring their families with them, right? Cause they're like, I'm gonna take this gig, I'm gonna make enough money, and then we'll get set up in some, and we'll get set up in 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 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 I think a lot of these people basically just wind up kind of camping near the mining town, because 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 Gauley Bridge as well. The urban population, the people who actually live in this town, considered them so there's a conflict because being miners and being these like 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, these miners who are out of work and who are coming to this project should have invested the money they had back when mining was booming better. And the fact that they were like poor and desperate now was their own fault.

There are that is a conflict that exists in this situation. It's not one that I think it's 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. 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 gonna 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, 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 there these 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 pitons 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 Cherney Axebook 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 as I, 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, Chair Neacle note, this is not uncommon for the time. I don't want to be a clip here, but I find it fascinating that that old song from the 40s at 16 tons song. Yeah. See you load 16 tons. See what you get.

Another day older and deeper in debt. The fact that the fact that that song hates a much rosier picture of my big desk reality of the story. They're telling here like that, like that's almost a romantic version. It's literally about a man who, who can't go to heaven because he, 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 sponsored this podcast. So please, everybody, here we go, ads. A brand new historical true crime podcast. The year is 1800, a city hall, New York. The first murder trial in the American Judicial System. A mass-ass trial for the charge of murder.

Even with defense lawyers, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr on the case, this is probably the most famous trial you've never heard of. When you lay suffering a sudden violent brutal death, I hope you'll think of me. Starring Allison Williams. I don't need anything simplified, Mr. Hamilton, thank you. With Tony Goldwyn as Alexander Hamilton, Don't be so sad down front, it doesn't suit you. Written and created by me, Alison Flock.

Why are you doing that goal? Listen to E. Rast, the murder of Elma Sands. She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl. Until she met that man right there. On the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Apple Murder! When Tracy Rekel Burns was two years old,

her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident. And no one really talked about it. Her parents told police, she had killed him. Medical records fed that I killed my baby brother. I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for burden of guilt. The new podcast that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who was framed for murder and how she grew into an adult determined to get justice and protect her family.

While we had prosecuted some cold cases, this was the coldest, this was frigid. But how does a two-year-old get blamed for murder? She said, we wanted a new life. You just don't know what it's like when you'll do anything for somebody. Listen to Byrdon of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Chelsea Handler.

This week on Dear Chelsea, Jada Pinkett Smith on her new memoir Worthy. When I went through one of the darkest periods when I was really suicidal, I thought I was inherently broken. A lot of us women, our stories are still considered taboo. We feel like that we are going to be dragged through the mud. You guys have been separated, but you're not divorced. No, and you have no plans to get divorced.

No. So talk to us in a thought. I'm down with it. I think this is a great new way of thinking about marriage. From my perspective, I remember watching that night thinking, what's going on with him? Like, that's not who he is. What's happening to him? He must be going through something either with you. You can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be there! And we're back! Oh boy, good times were 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,

we, it's been a while since the last listener survey. But I think Sophie Kirkman, if I'm wrong here, less than half of our listeners are professional tunnel diggers or, or mining engineers, right? I think it's about 32%. Yeah. And that's a big difference for Jason and I, because Jason 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 subject

Yeah, like the six funniest things about when your mind card overturns Yeah, at the end of your shift and everybody nodded everybody nodded know we were talking about mm-hmm Eight things you learn getting black lung Everybody nodded and all we were talking about. Eight things you learn getting black lung. So here's churniac describing this is like the, 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, tin boring horizontally into the heading face and 6 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 Inger saw drills were equipped with supports, drilling into the heading face required the work of a drill drill and an assistant, the easiest vertical drilling

could be done by a single drill. When a charge was detonated and the debris cleaned away, the first bench would be levelled 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 clear to 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 5-15 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 how 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 an 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 three or four percent silica, usually. And obviously that's

enough that after years in the tunnel, you can get silicaoses. The rock they're digging out of the hawks nest 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 in because this is how you like make glass, you make a bunch of shit out of silica. You don't need to even do any, this shit is almost 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

Pharaoh Silicone 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 in order to do that and stay on the timeframe, Ryan Hart 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 paper saying, hey guys, I'm sorry, this is a mine. We're mining this stuff like the tunnel we need. But also, this is function's 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 and a factory. No, I 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 you, 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 Reinhardt and, 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 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 their or best friend into that mind, would not dare let them go in without something. Like on a human level,

that's the whole thing about all of is it is it is you completely detach yourself from the 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, easy. Like 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 were doing these high-skilled jobs, the engineers that are overseeing it, and the management who are coming into 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 it 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 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 push by this, you know, you get $250 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 breed dust. We've all had to breed smoke. We've all had to breed smoke. This is a nasty brand of dust. Like that wording that it has like glass that slashes at your eyes. Like it's tiny little razor sharp microscopic particles. Yeah, I can't out 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. Reinhart 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 shoving people in to 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 drill set and knock 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 shit kills, right? You know, you're not talking anything like normal miners lung. People are dropping right after they start, before they really even get settled into the job. I mean, there is 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 softened, cause in your lungs, like if you're inhaling enough to give yourself solar cosis after a couple months, that means you knew you were breathing air that burned when you breathed 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. I, you know, 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 notice that like 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 or silicosis. This happens very quickly. And when it happens, panic discussions erupt among Reinhart 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 gotten pneumonia. It's fine. Don't worry, guys. It's tuberculosis. You're good. 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, they didn't try to be human beings for three months. Yeah, this is the, this is the one episode of our show that's going to end with with justice for the, uh,

aggrieved. So everybody look forward to that in part two. 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 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 deck. 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 listening, steal a copy from somewhere. Yeah. Jacket. If you're listening to the 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 and the desert with posthumans 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 corrupted 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.

So have a happy time. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. A brand new historical true crime podcast. When you lay suffering a sudden brutal death, starring Allison Williams, I hope you'll think of me. Erased, the murder of Elma Sands. She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl, until she met that man right there.

Written and created by me, Allison Flon. Is it possible, sir? We're standing by for your answer. Erased, the murder of Elma Sands, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. When Tracy Rickell Burns was two years old, her baby brother died.

I was told that Matthew died in an accident. Her parents told police she had killed him. I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for Birdon of Guilt, the new podcast that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who is framed for murder. Listen to Birdon of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Moaraka, and I'm excited to announce season four of my podcast, Mo Bituaries.

I've got a whole new bunch of stories to share with you about the most fascinating people and things who are no longer with us, from famous figures who died on the very same day, to the things I wish would die, like buffets. Listen to MoPituaries with MoRaka on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.