PROUD MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY: Dust to Dust
Tyler, Alicia
PROUD MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY Dust to Dust by Alicia Tyler If by their suffering and death they will have made life safer in [the] future for the men who go beneath the earth to work, if...
...Belated gifts of food and clothing poured into the small mountain town on the heels of the national publicity, but efforts to intensify the congressional investigation with additional funds and the power to subpoena witnesses failed...
...you’d rake your face or any part of your flesh, just like rubbin cement along toward the last of the shift...
...The “silicosis racket” had nothing to do with Gauley Bridge: “Many undesirables, mainly Negroes, came among us seeking employment during the big construction, and many of them remained afterwards for lack of other work to go to...
...Just from looking at it, a man would never know how Alicia Tyler is a West Virginia writer...
...You had special drills up there that you watched...
...C. C. Waugh, a superintendent in the Number 1 heading, told the jury he had worked 12 to 14 hours a day on both shifts and had missed only five days of work during the project...
...If them rocks don’t fall on you and kill you,” a young man told his friend, “the dust will...
...Of the 133 invited guests, only eight were representatives of labor...
...Workers later charged that safety precautions were not taken because the contractor wanted to save time and money-and didn’t expect them to die so soon...
...This Walter Fields, he worked there, too, see, on the same shift I worked...
...A black woman, whose husband had been buried hours after his death, angrily had h s body exhumed-there were three others stacked on top of him, wrapped in cloth...
...Well, I stilldo...
...Incredibly there was no elaboration in the local paper on the troubles in Gauley Bridge...
...And they was gonna bring suit against Rinehart and Dennis for killin ’ ’em out that way...
...They had one of these little ole booster fans that they had on the outside to comply with the state law...
...Some days I do pretty good...
...His suspicions of silicosis were confirmed...
...The promise of work, a big tunnel job, is passed along the grapevine, so men hop freight trains headed for the West Virginia hills...
...Andrews, the foreman in the Number 1 heading, dropped by the house to ask why the boy was not at work, and Emma told him she thought the tunnel dust was killing the men...
...Nothing to Worry About All along, Emma Jones had feared the powdery tunnel dust which collected in the hair, in the eyebrows, and on the clothes of her menfolk...
...PROUD MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY Dust to Dust by Alicia Tyler If by their suffering and death they will have made life safer in [the] future for the men who go beneath the earth to work, if they will have been able to establish a new and greater regard for human life in industry, their suffering may not have been in vain...
...And I thought he was asleep, and everybody else thought he was still asleep...
...Hayhurst, and Dr...
...But unlike before, the illness could not be blamed on a steady diet of nickel pies and soda pop or sleeping in wet overalls in overcrowded shacks...
...Toward the end, Shirley was like a living skeleton, just “hide, bone, and leaders,” and in June of 1932 he died...
...Two months later, under threat of another trial, the $10,000 suit of Cecil Jones’ widow, the attorneys for over 300 claimants effected a settlement with Rinehart and Dennis for $130,000, about three per cent of the approximately $4-million damages sought...
...One West Virginian summed it up simply: “You look at that tunnel there, and you thmk it’s a mighty fine thing...
...And that’s what you lived in...
...Had a little place up on top of the highwall where they’d sell pop and crackers...
...Emory Hayhurst, one of the country’s leading authorities on occupational diseases, give a lecture on silicosis...
...And nothin’ you can do about it...
...The conference effectively delayed any federal action-the committee reports were released ten months later, and by that time public interest had subsided...
...over a period of not less than two years in the same employment...
...The difficulty lay in proving the existence of the disease after such a short period of exposure...
...As requested, Dr...
...Cecil’s widow received $1,000, and the Jones family received $800 for Shirley’s death, $800 for Charley, who was also suffering from silicosis, and $500 for Oren...
...You went up on the right side of the tunnel all the time, the nipper did...
...They had many opportunities to observe the workers returning to their homes from the tunnel, and all agreed...
...Harless told the Jones family about the strange disease...
...When they came home from work and dropped their clothes on the floor, the dust would scatter all over the room...
...When the Joneses had applied for assistance, Emma told the relief worker who questioned how she could keep their cow on only $2 a week: “One week I’d buy feed for the cow, and the next week, I’d buy flour for the children...
...the remainder was distributed by the plaintiffs’ attorneys to the families of the deceased and among those men found to be suffering from silicosis by a three-man commission made up of Dr...
...Then you run back there 2,000 foot from where they was gonna shoot...
...In February the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that because silicosis was not compensable under the State Workmen’s Compensation law, the tunnel workers had right of action at common law, and the floodgate of damage suits was opened...
...I t would stay blue from one shot in there to the next...
...No one had claimed the bodies, and survivors were not known...
...I ain’t workin’ here no more...
...I knew that he had had it, ’cause I’d seen a lot of fellers that had died out with silicosis...
...They’d hire him anytime...
...On the day he got off a passenger train in Nicholas County, he caught the eye of Emma Johnson, a handsome young woman who was workmg in a boarding house...
...The men getting sick in the fall of ’31 were white...
...A number of business and professional people in Gauley Bridge sent a petition to newspapers all over the country, protesting the “slander and abuse” of their town by “communists and traducers...
...He testified that the working conditions and machinery on the Hawks Nest job were the best he had known in his 35 years of experience in tunnel construction...
...The brave contingent from Gauley Bridge, along with those they had left at home, hoped that federal legislation compensating victims of silicosis would be passed as a result of their efforts...
...The undertaker, who was paid $55 a head by the company, later insisted that he had buried only 33 persons on the farm...
...Harless was, at that time, a company doctor for the Ele ctro-Me tallurgical Company...
...The Department of Mines had side-stepped the Public Service Commission and claimed jurisdiction over the project because the silica rock was being mined...
...Rinehart and Dennis nad no problem finding men to work, and they had plenty of jobs to offer...
...Shirley’s friend, Oley Jeffrey, a boy who had lived with the Joneses for seven years after his mother’s death, rounded out the family work force...
...Well, he didn’t go...
...In 1938, after exposes in the radical press, leftist editor Frank Palmer brought Charley and Emma Jones, along with three other tunnel workers, to Washington to testify before a House labor subcommittee, and for several weeks the Hawks Nest tunnel claimed a national audience...
...A local relief board designated Emma as the “priority worker’’ for the family of eight, and she was assigned to a WPA sewing room in Gauley Bridge, about a five-mile walk from their new home in Humphrey Town...
...Shirley, who had been too sick to go to Charleston for an x-ray, told his mother that he wanted to be opened up when he died, to see if it was the dust that killed him...
...They might live a while after they get out of them, but it’s always on their mind...
...Charley and Emma Jones and their seven children lived in Gamoca, a small coal camp just above Vanetta on the Gauley kver...
...One of the tunnel foremen, who made a habit of dropping by the Jones house in the evening to drink homebrew, persuaded Charley and the two oldest Jones boys, Cecil and Oren, to quit their jobs at the Midvale mine and go to work at the tunnel, where they could make 35 cents an hour nipping steel...
...I say she’s time to go, Fields...
...Some weeks the mine ran two or three days...
...They’d hire a nipper anytime a boy’d come along that would nip steel...
...So did their doctors...
...After hearing the witnesses who did testify, the subcommittee concluded that the “whole driving of the tunnel was begun, continued, and completed with grave and inhuman disregard...
...and Numbers 2 and 3 from the middle of the mountain where a shaft was sunk down to the tunnel bed, and crews set out in opposite directions to meet the lower and upper crews...
...Now just as soon as the shot went ofi [foremen] Bill Watts and Arthur Andrews“Let’s hit the headin’, boys...
...When he drove that two-foot bit down with a jackhammer or a liner drill in the headin’, he had to have a four-foot bit...
...Harless performed an autopsy and removed the boy’s gritty lungs...
...Often workers had been carried from the tunnel to the outside, overcome with carbon monoxide...
...Can’t get my breath, see...
...The fresh outside air seemed to help some, but it was obvious that he wasn’t getting better...
...In his expert opinion, the shadows in Johnson’s lungs indicated advanced tuberculosis...
...and she would need it when he was gone, because “the rest of them are going, too...
...other weeks, no work at all...
...He was pantin’ just like I am now, or worse...
...She would carry Shirley from his bed to the table or from his bed to the porch, where he sat propped up while she changed his sheets...
...For one local family, the prospects of tunnel work must have seemed a small bonanza in the face of the Depression...
...Was talkin’ about how bad they was, you know, and what stage of silicosis they were in...
...silicosis,” the Secretary of Labor called a National Conference on Silicosis to study various aspects of the problem and report their findings...
...Now Hawks Nest has got you, boy...
...They came over there and asked Boomer, the store manager at Vanetta, if they could carry a little account there, you know, until they’d get this silicosis money from Rinehart and Dennis...
...Pneumonia, according to the undertaker, was given as the cause of death in most instances...
...Her research was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...And yet, an analysis of the ash content of the lungs revealed “as much silica as those of South African gold miners employed for long periods...
...There were local men experienced in railroad tunnel construction, as the mainlines of four major railways criss-crossed the mountainous countryside and branched off into the coal-rich hollows...
...So I see now that the old feller pretty well knew what he was talkin’ about...
...Leroy Gardner, director of the Saranac Laboratory for the Study of Tuberculosis, wrote after examining the lung tissues and antemortem x-rays of nine tunnel workers: . . . microscopic examination revealed so many silicotic lesions, it is perhaps surprising that the x-ray failed to detect them...
...the Jones boys had only worked in the tunnel for a little over a year...
...The Thirties...
...The only place that I went for a job that found and finally rejected me for silicosis was in 1960 over here at Snap Creek in Logan County...
...If by their suffering and death they will have made life safer in [the] future for the men who go beneath the earth to work, if they will have been able to establish a new and greater regard for human life in industry, their suffering may not have been in vain...
...I didn’t tell you about the air...
...Reportedly, they stood 7 to 5 for the plaintiff...
...In May, Robert M. Lambie, chief of the State Department of Mines and a native of Fayette County, accompanied by the Fayette County sheriff and prosecuting attorney, began an investigation of working conditions on the tunnel project...
...They were soon joined by a younger brother, Shrley, a gentle boy who would entertain his classmates by drawing pictures and outline maps of West Virginia from memory...
...Several years before at a conference, Dr...
...Oh, buddy, the dust in that place...
...And I know how they gasped for breath...
...Over 200 pending suits were stricken off the record by the ruling, and the contractor made final settlement with the claimants for $70,000...
...No report, or any further mention of the investigation, appeared in the local news paper...
...And he hollered at him again, “Let’s go, Walter...
...And they ’d been sleepin ’, several of them had, just come out thereand fall up agin the highwall...
...Ironically, Dr...
...In five years Charley died, his heart enlarged by the difficult job of pumping blood through hardening lungs...
...The checks were handed over at Lane’s garage in Gauley Bridge after the men and women signed papers providing that, for a dollar in hand, they would release all claims against Rinehart and Dennis Company...
...Well, he said yes, we’ll advance you a little to get along on, provided you sign over what you get for silicosis to the company here...
...Generally the skilled workerspower shovel operators, crane operators, motormen-and the foremen came in from the South with the contractor, while unskilled jobsdrillers, drill helpers, steel nippers, muckers-were filled by local men and large numbers of southern Negroes who were recruited by company labor scouts promising steady work and good wages and then transported in boxcars to Gauley Bridge...
...And the only time that you could was between the time that you quit drillin’ and the powder monk put the powder in the holes...
...According to the Fayette Tribune, the investigation was “precipitated by an unusual number of deaths...
...Within two years, 20 of the county’s 109 coal mines had shut down, and annual production declined by over 750,000 tons...
...On a Sunday morning in September, the oldest Jones boy, Cecil, died after struggling so hard for his breath that he kicked the wooden slats out of the baseboard of his bed...
...A particularly ironic example was the West Virginia legislature’s response to the local tragedy...
...Counsel for the defense maintained that the Hawks Nest tunnel had the best ventilation of any ever constructed by Rinehart and Dennis, a company which had been in the contracting business for 30 years, and then brought forward an impressive battery of officialdom to describe the safe, even ideal, working conditions on the tunnel project...
...So it’s just one of the things that happens in some people’s lives...
...that a white, powdery dust covered their hair and clothes...
...And when he hit him, he just kept on a goin’-done stood there and died and was stifj...
...When all the hammers and headin’ drills was a goin’ and that shovel down there was a goin’, you couldn’t see a , . . you had to bump a man before you’d know where he was at...
...Henry K. Pancoast, an expert roentgenologist and respected pioneer in silicosis research, interpreted two of the plaintiffs’ chest x-rays for the jury...
...Like a faded vaudeville act, they returned to Gauley Bridge...
...Although he was malung $1.80 a day for an eight-hour shift-80 cents was deducted from a day’s pay for rent, coal, and electricityCharley was concerned because the work wasn’t steady...
...Her findings and conclusions do not represent the views of the Endowment...
...Now, there was a drawback right there...
...Workers were confronted with lower wages, fewer working days and uncertainty about the future...
...As they approached the tables, they walked by a 1 00-foot-long trench, where mutton, pork, and ox were being roasted or barbecued whole over the smoldering fires...
...After the dynamite shots were fired, the men testified, foremen would order them into the heading before the dust had settled...
...Set Up A Committee Federal silicosis legislation was not forthcoming...
...Well, we went over there one evening, and Fields, he was standin’ there, leanin’ up agin the highwall, and larry cars went up there and stopped to pick ’em up, you see, to go inside to go to work...
...Of course, I was fortunate...
...He couldn’t hardly get along, see...
...The guests were entertained by a local orchestra and dancing troupe, then led to a sumptuous banquet under a “canopy of arching forest trees...
...worth of cheese and a box of crackers...
...The 24-inch canvas tubing, according to workers, was riddled with holes from the rock falls...
...Some of these have been in distress and have been misused by troublemakers...
...All except Walter, he was still standin’ there...
...Some of the townspeople, after hearing this tale, began to whisper that Doc Harless lived in fantasy...
...No, he explained, silicosis went back to the time of the pharaohs and the building of the pyramids...
...As we progressed into the 1940s and 50s, the coal mines were mechanized and the white clouds of silica dust at Hawks Nest were replaced by black clouds of coal dust throughout Appalachia...
...After everybody got their suit in, Doc Harless called in four doctors from around Cincinnati, and Mayo Clinic, I think was one, and Cleveland Clinic, and Baltimore...
...They couldn’t hear...
...Now it used to be that a lot of coal companies through here didn’t x-ray you for lung trouble...
...The money was awarded to 146 claimants in amounts of $1,000 and under, according to severity of illness, officiallyunofficially, marital status and race were also taken into account...
...And I met Arthur Andrews there in front of the RexallS in Gauley Bridge, I’d say a year and a half after they had completed the tunnel...
...They’d get ’em a dimeS...
...the remainder were heavily weighted toward industry, insurance carriers and govern men t administrators...
...After it got to the place where the silicosis was talked a lot, that’s when the lawyers came down here and got all those fellers...
...Officials of Rinehart and Dennis had declined an invitation, to appear before the subcommittee on labor, denying “each and every allegation which refers to us and our work...
...He said, “This tunnel has got to go through, and if you expect to stay here, you keep that kind of stufl to yoursel$ ’’ In the fall, after the crews on Numbers 3 and 4 had “knocked the headings,” an alarming number of men became sick with what was believed to be pneumonia or “fever...
...The article revealed that the Tribune had “been appealed to on more than one occasion to lay bare these atrocious conditions against humanity” and expressed the newspaper’s hopes of publishing Lambie’s report in the following week’s edition...
...You’d go up there sometimes, and the fumes of the 60-percent dynamite would almost smother you out, but you went anyhow...
...Then his mother could get compensation...
...The drills were operated with water at all times, and there was plenty of fresh air in the tunnel and little or no dust...
...I had to go to Man hospital, and they x-rayed my lungs...
...silicosis usually takes ten to twelve years to develop...
...The tunneling would require over 800 men working night and day on two ten-hour shifts...
...At the time of the congressional hearing, only 11 states had laws compensating victims of silicosis...
...Now the air in there...
...They had five doctors here that checked everybody...
...She waved a greeting to him, and when he waved back, she said to a friend, “That’s the man I’m gonna marry...
...Well, I can see myself gettin’ in the same fix that they was, see...
...Finally, the defense called on medical witnesses who testified that Johnson was not suffering from silicosis...
...He denied the plaintiff’s charges that he had used a system of signals to warn men to put water on the drills when the mine inspectors came...
...In 1935, silicosis was made a compensable disease under state law, providing, among other things, that the worker has been “exposed to the inhalation of silicon dioxide dust...
...The deaths total about 37 in the past two weeks...
...So did the state and federal government...
...See, that was just a straight hole in the mountain there...
...I was out there one evenin’, oh, just before I quit work over there...
...They complained of chest pains, shortness of breath and of generally feeling run-down...
...Sqme hearts in the “town of the living dead” were not touched by the glaring national spotlight...
...within a year bills had been introduced in 40 state legislatures to extend workmen’s compensation coverage to victims of silicosis and other dust diseases...
...We worked 10 hours a day, 30 cents an hour, three dollars a day...
...You didn’t question whether it was too smoky, too dusty, or what...
...It was, in the opinion of the Fayette Tribune, a “novel” dinner for most of the guests...
...Harless, Dr...
...The problem of silicosis which threatened an estimated one million American workers in mines, quarries, foundries, potteries and even scouring powder factories, was left up to the states...
...Soda tablets and bed rest were not curing the boys of their illness...
...So he was still standin’ there, and Andrews hollered at him, “Time to go, Fields...
...Within two months of their pilgrimage to Washington, Charley’s $2-a-week relief allowance was cut off...
...And I told some of the fellers around there in the tool shed where they sharpened bits, ‘ Y Z be daggoned if I don’t believe that dust’d kill a man...
...As for the miners from nearby coal camps: “Some of the native-born poor, whom the Bible says ‘we have with us always,’ have likewise been misused in the same way...
...In Dr...
...Fifty per cent of this settlement was retained for legal services...
...The coal companies denied the existence of such a condition...
...Now,” he said, “Mullins, don’t let me hear you say that again...
...And wasn’t from the first 50 foot in there...
...or if a man became disgruntled, he just moved on, as a lot of them apparently did...
...Telling This Story The first suit to come to trial in Fayetteville was that of Raymond Johnson, Emma Jones’ 37-year-old brother...
...Johnson exhibited his emaciated chest to the jurors-he was 5 feet 11 inches and weighed 143 pounds at the time of the trial-and related to them both the symptoms of his disease and his mental anguish...
...some days I don’t do too good...
...Was it a new one, Emma had wanted to know...
...So if he started a hole, he had to have a two-foot bit...
...Rinehart and Dennis also found a fertile labor market in Fayette County...
...See, you had a two-foot bit, four-foot bit-went up by twos up to 16-foot...
...Doc Harless told us down there that 40 years from that day, whatever day it was that they examined us, there will be men dyin’ from the effects of Hawks Nest tunnel...
...So after I had left the tunnel, I went back in the mines...
...10,000 of the fee was recovered and distributed among the claimants-the Jones family received a check for $125...
...There was no way to ventilate it other than that booster fan and this tubin’ that run up along the left side of the tunnel...
...Johnson died 20 months later in November 1934...
...Desperate for a job, they head for a site near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where hundreds of men ended up with a mysterious disease while excavating a tunnel and began “dying like flies” within a year after the job began...
...Others were transported to Nicholas County and buried unceremoniously on a private farm...
...Well, they came down here and wanted everybody that had worked in the tunnel...
...Harless’ opinion, Raymond Johnson was in the beginning third, or last, stage of silicosis and, as the doctor told the crowded courtroom, would probably die within the year...
...The tunnel was of singular importance to the expanding Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation, the key element in an ambitious $10-million hydro-electric project, designed to divert the meandering New River from Hawks Nest to a power station to be built near Gauley Bridge...
...So he didn’t move that time, and Andrews jumped off the larry car, and he went over and hit him on the shoulder...
...During one period of time], they averaged catchin’ one there every shift, between the dipper and the rib...
...Report of the House Subcommittee on Labor, 74th Congress, investigating the Hawks Nest tunnel, February 5, 1936...
...If you get that started around here, Rinehart and Dennis won’t be able to hire the first man to this work...
...Knowin’ how the Jones boys, Oley Jeffrey, and all the ones that 1 knew that’worked there-I know how they died...
...No, Andrews said, it was just a foolish idea of hers...
...and the most common method of reducing the deadly dust in the air, wet drilling, had been advocated by the U. S. Bureau of Mines since 1914, when 433 lead and zinc miners out of 720 examined in the Joplin, Missouri, area were found to have silicosis...
...Mineral Wealth In excavating the lower end of the tunnel, the workers came across a rich deposit of silica sandstone which assayed as high as 99.44 per cent pure...
...By October, both Oren Jones and Oley Jeffrey were dead...
...after the sandstone was discovered, the tunnel was extended from 32 feet in diameter to 46 feet or more to mine the valuable ore...
...Rinehart and Dennis contended that because the company was a subscriber to the state compensation fund, the tunnel workers were barred from bringing suit against it...
...The big logging days were over, and the coal industry was in a slump...
...But I went back there a many a time-it was just as flat as your hand, that tubin’ was, no air comin’ up in it...
...The Fayette Tribune reported in the winter of 1928 that “dull times in the coal field have sent several young men into the army and navy...
...through accidents and disease” the previous week, and the death rate was “high, especially among colored workers...
...Charley Jones had been mining coal for 18 years when the tunnel project began...
...And it’s been, not what you’d call a dread, but 1 just hate for the time to come when that3 what’s gonna eventually wind up with me...
...Well, he’d motion you with his fingers, and you grabbed the four-foot bit, and you run to wherever he was at...
...If a man refused to work in the tunnel, a foreman would run him out of the camp...
...In early August of 1931, the Number 1 heading broke through to Number 2, within one inch of the engineers’ calculations, and a gala celebration was held for over a thousand prominent West Virginians at Hawks Nest in a clubhouse overlooking the New River gorge, more than a thousand feet below...
...A parade of tunnel workers, white and black, took the stand during the two weeks that the plaintiff‘s case was presented...
...Harless remembered the disease and consulted all the literature on the subject he could find...
...A number of Gauley Bridge townspeople testified in Johnson’s behalf, including two ministers and several local shopkeepers...
...He was comin’ up the walk there with a cane...
...In spite of the obvious hazards, jackhammers on the benches of the Hawks Nest tunnel drilled dry because, as workers explained, water would choke up the bits, slowing down the operation...
...And they was a lot of those fellers that was pretty well done in...
...In seven of the nine tunnel workers “caseous tuberculosis pneumonia was so extensive that it obscured any other lesion which might have been present...
...Two tunnel workers testified three years later at the congressional hearings that Waugh and a number of other foremen in the Number 1 heading had died of silicosis...
...The power station’s electricity would be used to fire the electric arc furnaces of a proposed smelting plant, run by Electro-Metallurgical Company, a Union Carbide subsidiary...
...Well, if you started up there when he was unloadin’his bucket, when he brought it back around, that bucket scraped the rib of the tunnel...
...You’d get just as tight agin the rib of the tunnel as you could get, and when they put the shot ofj, it would rock you backwards and forwards there eight or ten times, the concussion would...
...I’ve put 28 years in tunnels, and it hasn’t hurt me yet...
...Hard times...
...When her son, Shirley, came home one evening in September, complaining that he couldn’t get his breath, Emma kept him at home...
...After testifying, they were shuffled off to New York City and a bewildering tour of radical social functions in an effort to raise money to send more workers to the Washington hearings...
...Well, if you never feel no better, you’ll not work no more...
...Emma was not satisfied with the company doctor’s diagnosis...
...in desperation she begged money to put the two older boys in a Charleston, West Virginia, hospital for chest x-rays...
...The hazards of breathing silica dust were well known to civil and mining engineers in the 1930s...
...It wasn’t until 1969, after thousands of men had been disabled and had died that there was any official recognition of black lung...
...When he saw the chest x-rays of the Jones boys, Dr...
...The next trial, Lewis Scott v. Rinehart and Dennis, was set for hearing in May 1935, but by that time, defense attorneys were able to plead that the case was barred by the statute of limitations-it was over a year since Scott had quit working for the contracting company-and they were sustained by both the circuit court and the West Virginia Supreme Court...
...You get to the place where you can’t lay down, you can’t get your breath...
...An analysis of Cecil’s lungs revealed that half of their ash content was silica-about five times greater than the percentage normally found in the lungs of the average adult male...
...The river would follow a path down a rugged three-mile course through Gauley Mountain...
...It would seem that the workers were even betrayed by their x-rays, which revealed a general haze or cloudiness in the lungs, rather than the nodules characteristic of silicosis...
...Johnson’s attorney charged that in order to speed up the work, Rinehart and Dennis had ordered dry drilling, which created a hazardous cloud of silica dust in the tunnel...
...He was 16, and this job was his first...
...Charley continued to work, while Emma cared for the ailing boys...
...No man worked on the tunnel excavation at Hawks Nest for more than 18 months...
...The new mining machinery produced the dust, which in turn caused black lung in those who breathed it...
...And whatever the helper on the drill motioned that was the bit he needed, you went with it up along the side of the tunnel up to where he was at...
...relative to...
...The end result was a patchwork of state laws with differing criteria, not always relevant to the disease itself...
...Gauley Bridge was “never more thriving and prosperous.’’ One civic leader maintained that less than two per cent of the town’s population had been employed by Rinehart and Dennis on the tunnel project...
...Hughey of Charleston...
...Like a tale from the story of Aladdin’s lamp, boring of the tunnel has enriched the Union Carbide Company with untold wealth,” a newspaper announced...
...Along toward the last of the tunnel work, colored fellers would come out on the highwall there and stand there and sleep like a bunch of cattle...
...After a total of 32 hours deliberation, the jury reported to Judge J. W. Eary that they were hopelessly deadlocked, and he discharged them...
...And I’d heard that he was just about washed up...
...That was about the limit of their meals...
...Rumors circulated wildly about the number of men dying...
...In the spring Shirley was worsehis weight had fallen off considerablyand Cecil, Oren, and Oley Jeffrey were sick too...
...He got up to where I was at, and I said, “Andy, you remember what you told me over there at the bit shed one time, that you’d worked tunnels 28 year and it hadn’t hurt you any...
...A company doctor, in a ludicrous flight of fancy, called it “tunnelitis...
...They were given two years from that date, March 13, 1930, to complete the tunnel, dam, and powerhouse...
...And when they did start x-raying men, naturally I couldn’t pass a test, because I was in second stage of silicosis just before the trial that they had over here for the tunnel men...
...Report of the &use Subcommittee on Labor, 74th Congress, investigating the Hawks Nest tunnel, February 5, 1936...
...She had worried when she washed their clothes and found a sediment two inches deep in the bottom of the washtub-she even showed it to the neighbor women who lived along the creek...
...The growing national concern over silicosis, which had gained a sense of urgency from the Gauley Bridge tragedy, was sidetracked when, “in view of the many misunderstandings...
...And I worked up till 1969, and 1 got to where I couldn’t breathe in the mines, you know, and would take blackout spells and fall out, and didn’t know where I was at...
...I’d give a lot if I had never went in there...
...Some 300,000 tons of silica rock were loaded into railway cars and shipped to the new ferroalloys plant on the Kanawha River for future use in the smelting of ferrosilicon, an iron alloy widely used in the man,ufacture of steel...
...A company doctor called it “tunnelitis” and gave the men soda tablets, whose bitter taste was not easily disguised by a black sugar coating- “li ttle black devils, ” the men called them...
...And that, to the State, was a ventilation...
...Number 4 from the upper end at Hawks Nest...
...Construction on the Hawks Nest project began in the spring of 1930 when a Union Carbide-owned utility company announced that a $4.2 million contract had been awarded to Rinehart and Dennis Corporation of Charlottesville, Virginia, “one of the oldest and largest railroad contracting firms in the country,” according to a local newspaper...
...I didn’t no more than get it out till-Andrews was there, see...
...Harless had heard Dr...
...And, like I say, that’s the reason you had to signal [relay] the signs down off the benches to the nipper boys...
...I never went to a mine after that where they examined people for a job that it wasn’t the first thing that I thought of Now, I know theyi-e gonna find me with silicosis and turn me down...
...They were outraged...
...To meet the two-year deadline, the tunnel was to be driven from four headings-Number 1 from the lower end at Gauley...
...Some thought it was pneumonia, some thought “fever...
...See, there was about 30 families of ’em lived up there at that old camp, Vanetta...
...When the shovel was dumpin’ in the larry car back there, when the man swung around to dump back here, he couldn’t see...
...I never seen no time that you could see over ten foot, no time...
...Unusual Number of Deaths The first report of problems on the giant hydro-electric project, other than occasional newspaper accounts of accidents, surfaced in a terse society note from Gauley Bridge, published in the Fayette Tribune in February of 1931, less than a year after the tunneling began: “Their [sic] is a great deal of comment about town regarding the unusually large number of deaths among the colored laborers at the tunnel works of the New-Kanawha Power Company...
...many lives were sacrificed...
...His suit against the contractor, filed on behalf of his widow, Dora, and two children, became the test case on which the fate of the other workers rested...
...for the health, lives, and future of the employees...
...As a young man, Charley had come to West Virginia to work on the railroads...
...The newspaper report was more than a metaphor...
...Local workers were hungry for jobs, too...
...Only later would they regret the decision to work on the tunnel...
...It depends on the atmosphere just how well you do during the day...
...He had worked in tunnels for 30 years, and he knew it wouldn’t hurt them...
...they described the dry drilling on the benches and the effects of breathing air heavy with rock dust and gasoline fumes...
...Called it a commissary...
...The x-rays were read by a local doctor, Leonidas Ryan Harless-“Doc Harless was an old country doctor and a good one”-and he became intrigued with what he saw...
...Some, it was said, were dumped in the river bed and covered with the tunnel rock...
...Most of the time I just sit, just like 1 am now...
...According to company records, of the almost 3,000 men who worked in the tunnel, well over half worked less than two months and almost one fifth worked less than one week...
...At the end of five weeks, the case was sent to the jury...
...You hit the headin’ if you stayed there...
...In August, another round of lawsuits was begun by different lawyers, and it was discovered that the plaintiff‘s Fayetteville law firm had been paid $20,000 by the general manager of Rinehart and Dennis to effect the earlier financial settlement...
Vol. 6 • January 1975 • No. 11
