Tragedy at Work and at Home: Three Histories of Occupational and Environmental Health in America

TRAGEDY AT WORK AND AT H01vlE: THREE HISTORIES OF OCCUPATIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IN AMERICA Martin Cherniack. The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster. New Haven: Yale University Press, I986. x + 194 pp. Illus. David DeKok. Unseen Danger: A Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. xiv + 299 pp. Illus. David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, eds. Dyingfor Work: Workers' Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. xx + 234 pp. Scott P. Schneider Occupational and environmental health are specialized areas for American history , with their own tales of great tragedies in which hundreds of workers or residents are killed in a fire or by exposure to a toxic chemical or hazardous waste. These are morality plays, with the public or workers exploited by corporate greed and by an unfeeling government bureaucracy, and with similar endings in which the tragedy spurs the government regulation that should have prevented the accident in the first place. The writers of these tales hope to force us to think and act now to prevent future tragedies. These three books show different facets of this approach. The Hawk's Nest lncident tells one story of a mining tragedy in West Virginia in which hundreds of workers died from breathing the tunnel dust; it makes a scholarly attempt to reconstruct the facts of the case. The Unseen Danger is a popular account of environmental tragedy where residents were plagued by a mine fire burning under their town and threatening them with toxic fumes. Dyingfor Work is a collection of scholarly pieces on various aspects of occupational and environmental health. * * * Over fifty years ago, a three-mile-long tunnel was built through Hawk's Nest Mountain near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to divert the New River and create hydro-electric power. During the construction of this tunnel, hundreds of workers died from inhaling silica dust. The story of this monumental tragedy is retold in 374 Scott P. Schneider Dr. Martin Chemiack's book, The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster. The project began in March 1930and it was completed in December 1931. The tunnel was built by Rinehart and Dennis Company for the New Kanawha Power Company, a front corporation for Union Carbide. During this period, 5000 workers were employed, with over half of those underground. While almost all the foremen were white, about three-quarters of those working in the tunnel were black. Almostall of the blacks were migrant labor brought from the South for this purpose. Blacks lived in camps provided by the company, for which they had to pay half their wages. Blacks were paid in scrip so they would not quit, they were physically abused, paid less than white workers and forced to reenter the tunnels immediately after dynamiting when conditions were dustiest. The turnover was high. More than half worked less than two months and most less than six months. The average tenure was about fifteen weeks. No more than seventeen workers died in the tunnel during the project, from accidents such as roof collapses or rock falls. Many more died from acute silicosis, a lung disease, from inhaling the tunnel dust which was particularly high in silica content. Classical silicosis, where the disease develops over many years of exposure to lower levels, had been known sincethe mid 1800s. Acute silicosis, resulting from very high short-term exposures, was as yet unknown. Since 1914, the Bureau of Mines had recommended wet drilling methods and yearly physical examinations for tunnel workers. Techniques for measuring silica dust had been developed by 1916. From what records exist, we may assume that the company probably knew in advance of the high silica content of the tunnel rock; in fact, it enlarged certain sections of the tunnel and sold the silica for profit. Some of the engineers even wore respirators when entering the tunnel. While the company knew of the silica in the rock, it claimed that it did not know of the dangers of silica inhalation and claimed that proper drilling methods were used. These contentions were contradicted by eye-witness testimony from tunnel workers during the many subsequent...