The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster by Martin Cherniack

Abstract

Technology and culture Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 931 for publishing From Fire to Rust. It is the sort of thoughtful, analytical local history we would like to see more of. Robert Casey Mr. Casey is curator of industrial history at the Detroit Historical Museum. Before becoming a historian he spent twelve years as an engineer at Bethlehem Steel’s plant at Sparrows Point, Maryland. The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster. By Martin Cherniack. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. Pp. x+ 194; illustrations, tables, notes, appendix, bibliography, in­ dex. $19.95. In The Hawk’s Nest Incident, Martin Cherniack has written a fine anal­ ysis of the large loss of life that occurred in the 1930s on a 3-mile-long tunnel project undertaken by Union Carbide in West Virginia. This tunnel through Gauley Mountain delivered water to a hydroelectric plant that in turn provided power to Union Carbide’s metallurgical works in Alloy. Assessed strictly in technical terms, the Hawk’s Nest hydro project was a great success. But in human terms, the tunnel proved to be “America’s worst industrial disaster.” By Cherniack’s care­ ful estimate, the project killed some 764 workers. Despite this ex­ tremely high death toll, the Hawk’s Nest tragedy received scant attention in the 1930s and has since been all but forgotten. In the course of chronicling the planning, construction, and aftermath of this tunnel, Cherniack presents several reasons for its lack of notoriety. The men did not die all at once in a dramatic, crushing accident. Instead, they fell victim to acute silicosis, caused by driving the tunnel, without respirators, through a deposit of nearly pure silica. At the time, this particularly fast-acting and deadly variety of silicosis had rarely been encountered and was little understood. But it was not medical uncertainty or the lack of scientific knowledge that really doomed these men. In search of whatever work they could get during the Depression, migrant blacks from the South filled most of the dustyjobs inside the tunnel. Racist attitudes defined the blacks as expendable and allowed the contractor to shelter them inadequately while off work and to protect them inadequately while at work. Rapid labor turnover was the standard on this project. Many workers stayed long enough to contract the disease and then moved on to die in distant regions. No large loss of life—of people who mattered—occurred instantly in the immediate vicinity of the tunnel. The migrant blacks who did die on site were hidden away in unmarked pauper’s graves in a farm field. Union Carbide used its corporate power and wiles to launch and sustain the project; the tunnel’s contractor was principally interested in pushing its completion on schedule and within budget; local citizens 932 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE welcomed the promise of economic development and did not seek out conflict and controversy; state and federal officials nominally re­ sponsible for oversight did little; and the local press largely ignored any rumors of disease that were circulated. So by the time the news of this disaster finally began to spread, largely owing to leftist pub­ lications, the harm had already been done. In the 1930s, nobody could even say, with any certainty, just who or how many had died. That left Cherniack, a professor in Yale’s Occupational Medicine Program, with a difficult piece of historical detection. He could not simply count the victims one by one, by ex­ amining death records. Instead, he had to arrive at his figure of over 700 deaths by performing a complex epidemiological analysis of ex­ cess deaths in the local county during and after the tunnel-driving years. By extrapolating from this, he determined how many migrant workers (who spent at least two months in the tunnel) would have died from acute silicosis, or related lung diseases, within five years of leaving Hawk’s Nest. Relatively little of The Hawk’s Nest Incident is given over to the actual technology employed in driving the tunnel. The focus is clearly on its social costs and on the failure of institutions and individuals to safeguard human life. For historians...