Admittedly, there’s a spellbinding allure to disaster, close cousin of the sublime. Hypnotic and wordless, the disaster repulses even as it propels one’s attention toward it. I know, because I’m victim to its seduction, too. I live five miles from where the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel tragedy unfolded, along the New River Gorge in Fayette County. Hawk’s Nest is an extreme in a class of extremes—the disaster where truly nothing seemed to survive, even in memory—and I have made a home in its catacombs. The historical record is disgracefully neglectful of the event, and only a handful of the workers’ names were ever made known. What’s more, any understanding of Hawk’s Nest involves the discomfort of the acute race divide in West Virginia, seldom acknowledged or discussed. Indeed, race is still downplayed in official accounts. Disaster binds our people, maybe. But what if you’re one of those deemed unworthy of memory?
HERE’S WHAT WE KNOW: BEGINNING in June of 1930, three thousand men dug a three-mile hole through a sandstone mountain near the town of Gauley Bridge for the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation. The company was building an electrometallurgical plant nearby, which needed an unlimited supply of power and silica, and the tunnel was determined to be the cheapest and most efficient source of both. A dam would be built to divert a powerful column of the New River underground and down a gradually sloping tunnel to four electrical generators; the ground-up silica rock harvested during excavation would be fed into the furnace in Alloy.
Three-quarters of the workers were migratory blacks from the South who lived in temporary work camps, with no local connections or advocates. Turnover on the job was rapid. By some reports, conditions were so dusty that the workers’ drinking water turned white as milk, and the glassy air sliced at their eyes. Some of the men’s lungs filled with silica in a matter of weeks, forming scar tissue that would eventually cut off their oxygen supply; others wheezed with silicosis for decades. When stricken, the migrant workers either fled West Virginia for wherever home was, or they were buried as paupers in mass graves in the fields and woods around Fayette County. The death toll was an estimated, though impossible to confirm, 764 persons, making it the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history.
If the company had wet the sandstone while drilling, or if the workers had been given respirators, most deaths would likely have been avoided. Yet through two major trials, a congressional labor subcommittee hearing in Washington, and eighty-six years of silence, neither Union Carbide nor its contractor—Rinehart & Dennis Company out of Charlottesville, Virginia—has ever admitted wrongdoing. Calling the whole affair a “racket,” in 1933 the company issued settlements between $30 and $1,600 to only a fraction of the affected workers and their families. The black workers received substantially less than their white counterparts.
Soon after the project wrapped, the workers’ shacks were torn down and a country club built to serve Union Carbide’s employees. A state park was established at the site in the mid-1930s, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built a charming stone overlook at what has become one of the most misunderstood and most photographed vistas in the state: the New River, dammed and pooling above the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel. Historical memory of the event has since then constituted nothing short of amnesia. Despite its status as the country’s “greatest” industrial disaster, it remains relatively unknown outside of West Virginia, and even here the incident is barely understood and seldom examined. It took fifty years for the state to mark the deaths at the site. The governor who presided over the disaster’s aftermath, Homer Adams Holt, who went on to serve as Union Carbide’s general counsel, excised the story from the WPA’s narrative West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State. Many also believe that when a novel based on Hawk’s Nest was published in 1941, Union Carbide convinced Doubleday to pull and destroy all copies.