Buried in the Mountain: The Forgotten Tragedy of Gauley Bridge

inside the mountain the air was a white cloud last week we spoke of the greed that sank the steamboat sultana and erased its victims from the ledgers this week we unearth a similar crime found not at the bottom of a river but in a box of brittle death certificates from gauley bridge west virginia the paper is dry the ink faded and one word appears again and again and again pneumonia but that is not what killed these men the year is 1930 the great depression has a firm grip on the country and men are desperate for work a new project promises jobs a three mile tunnel drilled through gauley mountain to divert the new river for a hydroelectric power plant nearly 5,000 men show up most are migrant workers

a majority are african american they are promised a wage a chance to survive they are not told what is inside the mountain the rock is sandstone with a silica content over 90% when drilled and blasted it shatters into a fine sharp dust a lethal dust workers described the tunnel as a constant fog so thick they could barely see they emerged from their shifts caked in a layer of white powder as if they'd been dipped in flour there was no proper ventilation no dust masks the company reinhardt and dennis knew a technique called wet drilling could control the dust but it slowed the work down so it was only used when inspectors were present the project

was classified as civil engineering construction not mining this was a deliberate choice it allowed the company to bypass even the minimal safety regulations that mining laws required there were cash incentives for finishing early the projected four year job was completed in eighteen months the men worked faster the dust grew thicker and soon they began to die they died like flies they called it tunnelitis that was the word company doctors invented to put on the records a euphemism to hide the truth the men were dying of acute silicosis their lungs hardening into stone from the inside out black workers faced the worst of it they testified before congress in 1936 that they were denied thirty

minute breaks in clean air when they grew too sick to work supervisors would force them from their beds sometimes at gunpoint and when they died their bodies were not sent home they were buried in unmarked mass graves one local farmer was paid to let them use her field in the end 538 lawsuits were filed seeking $4,000,000 the first trial ended with no decision eventually the victims received a settlement of $130,000 the lawyers took half the official congressional investigation listed four hundred seventy six deaths later studies place the

number closer to 1,000 union carbide the corporation behind the project has never admitted guilt the story faded another tragedy lost in the hardship of the depression but the evidence was never truly gone it was just filed away buried in archives the hawk's nest tunnel is still in operation today it still diverts the water of the new river it still generates power and it stands as a monument to an engineering achievement built on the slow painful deaths of hundreds of men whose names were deliberately forgotten