How many men died building the Hawks Nest Tunnel? The company's number and Congress's number never matched.

1930.

The New River runs north through southern West Virginia, through a gorge it cut long before there were people to name it. Near the town of Gauley Bridge it meets the Gauley River, and the two become the Kanawha. In the late 1920s that country lived on coal, timber, and the railroad. The towns were small. Work came and went with the mines.

Downstream, at a place called Alloy, a Union Carbide subsidiary ran an electro-metallurgical plant. It made alloys for steel, and the furnaces that made them needed enormous amounts of electricity. Union Carbide wanted its own power. The New River dropped steeply through a long bend near Hawks Nest. If the water could be cut off before the bend and sent straight through the mountain, it would arrive at the far side with a long fall behind it. That fall could turn turbines.

A Union Carbide company was set up to build the project. It planned a dam on the New River and a tunnel through Gauley Mountain, a little more than three miles long, to carry the river to a powerhouse downstream. The digging went to a contractor from Charlottesville, Virginia, called Rinehart & Dennis.

The work began in 1930. The country was sliding into the Depression. Men needed jobs badly, and word went out that the tunnel was hiring. They came from all over West Virginia and from the South. Thousands of them worked on the tunnel over its life. Most were Black men who had come up from Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Many lived in camps the contractor put up near the work: shacks, with the cost of housing taken out of their pay.

The tunnel went in from both ends and from shafts sunk along its route. The crews drilled holes in the rock face, packed them with dynamite, blasted, hauled out the broken rock, and drilled again. They worked around the clock in shifts.

What the drills hit was sandstone. In long stretches of Gauley Mountain the rock was almost pure silica, the mineral glass is made from.

Silica is harmless as a solid. Ground into dust fine enough to breathe, it is something else. The particles lodge in the lungs, which cannot clear them. The lung tissue scars around them. The scar spreads. A man breathing heavy silica dust can develop silicosis, the lungs stiffening until he cannot get enough air. In the slower form it takes years. With very high exposure it can come in months.

This was known in 1930. Mining engineers knew it. Public health officials knew it. The standard methods for keeping the dust down were known too. Drilling could be done wet, with water fed through the drill to turn the dust to mud at the bit. Tunnels could be ventilated so the air was pulled out and replaced. Workers could wear respirators.

The Hawks Nest tunnel was largely drilled dry. Wet drilling was slower. The ventilation was poor. After a blast, men went back into the heading before the dust had cleared. Respirators were not generally provided to the workers in the tunnel.

The rock was valuable for more than its fall. The silica coming out of the tunnel was good enough to use at the Alloy plant. Union Carbide took it. In the later investigation, testimony described the company widening part of the tunnel, and the extra rock it brought out went to the plant.

The dust inside the headings was thick enough that the men could see only a short distance by the light of their lamps. When the shifts came out, they were coated white. In Gauley Bridge, people would later testify that the men coming out of the tunnel were so covered that it was hard to tell the Black workers from the white ones.

Men began getting sick within months. They were short of breath. They coughed. They lost weight. They could not keep up with the work, and men who could not keep up were let go and replaced. Some went home. Some stayed in the camps. Some died there.

A local doctor treated many of them. The illness was given names that did not point at the tunnel. The men called it tunnelitis. On paper, deaths were frequently put down to pneumonia or other causes.

The bodies of men who died far from home, without family nearby to claim them, had to be buried somewhere. A local undertaker was paid to bury some of them in a field near Summersville, in the next county. The graves were shallow. The record left by the later investigation describes the field and the burials. Some of the graves were marked only with cornstalks.

The tunnel was holed through in 1931. Water was turned into it, and the powerhouse began generating. Electricity went down the line to Alloy, and the furnaces ran.

By then the dying had moved out of the tunnel and into the homes and camps along the gorge. It continued after the work ended. The men who had been hired to dig the tunnel had been paid off. Many had nowhere to go. Many of the ones who had come from the South went back there, and some of them died there, far from the records of Fayette County.

The families and the surviving workers sued. Hundreds of lawsuits were filed against Rinehart & Dennis. The first case went to trial in 1933 and ended without a verdict. Most of the rest were settled out of court in a group settlement. The total amount was small, and a large share of it went to the lawyers. There were later reports that one of the plaintiffs' attorneys had been paid by the contractor.

West Virginia's workers' compensation law at the time did not cover silicosis. Men who had it were left out.

The story spread slowly beyond the gorge. Reporters wrote about Gauley Bridge as a town of dying men. In 1936 a subcommittee of the House Committee on Labor held hearings in Washington on what had happened in the tunnel. Witnesses described the dry drilling, the dust, the lack of masks, and the burials. A doctor testified about the X-rays he had taken of tunnel workers' chests.

The hearings produced estimates of the dead far above anything the company acknowledged. The contractor and Union Carbide kept to a much smaller count.

Congress took no further action. The subcommittee called for further investigation, and none followed.

The tunnel drew the attention of writers. In 1938 the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who had traveled to Gauley Bridge, published a sequence of poems about it called "The Book of the Dead," drawing on testimony from the hearings. Gradually, the story slipped back out of the national memory.

The number that has never been settled is the one that matters most. Union Carbide's figure for deaths among the tunnel workers was around one hundred. The congressional hearings produced estimates in the hundreds. In 1986 a physician and public health researcher named Martin Cherniack published a book, The Hawk's Nest Incident, built on employment records, medical studies, and death statistics. He estimated that 764 of the tunnel workers died of silicosis. If his estimate is right, it is among the worst industrial disasters in American history.

No one was charged with a crime.

West Virginia added silicosis to its workers' compensation law in 1935. Over the following years, federal and state rules on dust in mines and tunnels were strengthened. Wet drilling and ventilation became standard practice.

The field near Summersville where the undertaker buried men stayed mostly unmarked for decades. In the 1970s, construction of a highway through the area disturbed some of the graves. Some remains were moved.

West Virginia has since put up a historical marker near the tunnel. It stands along the road, in a state park built on the edge of the gorge, beside an overlook where visitors stop to look down at the New River.

Union Carbide sold the hydroelectric project decades later. It still runs. The dam still diverts the New River into Gauley Mountain, the water still falls through the tunnel the men drilled dry, and the powerhouse at the far end is still generating electricity today.