They widened the tunnel because the rock was worth money.

March 1930.
38.1235° N, 81.1290° W

The New River comes out of the mountains of Virginia and runs north through West Virginia in a gorge it cut for itself. Below the settlement at Hawks Nest it swings around the base of Gauley Mountain in a long bend, doubling back for miles before it reaches the town of Gauley Bridge and joins the Gauley to become the Kanawha. The drop in elevation across that bend was spread out over all those miles of river. Cut straight through the mountain instead, and the same drop arrives all at once.

That was the plan. Dam the New River above Hawks Nest, drive a tunnel through Gauley Mountain, and send the water through the rock rather than around it. At the far end it would fall into turbines.

The current had a buyer waiting. Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation made ferroalloys, and making ferroalloys means running an electric furnace day and night without stopping. Power was not an expense in that business so much as the business itself. A subsidiary, the New Kanawha Power Company, was chartered in West Virginia to build the dam and the tunnel. The construction contract went to Rinehart and Dennis, a firm out of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Work started in the spring of 1930.

The timing brought the men. The country was going into the Depression, and a tunnel job was a job. Word traveled south, and men came up from Alabama and Georgia and the Carolinas on the strength of it. Most of the men who went underground at Hawks Nest were Black. They lived in camps the contractor built near the portals, in board shacks, segregated by race, with rent deducted from the pay. Something on the order of three thousand men worked the job over its length.

The method was ordinary for the period. Drill the face, load the holes with powder, blast, muck out the broken rock, advance. Compressed air drills did the drilling, and there were two ways to run one. A water feed sent a stream down through the drill steel and knocked the dust down as fast as the bit made it. Dry drilling did not, and dry drilling cut faster.

They drilled dry.

Then the rock changed. The mountain held sandstone of very high silica content, in stretches nearly pure. Word went up the line, and the bore was widened past anything a water tunnel required. The excavated silica was hauled out and shipped downriver to the company's own plant, where it went into the furnaces as raw material. The tunnel was still a tunnel. It was also now a quarry, and the men cutting it were being paid tunnel wages.

Silicosis was a known disease in 1930. It had a name, a medical literature, and a reputation as the slow killer of hard rock miners, the thing that caught up with a man after fifteen or twenty years underground. Fine quartz particles reach the deepest tissue of the lung, and the lung walls them off with scar. Enough of them and the scarring takes over the working surface. What was not known was how fast it could happen if the dust was thick enough, because a dust that thick had rarely been produced in an enclosed space.

After every blast, the air inside the heading went white and stayed white. Standard practice was to hold the crews back until it settled. At Hawks Nest the wait was cut to a matter of minutes. Men testified afterward that foremen drove them back to the face before the air cleared, and that some were driven with pick handles. Electric bulbs strung along the bore and the lamps on the men's hats did not carry through it. Crews worked by feel, and came out at the end of a shift coated in gray, hair and skin and clothing, recognizable at a distance by the color of them.

When state inspectors came to look at the work, the water feeds went on the drills.

Men began falling out within months of starting. Shortness of breath came first. Then a cough that brought up nothing. Then breathlessness sitting still. A man in his twenties who had walked onto the job in the spring could not get up the hill to his own shack by the end of the year. The crews had a word for it and the word was tunnelitis. The physicians the company sent to examine the sick men wrote down pneumonia, and sent some of them back to work.

Then the men started dying, and they died in a matter of months rather than years. They died in the camps and in boarding houses in Gauley Bridge and on trains going home.

The contractor made an arrangement with a local undertaker to handle bodies that nobody nearby was going to claim. The undertaker took them to a field near Summersville, in Nicholas County, on ground belonging to his mother, and buried them there without markers. The field was later planted in corn.

Families in the South sometimes learned nothing for months. Sometimes they learned nothing at all. A man who had signed on for tunnel work in West Virginia was, as far as anyone at home could tell, a man who had gone on to the next job.

The tunnel was holed through and the water turned into it. The powerhouse went into service and the furnaces got their current, and the town that grew up around the metals plant downriver eventually took the name Alloy. The crews scattered to wherever there was work.

The lawsuits began in 1932. Hundreds of them were filed in Fayette County by sick men and by widows, against the contractor and against the power company. The first trial ended without a verdict. It came out later that jurors had been reached.

A settlement was concluded in 1933. It covered the whole body of claims for a sum in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars, and roughly half of that went to the plaintiffs' attorneys. What remained was divided on a schedule that paid different amounts to white men and Black men, and different amounts again depending on whether a man had a wife and children. Nobody admitted liability. Some of the men who signed were dead before the money moved.

In January 1936, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Labor took the tunnel up in Washington. Widows testified. Surviving workers testified, some of them unable to get through a sentence without stopping for air. Company officials testified that the deaths were being exaggerated and that the men had come to the job already sick. The subcommittee put the number of dead at 476 and found that the work had been carried out with a disregard for the men that it described in the strongest terms available to it.

No legislation came out of the hearings. Congress moved on.

The Labor Department convened a national conference on silicosis in Washington that same year, and over the next several years most states rewrote their workers' compensation statutes to cover occupational dust diseases. West Virginia was among them. The rewrites applied going forward.

No one was charged with anything. No company officer, no superintendent, no foreman. The contractor finished other jobs. Union Carbide kept the power plant.

In 1938, the poet Muriel Rukeyser published a long sequence about the tunnel, built out of the hearing transcripts and interviews she conducted in Gauley Bridge. It was read as poetry and had no legal consequence.

In 1986, an epidemiologist named Martin Cherniack published a study that went back through the payroll records, the death certificates, the burial records, and the migration patterns of the men who had left. He concluded that the figure of 476 was low, and that the true number of deaths attributable to the tunnel was closer to 764. That count would make it the worst industrial disaster in American history.

The graves near Summersville were disturbed by highway construction decades later, and the remains that could be located were moved and reinterred. A marker went up at the site in the twenty-first century listing what is known of who is under it, which for most of them is not a name.

Hawks Nest Dam still stands. The tunnel through Gauley Mountain has never been taken out of service. The water still goes through the rock, and at the far end of it the turbines are still turning.