Flutterby™! : Hawks Nest Tunnel

Hawks Nest Tunnel to rise from the depths for first time in 85 years. It's a tunnel on the Gauley River, in West Virginia, that I've paddled a number of times. Got this link from a whitewater buddy. But it was built from 1930-1935, and this caught my eye:

The Hawks Nest Tunnel was completed months ahead of schedule by workers who labored six days a week on 10- to 12-hour shifts to drill and blast their way more than 3 miles through Gauley Mountain sandstone. The workers were issued no protective breathing gear to filter silica dust from the air.

According to Martin Cherniack, the medical doctor who wrote “The Hawks Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster,” at least 764 of the 1,213 people who worked in the tunnel for at least two months died from respiratory problems within five years of the tunnel’s completion.

I grew up with, of course, all sorts of tales of the evils of Communism. Pol Pot and Kampuchea were fresh in everyone's mind, my mom taught English as a Second Language to various Laos refugees. Of course Stalin's manipulations were a huge thing.

As I learn more about economics and history, it turns out that wasn't so much Communism as just politics and economics in the 20th Century, and the US was complicit if not an instigator of a whole lot of killing that got swept under the rug.