The men at Hawk\u2019s Nest were hired to carve out a tunnel in a mountain. What they were really doing, though, was mining the same material that would help kill them.<\/p>\n
In the early 1930s, workers blasted a 3-mile path through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia to carry water to a new hydroelectric plant. But the rock they were breaking apart contained something that Union Carbide, the company behind the project, also wanted: silica. In its solid form, the natural compound of silicon and oxygen is everywhere\u2014quartz, sand, stone, and glass. When it\u2019s reduced to dust that\u2019s small enough to breathe, it becomes much more dangerous.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the tragic twist at the center of \u201cAmerica\u2019s Deadliest Industrial Disaster\u2014and the Cover-Up That Erased It From History<\/a>\u201d. At Hawk\u2019s Nest, the name for the rock outcropping above the New River where the project began, the one thing that made the rock so useful was also the thing that made it so deadly.<\/p>\n Ryan D\u2019Agostino reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cAn internal Union Carbide blueprint drawn up the year before work began, titled \u2018Hawks Nest\u2014Gauley Bridge Development, General Plan of the Profile of the Tunnel,\u2019 includes notations of the core samples taken before construction, showing that it was well-known among the planners that the mountain was almost solid silica. Three hundred thousand tons of the compound would be carted out of the tunnel as it was built, and this would be stored and saved to feed the hungry furnaces of the new plant.\u201d<\/p>\n That new plant would produce ferrosilicon, an alloy of iron and silicon used to make steel. In molten steel, oxygen can create defects, bubbles, and oxide inclusions. Silicon helps remove that oxygen by binding with it, which is why ferrosilicon is so important in metallurgy.<\/p>\n But inside the Hawk\u2019s Nest tunnel, silica wasn\u2019t a controlled industrial ingredient. Drills and dynamite turned it into dust, and workers shoveled and breathed it in.<\/p>\n OSHA describes respirable crystalline silica<\/a> as particles at least 100 times smaller than ordinary sand, created when workers cut, grind, drill, or crush stone and rock. Those particles can travel deep into the lungs<\/a>, where the damage doesn\u2019t always show up right away. Over time, scar tissue forms, breathing worsens, and the body gradually starts losing the one thing it can\u2019t survive without.<\/p>\n Here, the danger is captured in one chilling sentence:<\/p>\n \u201cAwaiting them in the tunnel\u2019s path: thousands of feet of solid rock that, when blasted and drilled and chiseled and shoveled, transformed into tiny, glass-like particles that sliced a million little cuts into your lung tissue until slowly, slowly, slowly, over years even, you died.\u201d<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the thing: it\u2019s not like the the dust was mysterious. By the time work began at Hawk\u2019s Nest, experts already understood the danger of silica dust and knew that water and ventilation could help control it. Union Carbide\u2019s engineers and executives should have known it, too.<\/p>\n This is just one sad detail from the whole tragic story: what Union Carbide knew, what the workers were denied, how the dead were buried, and how America\u2019s worst industrial disaster almost disappeared from history. Read the complete feature now.<\/a><\/p>\n You Might Also Like<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The men at Hawk\u2019s Nest were hired to carve out a tunnel in a mountain. What they were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645626,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[144865,278597,278596,79,278595],"class_list":["post-645625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-hawks-nest","tag-hydroelectric-plant","tag-industrial-disaster","tag-science","tag-union-carbide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}