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Speaker 1: Who Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards show,

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Speaker 1: where I enunciate the title slightly differently so that you

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Speaker 1: stay interested and don't slip into a belief that you

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Speaker 1: all of these episodes are just kind of like one

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Speaker 1: long episode and you're just sort of like lost in

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Speaker 1: space consuming it. Anyway, that was that what you were

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Speaker 1: going for there, buddy? Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like

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Speaker 1: a k hole but for your ears, speaking of while

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Speaker 1: not really speaking about ketamine, but anyway, Jason pargin.

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Speaker 2: Part two, The Triumphant Part two, the first part kind

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Speaker 2: of ended on an Empire strikes back a down note.

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Speaker 2: This is going to get us through to the Return

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Speaker 2: of the Jedi, when the Empire is finally finally going

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Speaker 2: to fall in. This company, this evil corporation behind this

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Speaker 2: disaster going to be dissolved. That they could clearly not

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Speaker 2: still in business after nineteen thirty whatever, once this stuff

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Speaker 2: all comes out. I'm sure I've not looked it up.

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Speaker 2: I'm sure they were not allowed to operate anywhere in

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Speaker 2: the world after this.

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Speaker 1: I've forgotten most of what I wrote here, but I'm

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Speaker 1: sure you're right on that one.

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Speaker 2: Jason.

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Speaker 1: Now, Jason, are you do you have a thing that

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Speaker 1: you've got a plug here that you yes, yeah, moving.

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Speaker 2: The new book is called Zoe is Too Drunk for

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Speaker 2: This Dystopia. Add in all formats on October thirty first,

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Speaker 2: twenty twenty three. If you are listening to this after

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Speaker 2: that date, it should be out wherever books are sold

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Speaker 2: in any possible format. If it is not out, boy,

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Speaker 2: google my name, because something terrible must have happened. I

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Speaker 2: can't imagine. It must have gotten canceled and pulled from shelves.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, Jason got canceled for his clandestine work in Nicaragua

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Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties or something like that. Look, we

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Speaker 1: all have we all have a dark history of clandestine

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Speaker 1: work in Latin America at some point in the nineties.

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Speaker 1: You know, don't don't be judgmental people, they'll come for

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Speaker 1: you next. This is the problem with cancel culture.

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Speaker 2: And also that does not get you canceled. Those people are.

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Speaker 1: Those people are very much you know, they're all fine.

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Speaker 1: So let's talk about another kind of canceled silicosis. So

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Speaker 1: one of the you know you mentioned there's not a

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Speaker 1: lot of sources on this. There there are some very

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Speaker 1: good sources on this, but they are kind of obscure

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Speaker 1: and buried, and honestly the very best, like early like

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Speaker 1: the the in terms of like stuff that how close

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Speaker 1: it is to the actual disaster, probably the best overall

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Speaker 1: work kind of covering this at least that that's kind

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Speaker 1: of contemporary to it. Happening is not a piece of

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Speaker 1: traditional journalism or like a traditional nonfiction book. It's a poem,

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Speaker 1: an epic poem. So we're not talking about like a

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Speaker 1: little rhyming thing. We're talking about almost like the Illea

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Speaker 1: or the Odyssey. Right, there's an epic poem about the

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Speaker 1: Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, The Book of the Dead, written

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Speaker 1: by Muriel Rukeiser. She was, you know, someone who grew

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Speaker 1: up soon after the disaster and came to west you know,

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Speaker 1: this part of West Virginia and was able to meet

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Speaker 1: and interview a bunch of the survivors and their family members.

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Speaker 1: And so it's this mix of you know, art where

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Speaker 1: where she is, you know, using kind of the medium

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Speaker 1: of poetry to talk through, to kind of set the

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Speaker 1: scene and to talk through you know, how horrifying this was.

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Speaker 1: But also large chunks of it are straight up interviews

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Speaker 1: with survivors and their family members that have been kind

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Speaker 1: of set to meet her in order to fit into

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Speaker 1: the work. I haven't ever encountered anything like this before actually,

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Speaker 1: and within sort of West Virginia, you know, academic spheres.

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Speaker 1: It's a pretty famous book. I had to, you know,

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Speaker 1: actually buy a physical copy of it because it's not online.

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Speaker 1: But it's it's very good. It's it's really remarkable, and

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Speaker 1: it is considered one of the more important pieces of

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Speaker 1: kind of labor journalism of this era. I think it's

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Speaker 1: been forgotten by most people now, but it shouldn't be.

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Speaker 1: It is a pretty remarkable work of art. So I

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Speaker 1: do want to encourage people check out Muriel Rakaiser's Book

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Speaker 1: of the Dead. We're going to be quoting from it

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Speaker 1: a couple of times here because it contains interviews with

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Speaker 1: people from that period of time.

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Speaker 2: In the last episode, we kind of joked about the

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Speaker 2: fact that I'm mostly known for TikTok, which is true.

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Speaker 2: Far more people have watched my tech talks and have

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Speaker 2: read any of my books. But I on there, I

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Speaker 2: talked about the HBO mini series they did about Chernobyl, Yeah,

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Speaker 2: and I talked about how they made it not as

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Speaker 2: a documentary or as a docuseries or anything like that.

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Speaker 2: They made it as a horror movie. Yeah, Like it

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Speaker 2: is highly stylized, and I was in that technok. I

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Speaker 2: was defending that choice because I was like, you can't

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Speaker 2: convey the reality of Chernobyl without trying to convey the

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Speaker 2: fact that it played out like cosmic horror to these people,

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Speaker 2: that you had this church demon thing you brought into

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Speaker 2: the world, and that everyone who looked at it their

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Speaker 2: flesh started melting off their bones. So it is highly

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Speaker 2: stylized because that's the only thing to really drive home,

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Speaker 2: Whereas if you just try to convey it as a

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Speaker 2: clinical piece of journalism, it doesn't hit the same way.

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Speaker 2: It is trying to bring you into what it was

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Speaker 2: like to live that situation that no one had ever

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Speaker 2: lived through before. There had never been a meltdown before.

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Speaker 2: Where here, I think it's the same thing if you're

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Speaker 2: trying to convey the actual horror of what occurred. Because

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Speaker 2: this mind, as we described in the previous episode. Please

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Speaker 2: go back to listen to that one if you have

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Speaker 2: not yet, it was hell on Earth. Yeah, Like you're

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Speaker 2: in this dark space that is cramped. Even if it's

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Speaker 2: a spacious mind, you're still you know, it's now far

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Speaker 2: enough that you're long out of the sunlight, and the

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Speaker 2: air is burning you. It's burning your eyes, it's burning

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Speaker 2: your nose, it's burning your lungs. It's probably burning your

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Speaker 2: skin like you're the teeny tiny pieces of glass. An

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Speaker 2: epic poem is as appropriate as anything as I can

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Speaker 2: think of to try to convey that this is an

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Speaker 2: epic tragedy. It's so easy to talk about this in

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Speaker 2: a way that we talk about numbers in the science

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Speaker 2: of it that doesn't convey what it was like to

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Speaker 2: get up and go to work in this place every day.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, absolutely, And I think Rukeiser does a really

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Speaker 1: admirable job of that. One of the accounts that she

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Speaker 1: provides is from a woman, and this is from one

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Speaker 1: of the relatively small number of laborers who were from

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Speaker 1: the nearby town of golly Bridge. This woman, this mother,

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Speaker 1: is named Absalom, and she has three sons who all

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Speaker 1: go to work in this tunnel. They had been coal

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Speaker 1: miners previously, but work was uneven, and as ru Keiser writes, quote,

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Speaker 1: a power company foreman learned that we made homebrew. He

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Speaker 1: formed a habit of dropping by in the evenings to drink,

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Speaker 1: persuading the boys and my husband to give up their

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Speaker 1: jobs and take this other work. It would pay them better.

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Speaker 1: Sureley is my youngest boy. He went into the tunnel.

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Speaker 1: I saw the dust at the bottom of the tub.

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Speaker 1: The boy worked there about eighteen months. Came home one

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Speaker 1: evening with a shortness of breath. He said, mother, I

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Speaker 1: cannot get my breath. Shirley was sick about three months.

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Speaker 1: I would carry him from his bed to the table,

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Speaker 1: from his bed to the porch in my arms. So

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Speaker 1: that's terrible, but it's also worth noting Absalom and her

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Speaker 1: family are kind of among the luckier victims in that

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Speaker 1: her kids and her husband, when they get sick, they

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Speaker 1: have a home in town that's stable, they have family

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Speaker 1: to take care of them. They're not completely in the wind.

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Speaker 1: So when Shirley gets sick, he's able to stay with

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Speaker 1: his mom and get care from his mom. This does

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Speaker 1: not ultimately save his life, but it's a less horrific

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Speaker 1: experience than a lot of these black laborers are forced

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Speaker 1: to endure. I want you to imagine not just the

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Speaker 1: tunnel horror, which Jason just described pretty ably, but living

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Speaker 1: and working in a camp outside the dig project. Right,

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Speaker 1: you're in these cramped quarters. You're in a tiny box

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Speaker 1: of a room with ten to fifteen other guys. None

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Speaker 1: of you are able to There's not hygiene facilities that

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Speaker 1: are good or super regular, so everything reeks. There's also

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Speaker 1: this chloeing silica dust that you just can't get all

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Speaker 1: the way off you. It's always on everything, and one

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Speaker 1: day you find that you just can't draw in breath.

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Speaker 1: It feels like a flu at first, maybe that's what

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Speaker 1: it is, you think, and you start coughing incessantly, But

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Speaker 1: the misery is so intense eventually that you stop being

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Speaker 1: able to work, and you can't sleep at night. Right,

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Speaker 1: So in the morning when it's time to go in,

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Speaker 1: you're not like you can't function right, you can't go

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Speaker 1: in there and do your job. You're coughing up a

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Speaker 1: lung and you haven't slept in days. This is an

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Speaker 1: experience that happens to a lot of these guys. In

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six, a newsreel interviewed one of these hawks

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Speaker 1: next workers after the fact, who claimed, quote, each and

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Speaker 1: every day I worked in that tunnel, I helped carry

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Speaker 1: off ten to fourteen men who was overcome by the

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Speaker 1: dust now there's no sick days in this period of time,

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Speaker 1: especially not for black migrant laborers in the midst of

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Speaker 1: a massive labor surplus. From Maine harton Davis's perspective, right,

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Speaker 1: the contractor union Carbide is directing to do all this.

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Speaker 1: Workers staying in their shanties are taking up space, and

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Speaker 1: if they're not working, that space has to go to

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Speaker 1: someone who will. So they hired security from the nearby

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Speaker 1: town to go through the camp after everyone had left

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Speaker 1: for work and hunt down the sick people who might

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Speaker 1: be like hiding, trying to like sneak a day sleeping

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Speaker 1: or something while their lungs rot in their chests. Cherniac

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Speaker 1: writes of this quote, Ryan Hart and Dennis retained as

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Speaker 1: an enforcement officer and formerly called a shack rouster. A

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Speaker 1: Georgian named McLeod, who was assisted by a black camp

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Speaker 1: overseer called Big John McLoud, carried firearms in a club.

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Speaker 1: With these, he is said to have forced black workers

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Speaker 1: to vacate the camp at the start of each work shift.

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Speaker 1: According to a surviving black tunnel worker, beatings were routinely

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Speaker 1: administered as part of this early morning ritual. The camps

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Speaker 1: of the colored men we're not close to the camps

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Speaker 1: of the for the white men. If a colored man

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Speaker 1: was sick and really couldn't go out to work in

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Speaker 1: the morning, he had to hide out before the shock

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Speaker 1: rouster came about. That fellow had two pistols in a

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Speaker 1: blackjack to force men to go to work. And it's

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Speaker 1: worth highlighting here the two pistols because rousters there's other rousters.

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Speaker 1: They're usually listed as carrying one. McLoud is carrying two.

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Speaker 1: Because the only reason to do that if you're in

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Speaker 1: this situation is if you're worried that you might find

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Speaker 1: yourself at the center of a mob of angry, sick

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Speaker 1: workers and need to kind of blast your way through

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Speaker 1: a bunch of people. Right, that's the only reason you

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Speaker 1: would need that for this job, which is basically just

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Speaker 1: like poking people in their bed and getting them up,

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Speaker 1: so kind of let you know the quality of dudes

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Speaker 1: who are doing this job.

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Speaker 2: You made a mention that these are very replaceable workers

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Speaker 2: because there's a labor surplus, and this is something we

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Speaker 2: imaged the first episode. I really want to reiterate this context.

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Speaker 2: There are so many people out of work and so

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Speaker 2: many people desperate for work. Again, at a level of

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Speaker 2: abject poverty that we kind of don't have anymore in America, Like,

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Speaker 2: no matter how bad it gets, it doesn't get bad

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Speaker 2: like this was because again, they didn't have the infrastructure

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Speaker 2: back then. So the fact that it is so easy

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Speaker 2: that when somebody dies or somebody is incapacitated, that you

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Speaker 2: can drag them away and know that when you post

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Speaker 2: that job you will have one hundred guys or migrants

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Speaker 2: willing to come in and fill it. The value of

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Speaker 2: a human life drops blow zero because they're costing you

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Speaker 2: money for every minute they're not up and working. It's

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Speaker 2: that is the context that they know they can replace

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Speaker 2: these people, because it would be different if you were

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Speaker 2: talking about a core group of guys who have been

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Speaker 2: trained for months and had to do a job, and

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Speaker 2: then when one goes down, the productivity drops. Now you

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Speaker 2: have to be concerned, not at for humanitarian reasons, but

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Speaker 2: for productivity reasons, like if they're all sick, like we

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Speaker 2: got to fix this, We got to get them because

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Speaker 2: they're not working. It's not like that they're all so

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Speaker 2: interchangeable that when one of them drops, they can just

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Speaker 2: plug another one in.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And that really is the core of like

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Speaker 1: why they're able to get away with a lot of this.

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Speaker 1: So there are reports that sick men were sometimes even

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Speaker 1: killed by rousters for refusing to leave. MacLeod and his

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Speaker 1: men were essentially immune to the consequences of whatever actions

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Speaker 1: they took. He had been deputized by the Sheriff of

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Speaker 1: Fayette County, so he's legally a law enforcement officer. This

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Speaker 1: like maniac who's like rolling into shacks full of dying

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Speaker 1: people with two handguns to like force them out, is

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Speaker 1: a cop at this point in time too. He's in

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Speaker 1: the pay directly of the Union Carbide Corporation. And McLoud

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Speaker 1: also runs a Saturday night saloon. It's illegal to drink

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Speaker 1: and gamble in this area at this point, but you know,

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Speaker 1: he's a cop, so he's able to get away with it.

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Speaker 1: And it was specifically a Saturday night saloon for black laborers.

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Speaker 1: So McLeod is kind of getting you know, when these

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Speaker 1: guys get out of work exault, they need something to

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Speaker 1: distract them. He runs this thing that takes their money

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Speaker 1: for booze and for gambling. And then when they're out

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Speaker 1: of work and they're sick, or when they're out of

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Speaker 1: money and they're sick. He'll make money kicking them out

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Speaker 1: of these shacks that they stay. And it's also when

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Speaker 1: he does this night saloon, most nights will end with

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Speaker 1: a raid and a mass arrest because he's. Part of

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Speaker 1: why he's allowed to do this is he's coordinating with

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Speaker 1: the sheriff of Fayette County and the sheriff of Fayett County.

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Speaker 1: When they arrest these guys for gambling and drinking, they

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Speaker 1: don't take them to jail. So that's good because that

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Speaker 1: would hurt Union Carbide, right, that would slow down production.

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Speaker 1: They find them all right, so they just take money

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Speaker 1: from them because they got caught drinking at this thing

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Speaker 1: that the police are basically helping to run. It's just

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Speaker 1: like these black labors are being so comprehensively mined while

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Speaker 1: they are mining. Right, That's one of the things that

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Speaker 1: is kind of worth acknowledging about how unjust this situation is.

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Speaker 2: A corporate world, they call this synergy.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, this is synergy.

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Speaker 2: There's snitchs all possible angles to make sure that you're

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Speaker 2: maximizing the every possible dime you could squeeze from this

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Speaker 2: human being before they can no longer stand up.

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Speaker 1: And again you couldn't do the sheriffa Fayette County wouldn't

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Speaker 1: do this to a workforce that was local, right because

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Speaker 1: number one, those are your voters, right, And number two,

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Speaker 1: that'll endanger you. Someone's got to kill you eventually for

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Speaker 1: doing that in town if you're doing that to your neighbors.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: But these guys they're not from town. They're black, and

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Speaker 1: they're dying so quickly that there's very little institutional memory

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Speaker 1: that can protect them from scams like this, right, by

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Speaker 1: which I mean you get in there and maybe your

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Speaker 1: fellow workers have only been there for a couple of

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Speaker 1: weeks because people are turning over so quickly, so like

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Speaker 1: nobody really knows how much they're getting fucked with, so

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Speaker 1: there's not much warning to get There's not old timers

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Speaker 1: in a lot of cases, right, because they die so quickly.

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Speaker 2: Now.

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Speaker 1: Cherniac is also careful to note that racism was experienced

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Speaker 1: by black ow workers, often at the hands of their

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Speaker 1: fellow victims, white tunnel workers who are also getting silicosis.

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Speaker 1: So you know that is a dimension here. Quote discipline

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Speaker 1: of blacks by whites is similarly recalled by a gully

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Speaker 1: Bridge man whose elder brother worked on the tunnel and

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Speaker 1: later died from silicosis. He described his brother as not

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Speaker 1: liking the and then he uses a slur, an attribute

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Speaker 1: which apparently served to qualify him as a foreman for

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Speaker 1: Ryan Harton Dennis. He routinely attended to his duties in

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Speaker 1: the tunnel armed with a baseball bat. And again he

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Speaker 1: was one of the guys. He's forcing these black laborers

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Speaker 1: forward into this dust cloud, but he is also entering

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Speaker 1: the dust cloud without protection. So that's a decent number

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Speaker 1: of the men who die are the guys who kind

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Speaker 1: of do this and don't realize that, like, as they

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Speaker 1: sign the death warrants of these other men, they're also

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Speaker 1: killing themselves.

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Speaker 2: I realize that it sounds like we're making some sort

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Speaker 2: of a ham fisted metaphor that these guys don't realize

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Speaker 2: they're breathing the same they're all breathing the same poison

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Speaker 2: air that, like their race, convinces them that somehow they're

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Speaker 2: coming out on top, even though the bosses equally don't

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Speaker 2: care about their lives. Really, but it's not really a metaphor.

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Speaker 2: It's just a thing that's literally happening.

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Speaker 1: In this case. It's just what's going down, Yeah, Joe,

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Speaker 1: it's yeah, cool stuff. Sometimes reality provides us with those moments.

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Speaker 1: I guess, I don't know.

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Speaker 2: Do you think there would be a solidarity in those

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Speaker 2: tunnels with those white guys saying, hey, I now kind

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Speaker 2: of get it. I get it. I see we're on

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Speaker 2: the same team against the people who control the capital.

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Speaker 2: Maybe we should all join up together. It's like, no,

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Speaker 2: as long as I have my racism, I don't need

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Speaker 2: clean air.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it is it. Really, there's a lot to dig

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Speaker 1: into here. This is part of the way I think

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Speaker 1: this is such a worthwhile moment and disaster for people

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Speaker 1: to know more about. Like, it really is important for

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Speaker 1: people to be aware of this history, and that's one

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Speaker 1: reason why. So Also, you know, if we're talking about

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Speaker 1: outside of the rate and the speed of silicosis here,

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Speaker 1: these are all things happening in other minds and industrial

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Speaker 1: construction projects around the country, right. The use of white

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Speaker 1: workers to do violence to black workers to force them

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Speaker 1: to labor. You know, these kind of like cops basically

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Speaker 1: hired by these companies to enforce their who take advantage

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Speaker 1: of them, rob them, beat them, kill them. All. All

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Speaker 1: of that is common in other projects. The difference here

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Speaker 1: is that at Hawk's Nest, they're doing it to men

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Speaker 1: who are dying in a matter of weeks, sometimes of

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Speaker 1: an easily preventable illness caused by the labor. Right, sixty

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Speaker 1: percent of the men who work in this tunnel last

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Speaker 1: less than two months. Eighty percent lasts less than six months.

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Speaker 1: Virtually everyone quits, dies or becomes too sick to work

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Speaker 1: in less than a year. You know, when we're talking

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Speaker 1: about these low skilled, unprotected workers, right, almost no one

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Speaker 1: makes it a year. Right again, sixty percent less than

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Speaker 1: two months. Now, a lot of those guys are leaving

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Speaker 1: because they're like, maybe they've got a little more options,

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Speaker 1: they've got some money, and they're like, well, this is

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Speaker 1: a death trap. I'm not going to stay here. But

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Speaker 1: a significant chunk of that sixty percent are getting sick

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Speaker 1: and eventually dying, you know, after just a couple of

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Speaker 1: weeks of labor. Absalom's son, Shirley, who we heard from

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Speaker 1: earlier from that poem, was one of the first to

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Speaker 1: fall ill before the company admitted any awareness to the

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Speaker 1: dangers of silicosis, and before the local medical community realized

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Speaker 1: what was happening. Her story lays out in horrifying detail,

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Speaker 1: how frustrating the process of trying to find any answer

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Speaker 1: could be quote, and this is Ruke Heiser kind of

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Speaker 1: quoting from her interview of this mother. When they took sick,

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Speaker 1: right at the start, I saw a doctor. I tried

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Speaker 1: to get doctor Harlest to x ray the boys. He

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Speaker 1: was the only man I had any confidence in the

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Speaker 1: company doctor in the Copper's mind. But he would not

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Speaker 1: see Shirley. He did not know where his money was

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Speaker 1: coming from. I promised him half if he'd worked to

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Speaker 1: get compensation, but even then he would not do anything.

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Speaker 1: I went on the road and begged x ray money.

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Speaker 1: The Charleston hospital made the lung pictures. He took the

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Speaker 1: case after the pictures were made. After two or three

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Speaker 1: doctors said the same thing. The youngest boy, Shirley did

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Speaker 1: not go down there with me. He lay and said, Mother,

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Speaker 1: when I die, I want you to have them open

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Speaker 1: me up and see if that dust killed me. Try

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Speaker 1: to get compensation. You will not have any way of

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Speaker 1: making your living when we are gone, and the rest

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Speaker 1: are going too. And what surely means by that is

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Speaker 1: her husband and all three of her sons are in

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Speaker 1: this mine, and as he gets sick. Shirley realizes we

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Speaker 1: are all dead. Mom's going to be alone. She'll have

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Speaker 1: no like the only hope of support is for us

378
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Speaker 1: to get compensation through some sort of lawsuit right for

379
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Speaker 1: our deaths, because we're already dead men. That's about as

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Speaker 1: bad as it gets already.

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Speaker 2: I think there are some listeners out there who are

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Speaker 2: feeling a sense of dread because at the very top

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Speaker 2: of the first episode we mentioned how the death toll

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Speaker 2: from this disaster ranges from a couple hundred to two over

385
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Speaker 2: a thousand, and I think there are some people saying, well,

386
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Speaker 2: how can they not know? Like, you've got doctor visits,

387
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Speaker 2: You've got aren't there records? Aren't there records of who

388
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Speaker 2: joined the project and of what happened to those people.

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Speaker 2: We're going to get into that because the answer of

390
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Speaker 2: how you can lose hundreds of dead people, this is

391
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Speaker 2: something that you could do in the nineteen thirties. You

392
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Speaker 2: could not do now because everyone has tracked, everyone has papers,

393
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Speaker 2: everyone has a social security number, driver's license, on and

394
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Speaker 2: on and on. This was an era when that stuff

395
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Speaker 2: did not exist to a very large degree. This was

396
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Speaker 2: an era when if you wanted to leave and abandon

397
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Speaker 2: your family. You could just move like five miles down

398
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Speaker 2: the road and you just tell people you went by

399
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Speaker 2: a different name, and that's it, Like there was there's

400
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Speaker 2: esuchally as photo ID is. So you could just lose people.

401
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Speaker 2: And I do not think people appreciate the opportunities it

402
00:20:55,720 --> 00:20:59,439
Speaker 2: creates for everything from serial killers to industrial disasters, that

403
00:20:59,480 --> 00:21:02,760
Speaker 2: you could just pile people in a mass grave and

404
00:21:02,920 --> 00:21:07,560
Speaker 2: literally nobody knows what happened to them. Somewhere in another state,

405
00:21:07,880 --> 00:21:11,639
Speaker 2: in Virginia or Tennessee or North Carolina. You've got some

406
00:21:11,800 --> 00:21:14,199
Speaker 2: family and they know that this guy went off to

407
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Speaker 2: go take a job in West Virginia and he just

408
00:21:17,080 --> 00:21:18,840
Speaker 2: never came back. And you don't know if maybe he

409
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Speaker 2: just stayed there, maybe changed his name, maybe passed some

410
00:21:21,640 --> 00:21:24,720
Speaker 2: unrelated reason. Maybe he moved and now he lives in Montana.

411
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Speaker 2: You just didn't know.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's you know, it's it's it's particularly like

413
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Speaker 1: fucked up that like that story we told of Absalom

414
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Speaker 1: horrible because she's a local, because she lives, she's part

415
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Speaker 1: of a community, she has some stability. She's going to

416
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Speaker 1: be able to like sue and stuff like that. That

417
00:21:46,840 --> 00:21:50,400
Speaker 1: is how this gets out like when this becomes known,

418
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Speaker 1: when there start to be news articles about it, when

419
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Speaker 1: there's investigations. It's because of the fairly small minority of

420
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Speaker 1: locals who lose family members. These black were are like

421
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Speaker 1: you said, they don't exist once they reach the mind right,

422
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Speaker 1: like they die, and you as we'll talk about like

423
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Speaker 1: you can kind of make them disappear so that there's

424
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Speaker 1: not going to be any kind of like justice for

425
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Speaker 1: most of these guys. Their families never find out what's happening.

426
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Speaker 1: Now when it comes to the rate at which sort

427
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Speaker 1: of it becomes obvious what's making these people sick, there

428
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Speaker 1: is that mortician who finds out earlier that doesn't get

429
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Speaker 1: out very far past. Like executives at the company, Ryan

430
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Speaker 1: Hart and Dennis employed two physicians in order to like

431
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Speaker 1: watch over the workforce, take care of people who get

432
00:22:34,200 --> 00:22:38,679
Speaker 1: sick and injured, and both men primarily existed to deny

433
00:22:38,840 --> 00:22:41,280
Speaker 1: sick workers that their ailments had anything to do with

434
00:22:41,400 --> 00:22:44,280
Speaker 1: the tunnel project. They would usually say it was pneumonia

435
00:22:44,400 --> 00:22:47,040
Speaker 1: or some other communicable disease. They would tell people to

436
00:22:47,160 --> 00:22:49,240
Speaker 1: keep working. They would tell them that they did not

437
00:22:49,400 --> 00:22:52,520
Speaker 1: need any protective gear, and then they would give them pills.

438
00:22:52,800 --> 00:22:56,320
Speaker 1: These two guys, doctor Simmons and doctor Mitchell, their primary

439
00:22:56,400 --> 00:22:59,520
Speaker 1: path like method whenever someone comes in with silicosis is

440
00:22:59,560 --> 00:23:01,960
Speaker 1: to give them and these pills called little black devils,

441
00:23:02,000 --> 00:23:05,360
Speaker 1: these little black pills that are just their placebos. It's

442
00:23:05,400 --> 00:23:08,760
Speaker 1: baking soda covered in sugar. Like they know that they're

443
00:23:08,800 --> 00:23:12,639
Speaker 1: not giving people real medicine. It's a delaying tactic. And

444
00:23:12,760 --> 00:23:14,719
Speaker 1: another thing you have to realize when it's like, how

445
00:23:14,760 --> 00:23:16,880
Speaker 1: did this they get away with this? This is all

446
00:23:16,880 --> 00:23:19,280
Speaker 1: taking place pretty much in a year or so, right,

447
00:23:20,240 --> 00:23:22,280
Speaker 1: eighteen months for some of the work, I think, but

448
00:23:22,480 --> 00:23:27,280
Speaker 1: it happens very quickly. So both Union Carbide and Ryan

449
00:23:27,280 --> 00:23:29,520
Speaker 1: Hart and Dennis know all we got to do is

450
00:23:29,600 --> 00:23:31,920
Speaker 1: push through to the completion line and then our lawyers

451
00:23:31,920 --> 00:23:34,560
Speaker 1: can handle the fallout. Right, So give these guys some

452
00:23:34,640 --> 00:23:37,560
Speaker 1: fake medicine. Maybe that'll keep them at Bay another couple

453
00:23:37,560 --> 00:23:39,840
Speaker 1: of months. A lot so many of them will die

454
00:23:39,880 --> 00:23:41,480
Speaker 1: that then we won't have to deal with those guys.

455
00:23:41,520 --> 00:23:44,240
Speaker 1: And like, every week we can put this off gets

456
00:23:44,280 --> 00:23:45,720
Speaker 1: us closer to the finish line.

457
00:23:45,880 --> 00:23:46,080
Speaker 2: Right.

458
00:23:46,720 --> 00:23:51,320
Speaker 1: There's also you know a decent amount of ignorance basically

459
00:23:52,119 --> 00:23:54,720
Speaker 1: among the local medical community, and it's not because they

460
00:23:54,760 --> 00:23:56,719
Speaker 1: don't know about silicosis. As I said, this is a

461
00:23:56,760 --> 00:24:01,080
Speaker 1: really well known illness, but it normally takes years, even

462
00:24:01,200 --> 00:24:05,080
Speaker 1: decades for people to get black lung of this severity.

463
00:24:05,320 --> 00:24:09,199
Speaker 1: No one has mined silica this peer and this quantity before,

464
00:24:09,320 --> 00:24:11,840
Speaker 1: Like it's pretty much unprecedented. I don't think there were

465
00:24:11,880 --> 00:24:15,240
Speaker 1: really any minds of this size dealing with this quantity

466
00:24:15,280 --> 00:24:19,239
Speaker 1: of pure silica. So there there are doctors who know

467
00:24:19,400 --> 00:24:23,199
Speaker 1: about silica who are not you know, unethical men, but

468
00:24:23,680 --> 00:24:27,359
Speaker 1: they're just seeing how much this is. This is hitting people,

469
00:24:27,520 --> 00:24:31,479
Speaker 1: killing them, you know, three four, five hundred percent faster

470
00:24:31,800 --> 00:24:34,360
Speaker 1: than they're used to. So they don't they don't necessarily

471
00:24:34,560 --> 00:24:36,560
Speaker 1: know that. They're like I have, I don't. Maybe this

472
00:24:36,600 --> 00:24:38,679
Speaker 1: is something different, right, Maybe this is some new virus

473
00:24:38,720 --> 00:24:42,159
Speaker 1: that's sweeping through town. So there is among some of

474
00:24:42,200 --> 00:24:44,840
Speaker 1: the medical professionals who are trying to puzzle this out,

475
00:24:45,119 --> 00:24:48,359
Speaker 1: there is reason to be consumed concerned, right, But within

476
00:24:48,400 --> 00:24:51,520
Speaker 1: the company doctors, there's there's evidence that the company has

477
00:24:51,560 --> 00:24:53,960
Speaker 1: access to that makes it much clearer what's happening, and

478
00:24:54,000 --> 00:24:56,520
Speaker 1: that would have made it clearer to everyone earlier on

479
00:24:56,920 --> 00:25:01,120
Speaker 1: that they delect, like deliberately keep away from people, right,

480
00:25:01,760 --> 00:25:04,720
Speaker 1: So yeah, further evidence for this comes from the fact

481
00:25:04,720 --> 00:25:08,120
Speaker 1: that company policies on stuff like wetting the drills would

482
00:25:08,280 --> 00:25:10,840
Speaker 1: change depending on whether or not government observers were in

483
00:25:10,880 --> 00:25:13,399
Speaker 1: town to monitor the work. Right when people start dying,

484
00:25:13,760 --> 00:25:17,240
Speaker 1: the government sends in teams to like monitor, and so

485
00:25:17,520 --> 00:25:19,960
Speaker 1: Ryan Hart and Dennis will say, Okay, everybody, today, we're

486
00:25:20,000 --> 00:25:22,399
Speaker 1: going to wet down the drills and we're going to

487
00:25:22,480 --> 00:25:25,760
Speaker 1: wait two hours after blasting to send new teams in.

488
00:25:26,119 --> 00:25:28,720
Speaker 1: And then when the government observers leave, they go right

489
00:25:28,760 --> 00:25:31,280
Speaker 1: back to the old procedures that are much faster and

490
00:25:31,359 --> 00:25:32,280
Speaker 1: much more dangerous.

491
00:25:33,280 --> 00:25:33,480
Speaker 2: You know.

492
00:25:33,840 --> 00:25:37,200
Speaker 1: Again, you can't just like regulate by having a guy

493
00:25:37,320 --> 00:25:39,920
Speaker 1: come by once to check something like this. That's easy

494
00:25:39,920 --> 00:25:40,399
Speaker 1: to deal with.

495
00:25:41,840 --> 00:25:45,280
Speaker 2: There's Yeah, there's a very much things worked on the

496
00:25:45,359 --> 00:25:49,919
Speaker 2: honor system in that era. Like there may have been

497
00:25:49,960 --> 00:25:53,160
Speaker 2: a perfunctory check or whatever, but if they had really

498
00:25:53,720 --> 00:25:56,360
Speaker 2: wanted to make sure they were, you know, abiding by

499
00:25:56,359 --> 00:25:58,360
Speaker 2: the rules, there's ways you can do it. You can

500
00:25:58,440 --> 00:26:02,719
Speaker 2: plan somebody there for a week, like you know, make them,

501
00:26:02,880 --> 00:26:04,840
Speaker 2: make them do it the whole time you're there, and

502
00:26:05,280 --> 00:26:07,960
Speaker 2: pay attention to do They seem to have respirators for

503
00:26:08,000 --> 00:26:11,600
Speaker 2: everyone because the inspectors wore them, is my understanding. When

504
00:26:11,640 --> 00:26:13,320
Speaker 2: they showed up to take a look, they did not

505
00:26:13,400 --> 00:26:15,959
Speaker 2: go in that mind without breathing equipments like what are

506
00:26:16,000 --> 00:26:16,480
Speaker 2: you nuts?

507
00:26:16,920 --> 00:26:21,520
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, so yeah. It seems safe to say that

508
00:26:21,640 --> 00:26:26,119
Speaker 1: Union Carbide deliberately avoided acquiring information that would have forced

509
00:26:26,200 --> 00:26:30,119
Speaker 1: them to improve safety practices and thus slow production. The

510
00:26:30,160 --> 00:26:34,160
Speaker 1: American Society of Safety Professionals their analysis, notes Union Carbide

511
00:26:34,160 --> 00:26:36,520
Speaker 1: had taken core samples along the course of the proposed

512
00:26:36,520 --> 00:26:40,000
Speaker 1: tunnel before construction began, and knew the rock was extremely

513
00:26:40,080 --> 00:26:43,560
Speaker 1: high in silica. Despite the generally well understood relationship between

514
00:26:43,600 --> 00:26:48,000
Speaker 1: exposure to airborne silica and death by silicosis, neither Union Carbide,

515
00:26:48,080 --> 00:26:51,160
Speaker 1: New Canawa Power, nor Rhin Harton Dennis ever measured dust

516
00:26:51,280 --> 00:26:54,480
Speaker 1: levels in the tunnel. Rhine Harton Dennis only conducted two

517
00:26:54,520 --> 00:26:57,960
Speaker 1: tests for carbon monoxide during the seventeen month duration of

518
00:26:58,000 --> 00:27:01,760
Speaker 1: the dig. A proven technology existed to measure clouds of dust.

519
00:27:01,880 --> 00:27:04,480
Speaker 1: The impinger was developed in nineteen sixteen by the US

520
00:27:04,520 --> 00:27:08,400
Speaker 1: Public Health Service. Impingers, also known as bubblers or small bottles,

521
00:27:08,760 --> 00:27:11,440
Speaker 1: used with an air pump to collect airborne contaminants into

522
00:27:11,480 --> 00:27:16,040
Speaker 1: designated collection liquids for later laboratory analysis. So they again

523
00:27:16,080 --> 00:27:18,119
Speaker 1: this is not don't just because this is ancient. They

524
00:27:18,119 --> 00:27:20,679
Speaker 1: have the ability to test and know their silica in

525
00:27:20,760 --> 00:27:23,560
Speaker 1: the air. It is standard on mines. But this isn't

526
00:27:23,560 --> 00:27:26,040
Speaker 1: a mine, even though they're mining, it's not a mine.

527
00:27:26,600 --> 00:27:29,800
Speaker 2: But also it's it's absurd because the idea of saying that, well,

528
00:27:29,840 --> 00:27:32,040
Speaker 2: we never got a chance to bring the instruments in

529
00:27:32,080 --> 00:27:33,679
Speaker 2: to see if the air was bad. That would be

530
00:27:33,800 --> 00:27:36,560
Speaker 2: like a house fire, and like, well, I never put it.

531
00:27:36,600 --> 00:27:40,040
Speaker 2: I never took up therrometer in there. See It's like, well, okay,

532
00:27:40,400 --> 00:27:42,719
Speaker 2: it was not there was no visibility in the tunnel

533
00:27:42,720 --> 00:27:45,959
Speaker 2: for the dust. Yeah, So like that, even that's not

534
00:27:46,000 --> 00:27:48,600
Speaker 2: an excuse. I get what they're saying is ludicrous.

535
00:27:48,880 --> 00:27:52,880
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's obscene. And what's also obscene are

536
00:27:52,920 --> 00:28:01,959
Speaker 1: the low low prices our advertisers have or their product. Ah,

537
00:28:02,000 --> 00:28:06,560
Speaker 1: we're back back from that glorious pivot. So as the

538
00:28:06,600 --> 00:28:09,600
Speaker 1: death toll starts to accelerate, which happens again that first

539
00:28:09,640 --> 00:28:12,200
Speaker 1: start dying after two months. By the six month point,

540
00:28:12,280 --> 00:28:15,159
Speaker 1: a lot of people are getting sick and dying, and

541
00:28:15,240 --> 00:28:18,280
Speaker 1: Ryan Hart and Dennis find themselves with a new logistical problem,

542
00:28:18,560 --> 00:28:21,560
Speaker 1: what do we do with all these corpses? Right, white

543
00:28:21,600 --> 00:28:25,160
Speaker 1: workers could be buried in local cemeteries pretty easily, especially

544
00:28:25,200 --> 00:28:27,919
Speaker 1: local workers who died, but most of the workers dying

545
00:28:28,320 --> 00:28:32,760
Speaker 1: are black laborers, and these white you know, the cemeteries

546
00:28:32,760 --> 00:28:36,000
Speaker 1: in town are whites only establishments. Right, They're so racist

547
00:28:36,040 --> 00:28:37,760
Speaker 1: that it's like, well, we're not going to let black

548
00:28:37,760 --> 00:28:41,760
Speaker 1: people into our cemetery. So at first, the majority of

549
00:28:41,760 --> 00:28:45,160
Speaker 1: these black tunnel workers who have died are are sent

550
00:28:45,360 --> 00:28:48,960
Speaker 1: to like a local cemetery. Specifically, it's an old local

551
00:28:49,040 --> 00:28:52,560
Speaker 1: slave cemetery, right, Like that's literally where they are burying

552
00:28:52,600 --> 00:28:55,800
Speaker 1: these men. Records suggest that only ten of the black

553
00:28:55,840 --> 00:28:57,960
Speaker 1: of the hundreds of black laborers who die on this

554
00:28:58,040 --> 00:29:00,760
Speaker 1: project are shipped back to their homes after death. So

555
00:29:00,800 --> 00:29:03,880
Speaker 1: the vast majority of these guys, to all their family knows,

556
00:29:03,920 --> 00:29:06,840
Speaker 1: just disappear forever. This leaves hundreds, you know, the fact

557
00:29:06,880 --> 00:29:09,760
Speaker 1: that you fit I think a couple one hundred in

558
00:29:09,800 --> 00:29:13,080
Speaker 1: the slave cemetery, but there's still a lot more people

559
00:29:13,120 --> 00:29:15,800
Speaker 1: who are dying. So rhin Hart and Dennis, you know,

560
00:29:15,840 --> 00:29:18,680
Speaker 1: they've got the resources obviously to transport all these buckets

561
00:29:18,680 --> 00:29:21,440
Speaker 1: of silica, but they don't want to use their own resort.

562
00:29:21,480 --> 00:29:23,600
Speaker 1: They don't want to like deal with the dead people

563
00:29:23,720 --> 00:29:28,240
Speaker 1: that they're creating themselves, So they have Union Carbide pay

564
00:29:28,520 --> 00:29:31,680
Speaker 1: contractors to deal with all of the dead people. And

565
00:29:31,720 --> 00:29:34,600
Speaker 1: the contractor that they hire is a local undertaker named

566
00:29:34,600 --> 00:29:38,120
Speaker 1: Hadley White. They pay him fifty five dollars for each

567
00:29:38,160 --> 00:29:40,960
Speaker 1: body he will take out of their hands and bury. Now,

568
00:29:41,240 --> 00:29:44,240
Speaker 1: Hadley is running the same calculation as every other unethical

569
00:29:44,280 --> 00:29:47,200
Speaker 1: contractor and company in this. They're paying him to bury

570
00:29:47,240 --> 00:29:52,120
Speaker 1: people in theoretically in coffins in a cemetery, and he's like,

571
00:29:52,240 --> 00:29:55,200
Speaker 1: you know, it's cheaper than a coffin is throwing people

572
00:29:55,240 --> 00:29:57,080
Speaker 1: in a bag and putting them in a mass grave.

573
00:29:57,680 --> 00:30:01,920
Speaker 1: That's much less expensive, right, So Hadley is going to

574
00:30:02,000 --> 00:30:05,760
Speaker 1: transfer pretty rapidly from burying people the way that he's

575
00:30:05,800 --> 00:30:08,640
Speaker 1: being paid to to you know, doing a mass grave

576
00:30:08,760 --> 00:30:11,720
Speaker 1: kind of situation. So once they run out of room

577
00:30:11,840 --> 00:30:15,240
Speaker 1: at that old slave cemetery behind the church where the

578
00:30:15,360 --> 00:30:18,560
Speaker 1: behind a local church where his company is located, he

579
00:30:18,640 --> 00:30:21,600
Speaker 1: starts driving the corpses forty miles away. He will just

580
00:30:21,680 --> 00:30:24,280
Speaker 1: stack them. It's often described as being stacked like cordwood,

581
00:30:24,360 --> 00:30:27,080
Speaker 1: like firewood. In the back of a truck, like just

582
00:30:27,080 --> 00:30:29,160
Speaker 1: this kind of like wrap stuffed in the clothes that

583
00:30:29,160 --> 00:30:33,320
Speaker 1: they died, and stuffed into canvas bags and thrown into

584
00:30:33,360 --> 00:30:37,400
Speaker 1: a mass grave in Somersville out of you know, within

585
00:30:37,480 --> 00:30:41,600
Speaker 1: hours of dying, right, like just kind of taken immediately

586
00:30:41,640 --> 00:30:44,200
Speaker 1: off the line, or you know, in their beds where

587
00:30:44,200 --> 00:30:47,360
Speaker 1: they pass thrown into a bag, stuck in a truck

588
00:30:47,520 --> 00:30:51,120
Speaker 1: and then tossed into a mass grave again within hours

589
00:30:51,160 --> 00:30:53,640
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases. In the Book of the Dead,

590
00:30:53,800 --> 00:30:57,280
Speaker 1: Rukaiser cites the testimony of a worker named George Robinson

591
00:30:57,320 --> 00:30:59,960
Speaker 1: on this matter, quote, I knew a man who died

592
00:31:00,120 --> 00:31:02,120
Speaker 1: at four in the morning at the camp. At seven,

593
00:31:02,200 --> 00:31:05,080
Speaker 1: his wife took clothes to dress her dead husband. At

594
00:31:05,080 --> 00:31:07,400
Speaker 1: the end at the undertakers, they told her the husband

595
00:31:07,440 --> 00:31:08,320
Speaker 1: was already buried.

596
00:31:09,320 --> 00:31:09,720
Speaker 2: So like.

597
00:31:12,080 --> 00:31:15,840
Speaker 1: That's you know, how they're treating It's just like trash, right,

598
00:31:15,880 --> 00:31:18,640
Speaker 1: that's how they're treating these these people Like we're not

599
00:31:18,640 --> 00:31:21,120
Speaker 1: even going to wait for their loved ones to you know,

600
00:31:22,360 --> 00:31:24,480
Speaker 1: have any sort of like when they have loved ones, Like,

601
00:31:24,520 --> 00:31:26,840
Speaker 1: we don't even care to know if there's anyone who

602
00:31:26,920 --> 00:31:29,600
Speaker 1: like will want to do a funeral. We're just going

603
00:31:29,680 --> 00:31:31,440
Speaker 1: to toss them in a mass grave and sorry, your

604
00:31:31,480 --> 00:31:32,480
Speaker 1: husband's gone already.

605
00:31:32,880 --> 00:31:35,600
Speaker 2: You know, maybe what I'm about to say is obvious,

606
00:31:35,760 --> 00:31:39,800
Speaker 2: But this was not that long ago.

607
00:31:40,760 --> 00:31:42,840
Speaker 1: Now there's people alive from then.

608
00:31:42,920 --> 00:31:45,680
Speaker 2: Still, there are people alive from they're very old, but

609
00:31:45,680 --> 00:31:47,480
Speaker 2: there were people that were born in this Sarah that

610
00:31:47,520 --> 00:31:49,960
Speaker 2: are still alive. This was We are talking about this

611
00:31:50,120 --> 00:31:55,280
Speaker 2: like it is another planet that something like this could happen,

612
00:31:55,520 --> 00:31:58,800
Speaker 2: and could happen in public, in broad daylight. And that

613
00:32:00,160 --> 00:32:02,880
Speaker 2: mostly to the indifference of all the local officials and

614
00:32:02,920 --> 00:32:07,200
Speaker 2: everyone around there living there, because at this point a

615
00:32:07,240 --> 00:32:09,480
Speaker 2: lot of people got to know. You have a lot

616
00:32:09,520 --> 00:32:11,880
Speaker 2: of dead people. Now, a lot of those bodies have

617
00:32:11,920 --> 00:32:14,760
Speaker 2: passed through a lot of hands. A lot of people know,

618
00:32:15,480 --> 00:32:18,680
Speaker 2: and this is just the kind of thing that happens

619
00:32:19,360 --> 00:32:21,320
Speaker 2: at this time and in this place. And it is

620
00:32:21,400 --> 00:32:24,880
Speaker 2: not that long ago. It's one long lifetime ago.

621
00:32:25,440 --> 00:32:27,200
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you want an idea of like how recent

622
00:32:27,280 --> 00:32:30,760
Speaker 1: this is, this is all happening about five years before

623
00:32:30,880 --> 00:32:33,840
Speaker 1: Hunter S. Thompson is born, Right, He's not a figure

624
00:32:33,920 --> 00:32:40,360
Speaker 1: from the distant past, you know, Like this is like, yeah,

625
00:32:40,560 --> 00:32:43,400
Speaker 1: I think that is important, Like how how kind of

626
00:32:43,440 --> 00:32:48,200
Speaker 1: directly connected this is to us. You know, it's like

627
00:32:48,320 --> 00:32:51,120
Speaker 1: treating people this way does not seem like a kind

628
00:32:51,120 --> 00:32:54,760
Speaker 1: of thing you would get away with. But there's not

629
00:32:54,800 --> 00:32:57,200
Speaker 1: a lot separating us from a period of time in

630
00:32:57,200 --> 00:33:00,080
Speaker 1: which people were getting away with this directly, just kind

631
00:32:59,880 --> 00:33:05,160
Speaker 1: of literally treating these people like like a fucking sprocket

632
00:33:05,240 --> 00:33:07,200
Speaker 1: or something that breaks in a machine and he just

633
00:33:07,240 --> 00:33:10,120
Speaker 1: toss in the trash. You will not be surprised to

634
00:33:10,160 --> 00:33:12,560
Speaker 1: hear that. The exact number of workers who die this

635
00:33:12,640 --> 00:33:17,560
Speaker 1: way is unclear. About three hundred certainly are buried by

636
00:33:17,640 --> 00:33:21,480
Speaker 1: Hadley White, maybe significantly more, we don't know. It might

637
00:33:21,480 --> 00:33:24,560
Speaker 1: have been a couple one hundred more than that. More

638
00:33:24,640 --> 00:33:28,000
Speaker 1: lingered on sick in the town of Gawley Mountain, or

639
00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:30,880
Speaker 1: they either had to rely on the family members or

640
00:33:30,880 --> 00:33:34,880
Speaker 1: the kindness of strangers. So many pale, gasping men spent

641
00:33:34,920 --> 00:33:38,520
Speaker 1: their last years shambling around Golly That acquired a new

642
00:33:38,600 --> 00:33:42,120
Speaker 1: nickname among locals, the town of the living dead. That's

643
00:33:42,200 --> 00:33:44,680
Speaker 1: like what they would call this place because of all

644
00:33:44,680 --> 00:33:48,240
Speaker 1: of the fucking black lung sufferers. No effort was made

645
00:33:48,280 --> 00:33:50,800
Speaker 1: to inform the family of dead migrant workers, and this

646
00:33:50,920 --> 00:33:53,920
Speaker 1: is shown well by the story of Dewey Flack. Dewey

647
00:33:53,960 --> 00:33:56,440
Speaker 1: was a seventeen or eighteen year old black man who

648
00:33:56,520 --> 00:33:58,720
Speaker 1: left his home in North Carolina on a one way

649
00:33:58,760 --> 00:34:01,520
Speaker 1: train ticket to West Virginia Yea. The last his family

650
00:34:01,600 --> 00:34:03,959
Speaker 1: saw him, he promised to send back the money he

651
00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:07,160
Speaker 1: made to help them. Quote from an article in NPR,

652
00:34:07,920 --> 00:34:10,880
Speaker 1: Flak died on May twentieth, nineteen thirty one, two weeks

653
00:34:10,880 --> 00:34:13,400
Speaker 1: after his last shift in the tunnel. His death certificate

654
00:34:13,440 --> 00:34:16,440
Speaker 1: said he died of pneumonia, but according to Cherniac, company

655
00:34:16,480 --> 00:34:19,600
Speaker 1: doctors often misdiagnosed workers' deaths or attributed them to a

656
00:34:19,600 --> 00:34:22,640
Speaker 1: disease they called tunnel ititis. The company would later use

657
00:34:22,680 --> 00:34:24,839
Speaker 1: those death certificates to prove there were few, if any,

658
00:34:24,880 --> 00:34:28,920
Speaker 1: silicosis deaths in the tunnel. NPR did find one relative,

659
00:34:29,040 --> 00:34:32,120
Speaker 1: Sheila Flack Jones of Charlotte, North Carolina, who was Dewey

660
00:34:32,160 --> 00:34:35,400
Speaker 1: Flack's niece. My father mentioned when I was younger that

661
00:34:35,440 --> 00:34:37,279
Speaker 1: he did have a brother, but the brother he thought

662
00:34:37,320 --> 00:34:40,479
Speaker 1: he'd run away, Black Jones says of learning her uncle's fate.

663
00:34:40,560 --> 00:34:43,040
Speaker 1: I'm heartbroken that my family died thinking that he had

664
00:34:43,120 --> 00:34:46,680
Speaker 1: run away, and they never knew the real truth. And

665
00:34:46,719 --> 00:34:49,200
Speaker 1: I think that Dewey's death here kind of stands in

666
00:34:49,320 --> 00:34:52,239
Speaker 1: for hundreds of these black migrant labors. You know, you

667
00:34:52,280 --> 00:34:55,520
Speaker 1: tell your family you're going. I'll send back money, you know,

668
00:34:55,760 --> 00:34:57,759
Speaker 1: I'll try to set up a place, you know, get

669
00:34:57,800 --> 00:34:59,600
Speaker 1: money so we can move to this northern town, and

670
00:35:00,040 --> 00:35:03,160
Speaker 1: ever hear from your husband, your son, your nephew, ever again,

671
00:35:03,320 --> 00:35:05,840
Speaker 1: Like that's the reality for a lot of these people.

672
00:35:06,360 --> 00:35:08,760
Speaker 2: What was the specific year you just mentioned there.

673
00:35:09,080 --> 00:35:12,000
Speaker 1: I believe he's nineteen thirty one. Yeah, May twentieth, nineteen

674
00:35:12,000 --> 00:35:12,400
Speaker 1: thirty one.

675
00:35:13,000 --> 00:35:16,920
Speaker 2: That's the year William Shatner was born, right, right, So

676
00:35:17,600 --> 00:35:20,719
Speaker 2: Clint Eastwood was one year old by the time this happened. Again,

677
00:35:20,800 --> 00:35:23,919
Speaker 2: they they lived long enough to see a world where

678
00:35:24,000 --> 00:35:26,560
Speaker 2: this happened. I brought up this thing about this not

679
00:35:26,600 --> 00:35:29,080
Speaker 2: being that long because I knew that thing about the town,

680
00:35:29,239 --> 00:35:32,840
Speaker 2: this village of the walking Dead was coming, because that,

681
00:35:32,920 --> 00:35:35,440
Speaker 2: to me, is the most nightmarish part of this, because

682
00:35:35,480 --> 00:35:38,440
Speaker 2: eventually you had these people in no place to go. Yeah,

683
00:35:38,760 --> 00:35:40,960
Speaker 2: they couldn't afford to travel, they were kicked off the

684
00:35:41,040 --> 00:35:42,560
Speaker 2: job site, they couldn't work, and so they were just

685
00:35:42,600 --> 00:35:44,560
Speaker 2: sent back to this town. As town started to become

686
00:35:44,640 --> 00:35:48,680
Speaker 2: overwhelmed of these people who were just walking around drowning

687
00:35:49,600 --> 00:35:53,080
Speaker 2: in the air, like they can't gasping for breath, and

688
00:35:53,120 --> 00:35:56,759
Speaker 2: they're getting sicker and just kind of shambling around this town.

689
00:35:56,840 --> 00:36:00,000
Speaker 2: And you have dozens or hundreds of them, we don't

690
00:36:00,160 --> 00:36:03,440
Speaker 2: know how many. They just had nowhere to go and

691
00:36:03,480 --> 00:36:07,520
Speaker 2: they're human beings and there's no support system. There's no

692
00:36:07,680 --> 00:36:11,680
Speaker 2: support system. I don't know how to convey that to people,

693
00:36:11,800 --> 00:36:13,960
Speaker 2: like they had no one to go to for help.

694
00:36:14,400 --> 00:36:20,200
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard to imagine a situation that, like anything

695
00:36:20,280 --> 00:36:22,799
Speaker 1: worse than that, right, Like that's as desperate as it

696
00:36:22,840 --> 00:36:27,080
Speaker 1: fucking gets. So disinformation about the causes of the illness

697
00:36:27,120 --> 00:36:30,440
Speaker 1: and the demographic realities of the workforce delayed the coalescence

698
00:36:30,480 --> 00:36:33,600
Speaker 1: of any sort of effective resistance to what was happening

699
00:36:33,640 --> 00:36:37,120
Speaker 1: by workers. The first public warnings about what was happening

700
00:36:37,239 --> 00:36:39,960
Speaker 1: came courtesy of the local radical press. And we're talking

701
00:36:40,560 --> 00:36:42,719
Speaker 1: unions off and run newspapers here, so some of this

702
00:36:42,760 --> 00:36:44,880
Speaker 1: is coming out through that. And there's like socialist papers

703
00:36:44,880 --> 00:36:47,000
Speaker 1: in the area, and these are the first people to

704
00:36:47,080 --> 00:36:50,560
Speaker 1: start reporting on this sickness sweeping through the camps. As

705
00:36:50,600 --> 00:36:52,799
Speaker 1: one of these papers, this is like a very new

706
00:36:52,880 --> 00:36:57,680
Speaker 1: deal supporting like left wing paper The State Sentinel warned,

707
00:36:57,760 --> 00:37:01,120
Speaker 1: quote strange and weird tales are a concerning the number

708
00:37:01,120 --> 00:37:03,600
Speaker 1: of fatalities. They are said to number four a week.

709
00:37:04,160 --> 00:37:04,440
Speaker 2: Now.

710
00:37:04,920 --> 00:37:07,919
Speaker 1: Radical papers kind of different in how radical they were.

711
00:37:07,960 --> 00:37:10,279
Speaker 1: In the case of the State Sentinel, they do note

712
00:37:10,400 --> 00:37:13,200
Speaker 1: later on that they were sure Union Carbide was in

713
00:37:13,239 --> 00:37:15,839
Speaker 1: a sense of any wrongdoing because Ryan Harton Dennis had

714
00:37:15,840 --> 00:37:19,440
Speaker 1: been contracted to handle the actual construction. It's worth noting

715
00:37:19,800 --> 00:37:23,359
Speaker 1: people that's not necessarily them trying to protect Union Carbide

716
00:37:23,520 --> 00:37:27,080
Speaker 1: at this stage. These random little papers you don't know

717
00:37:27,320 --> 00:37:31,080
Speaker 1: necessarily the relationship between these two companies. It becomes obvious

718
00:37:31,160 --> 00:37:35,719
Speaker 1: later that Union Carbide has engineers who are their employees

719
00:37:35,719 --> 00:37:38,399
Speaker 1: on scene, they are directing rehin harton Dennis, they are

720
00:37:38,480 --> 00:37:41,600
Speaker 1: in charge of the project, right, But that's not really

721
00:37:41,640 --> 00:37:43,759
Speaker 1: known necessarily to all these papers at the time. So

722
00:37:43,760 --> 00:37:45,960
Speaker 1: I don't think it's really anything against them. It's worth

723
00:37:46,040 --> 00:37:49,160
Speaker 1: noting it is through these little radical presses that like,

724
00:37:49,239 --> 00:37:52,040
Speaker 1: that's where this story gets out to start. It will

725
00:37:52,080 --> 00:37:55,320
Speaker 1: eventually be picked up by kind of larger news organs.

726
00:37:56,080 --> 00:37:58,960
Speaker 1: Lawsuits start to fly, and from mid to late nineteen

727
00:37:59,040 --> 00:38:02,120
Speaker 1: thirty two. This is late in the construction process, more

728
00:38:02,160 --> 00:38:05,719
Speaker 1: than eighty separate claims are filed from workers seeking compensation

729
00:38:05,840 --> 00:38:09,799
Speaker 1: for silicosis. Cases start winding their way up rapidly to

730
00:38:09,920 --> 00:38:13,720
Speaker 1: the state Supreme Court. There's a case there. They rule

731
00:38:13,800 --> 00:38:16,120
Speaker 1: on it and it opens. The ruling that the Supreme

732
00:38:16,160 --> 00:38:19,839
Speaker 1: Court gives basically is that you can sue rhine Hart

733
00:38:19,840 --> 00:38:22,920
Speaker 1: and Dennis for your silicosis. Right. So after this, this

734
00:38:23,000 --> 00:38:25,560
Speaker 1: kind of opens the floodgates and this ocean of new

735
00:38:25,600 --> 00:38:29,799
Speaker 1: claims start to flood in several hundred, eventually totaling two

736
00:38:29,880 --> 00:38:33,080
Speaker 1: point seven two five million dollars in damages is what

737
00:38:33,080 --> 00:38:36,480
Speaker 1: they're requesting. That's a lot more money. Back then, rehin

738
00:38:36,560 --> 00:38:40,280
Speaker 1: Hart and Dennis file injunction. After injunction, they're trying to delay,

739
00:38:40,600 --> 00:38:42,759
Speaker 1: and this is they know they're going to have to

740
00:38:42,760 --> 00:38:45,120
Speaker 1: make some sort of payout right. They know they can't

741
00:38:45,120 --> 00:38:47,520
Speaker 1: avoid this. This was kind of always in their calculations,

742
00:38:47,800 --> 00:38:51,320
Speaker 1: but injunctions delay sort of the start of that process,

743
00:38:51,640 --> 00:38:54,080
Speaker 1: and it allows them to Again, the whole goal is

744
00:38:54,719 --> 00:38:58,960
Speaker 1: as long as we finish ahead of schedule, we get

745
00:38:59,040 --> 00:39:02,040
Speaker 1: enough extra money to make this worthwhile, right, So that's

746
00:39:02,080 --> 00:39:06,000
Speaker 1: what they're doing. Union Carbide also starts hiring rein Hart

747
00:39:06,080 --> 00:39:09,879
Speaker 1: and Davis executives away from the contractor, right, and these

748
00:39:09,920 --> 00:39:11,880
Speaker 1: guys are still doing the job they were doing from

749
00:39:11,880 --> 00:39:14,640
Speaker 1: rein Hart and Davis. They're just Union Carbide employees now.

750
00:39:14,680 --> 00:39:17,040
Speaker 1: And the reason that Union Carbide is doing this is

751
00:39:17,040 --> 00:39:19,839
Speaker 1: that when you have these guys in house, you have

752
00:39:19,960 --> 00:39:23,680
Speaker 1: legal excuses to talk them through and direct their court

753
00:39:23,680 --> 00:39:27,560
Speaker 1: because you shouldn't be directing their responses to their court case.

754
00:39:27,920 --> 00:39:29,600
Speaker 1: But once you bring them on, you have all these

755
00:39:29,640 --> 00:39:31,279
Speaker 1: sort of excuses to talk to them. You can have

756
00:39:31,320 --> 00:39:34,080
Speaker 1: your lawyers represent them. It's just another way to kind

757
00:39:34,080 --> 00:39:36,840
Speaker 1: of protect the bag, right, And it's more evidence of

758
00:39:36,880 --> 00:39:40,520
Speaker 1: how closely tied these companies really are. So yeah, there's

759
00:39:40,520 --> 00:39:44,600
Speaker 1: also significant evidence that they bribe government officials. Union Carbide

760
00:39:44,600 --> 00:39:48,120
Speaker 1: does in order to try and delay the start of

761
00:39:48,160 --> 00:39:51,799
Speaker 1: any kind of like accountability. After this first wave of

762
00:39:51,880 --> 00:39:54,880
Speaker 1: lawsuits hits, the Department of Minds sins in an inspector,

763
00:39:54,960 --> 00:39:57,840
Speaker 1: a guy named Robert Lamby to investigate conditions at the

764
00:39:57,840 --> 00:40:02,160
Speaker 1: tunnel complex and particularly the death of black workers. Lamby

765
00:40:02,160 --> 00:40:05,319
Speaker 1: carries out a full inspection and he's pretty critical of

766
00:40:05,360 --> 00:40:07,359
Speaker 1: the mind There's like a lot of people see him.

767
00:40:07,360 --> 00:40:09,919
Speaker 1: He's yelling at a company for men about how unacceptable

768
00:40:09,960 --> 00:40:12,600
Speaker 1: this is. He's like, it seems for a little bit

769
00:40:12,680 --> 00:40:15,160
Speaker 1: like oh, the government sent a man. He's seen how

770
00:40:15,200 --> 00:40:18,200
Speaker 1: bad this is, and something's going to get done. And

771
00:40:18,360 --> 00:40:20,919
Speaker 1: you know, he does act. Initially, he sends a letter

772
00:40:20,960 --> 00:40:23,359
Speaker 1: to an executive at the New Kanawa Power Company, which

773
00:40:23,360 --> 00:40:26,840
Speaker 1: is again remember that's Union Carbide, and he lays out

774
00:40:26,880 --> 00:40:28,920
Speaker 1: like this is dangerous. All you need to do all

775
00:40:28,960 --> 00:40:30,800
Speaker 1: this stuff to make it safer, you have to start

776
00:40:30,800 --> 00:40:33,759
Speaker 1: issuing respirators to your men. He orders them. This is

777
00:40:33,760 --> 00:40:39,080
Speaker 1: a government official ordering New Canawa to put respirators on workers,

778
00:40:39,400 --> 00:40:41,239
Speaker 1: and New Canawa just says, now, we're not going to

779
00:40:41,280 --> 00:40:44,040
Speaker 1: do that. They ignore it, and they continue sending unmasked

780
00:40:44,040 --> 00:40:47,960
Speaker 1: workers into the tunnel. Now this should be pretty damning

781
00:40:48,160 --> 00:40:51,319
Speaker 1: for what happens in court. But two years later, you know,

782
00:40:51,440 --> 00:40:54,480
Speaker 1: after Lamby gets there, and after some five hundred lawsuits

783
00:40:54,480 --> 00:40:57,319
Speaker 1: from survivors are kind of churning their way through the

784
00:40:57,400 --> 00:41:00,959
Speaker 1: legal process, Lamby gets called into court and you would

785
00:41:00,960 --> 00:41:04,360
Speaker 1: expect him to be a pretty devastating testimony on behalf

786
00:41:04,360 --> 00:41:07,440
Speaker 1: of these miners. I told them to give respirators to

787
00:41:07,520 --> 00:41:10,280
Speaker 1: these guys, and they did not write. But he behaves

788
00:41:10,520 --> 00:41:14,320
Speaker 1: very differently once he's in a court room, as Cherniac writes.

789
00:41:15,719 --> 00:41:17,800
Speaker 1: Testifying on behalf of Ryan Hart and Dennis for a

790
00:41:17,840 --> 00:41:20,640
Speaker 1: whole day on tenth of April nineteen thirty three, he

791
00:41:20,719 --> 00:41:23,880
Speaker 1: described exemplary conditions in the tunnel, where air was supplied

792
00:41:23,920 --> 00:41:26,080
Speaker 1: at a face velocity of twenty seven miles per hour,

793
00:41:26,320 --> 00:41:29,080
Speaker 1: visibility was to f from five to seven hundred feet,

794
00:41:29,239 --> 00:41:32,800
Speaker 1: and water was constantly used to suppress dust. Vigorously cross

795
00:41:32,840 --> 00:41:36,120
Speaker 1: examined about the extreme inconsistencies between this testimony and his

796
00:41:36,239 --> 00:41:39,439
Speaker 1: earlier condemnatory letters, which had been read into the court

797
00:41:39,480 --> 00:41:42,000
Speaker 1: record by the attorney for Raymond Johnson, that's the miner

798
00:41:42,040 --> 00:41:45,120
Speaker 1: in this case two weeks earlier. Lamby blamed an accurate

799
00:41:45,160 --> 00:41:48,040
Speaker 1: information supplied by his staff. Although he conceded that he

800
00:41:48,080 --> 00:41:50,120
Speaker 1: had ordered respirators in writing, he said that he had

801
00:41:50,160 --> 00:41:54,080
Speaker 1: later countermanded this order orally when he better appreciated the

802
00:41:54,120 --> 00:41:57,160
Speaker 1: excellent working conditions and clearness of the air in the tunnel.

803
00:41:57,480 --> 00:42:00,480
Speaker 1: Two of Lambie's staff inspectors, who had originally filed highly

804
00:42:00,480 --> 00:42:03,279
Speaker 1: critical reports, now shared in their director's change of heart.

805
00:42:03,560 --> 00:42:06,480
Speaker 1: Testifying on The following day, C. B. Bishop and D. R.

806
00:42:06,520 --> 00:42:09,880
Speaker 1: Sullivan joined him in tribute to the admirable conditions at

807
00:42:09,880 --> 00:42:12,640
Speaker 1: Hawk's Nest. They indicated that Ryan, Hart and Dennis had

808
00:42:12,719 --> 00:42:16,600
Speaker 1: always cooperated fully and repeated Lamby's praise of the freedom

809
00:42:16,640 --> 00:42:19,759
Speaker 1: from dust and wet drilling. They described the reports they

810
00:42:19,800 --> 00:42:22,520
Speaker 1: had made in nineteen thirty one as purely precautionary and

811
00:42:22,640 --> 00:42:26,799
Speaker 1: unrelated to actual conditions. Lamby's startling about face was never

812
00:42:26,840 --> 00:42:30,480
Speaker 1: explained to everyone's satisfaction. Less than a week after his testimony, however,

813
00:42:30,680 --> 00:42:34,640
Speaker 1: the Charleston Gazette reported a remarkable coincidence. The former director

814
00:42:34,640 --> 00:42:37,280
Speaker 1: of the West Virginia Department of Mines had just opened

815
00:42:37,280 --> 00:42:40,319
Speaker 1: his doors to the prestigious Canawa Valley Building in the

816
00:42:40,320 --> 00:42:43,160
Speaker 1: capital city as a private consultant to the leading mining

817
00:42:43,200 --> 00:42:44,960
Speaker 1: and industrial corporations of the state.

818
00:42:46,640 --> 00:42:50,640
Speaker 2: Now, fortunately, that kind of revolving door is long in

819
00:42:50,719 --> 00:42:52,960
Speaker 2: the past. Like that's the kind of thing that today

820
00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:54,800
Speaker 2: would be outrageous to even.

821
00:42:55,560 --> 00:42:59,040
Speaker 1: And you know, as an aside, don't look up people

822
00:42:59,280 --> 00:43:01,160
Speaker 1: who have been a poor pointed in the last twenty

823
00:43:01,239 --> 00:43:04,800
Speaker 1: years to had regulatory agencies and what they did after

824
00:43:04,800 --> 00:43:07,080
Speaker 1: the period of time at which they headed those agencies.

825
00:43:07,400 --> 00:43:11,080
Speaker 1: Don't go Google in that because there's nothing to find, right,

826
00:43:11,840 --> 00:43:12,440
Speaker 1: that never.

827
00:43:12,280 --> 00:43:13,640
Speaker 2: Occurring to your results.

828
00:43:13,800 --> 00:43:18,520
Speaker 1: Yeah, serier results. So yeah, construction on the Hawk's Nest

829
00:43:18,520 --> 00:43:21,840
Speaker 1: tunnel was completed by nineteen thirty two. This is about

830
00:43:21,880 --> 00:43:23,839
Speaker 1: twice as fast, a little less than twice as fast

831
00:43:23,960 --> 00:43:26,120
Speaker 1: as had been initially expected. So that's a lot of

832
00:43:26,120 --> 00:43:29,239
Speaker 1: extra money for rehin harten Davis. By all accounts, it

833
00:43:29,280 --> 00:43:32,280
Speaker 1: was a marvel of engineering and craftsmanship. It is still

834
00:43:32,320 --> 00:43:36,000
Speaker 1: in works today. It's considered an exemplary I forgot how

835
00:43:36,000 --> 00:43:37,920
Speaker 1: to pronounce a word I've known since I was a

836
00:43:37,960 --> 00:43:41,000
Speaker 1: small child for just a second. There. It's considered to

837
00:43:41,040 --> 00:43:45,719
Speaker 1: be an exemplary piece of construction, and Union Carbides shareholders

838
00:43:45,800 --> 00:43:49,360
Speaker 1: make a fortune the equivalent of many billions of dollars

839
00:43:49,360 --> 00:43:52,160
Speaker 1: in modern money from the subsequent projects that this enables.

840
00:43:52,760 --> 00:43:55,320
Speaker 1: For the families of the men who die, though, money

841
00:43:55,400 --> 00:43:57,000
Speaker 1: is a lot harder to find. And we're going to

842
00:43:57,040 --> 00:44:03,480
Speaker 1: talk about that, but first maybe an ad product service

843
00:44:03,560 --> 00:44:11,400
Speaker 1: or too, you know. Yeah, and we're back. So for

844
00:44:11,440 --> 00:44:14,080
Speaker 1: the families of these guys who died, money is going

845
00:44:14,160 --> 00:44:16,239
Speaker 1: to be a lot scarcer than it is for the

846
00:44:16,600 --> 00:44:18,880
Speaker 1: executives who will spend the rest of their lives and

847
00:44:18,920 --> 00:44:22,520
Speaker 1: their grandchildren's lives profiting off of this project. There are

848
00:44:22,520 --> 00:44:25,440
Speaker 1: two massive state trials in nineteen thirty three and nineteen

849
00:44:25,480 --> 00:44:28,080
Speaker 1: thirty four, but only a fraction of the requested damages

850
00:44:28,160 --> 00:44:31,280
Speaker 1: or ever paid out in settlements, about two hundred thousand dollars.

851
00:44:31,760 --> 00:44:34,880
Speaker 1: And I should note here the amount of money awarded

852
00:44:34,880 --> 00:44:38,040
Speaker 1: to black laborers for the same ailments as white labors.

853
00:44:38,080 --> 00:44:41,560
Speaker 1: It's about half. I think individual awards are anywhere from

854
00:44:41,640 --> 00:44:45,520
Speaker 1: thirty dollars to sixteen hundred dollars, which is minimal, I

855
00:44:45,520 --> 00:44:49,200
Speaker 1: would say. But Union Carbide executives still complained was ruinous

856
00:44:49,239 --> 00:44:52,560
Speaker 1: to them. They described sick workers as mooches seeking to

857
00:44:52,560 --> 00:44:56,280
Speaker 1: get rich out of frivolous lawsuits. The West Virginia Encyclopedia

858
00:44:56,320 --> 00:44:58,800
Speaker 1: notes of this case, the largest trial ended with a

859
00:44:58,880 --> 00:45:03,040
Speaker 1: hung jury, evidence of jury tampering, and generous compensation to

860
00:45:03,080 --> 00:45:07,399
Speaker 1: the plaintiff's attorneys. It's you know, this is corrupt as hell.

861
00:45:07,520 --> 00:45:12,239
Speaker 1: This whole thing is just pretty fucked. That said, the

862
00:45:12,320 --> 00:45:15,279
Speaker 1: story does not go away, and over time, you know,

863
00:45:15,320 --> 00:45:18,759
Speaker 1: it starts in these radical papers, but it starts to

864
00:45:18,760 --> 00:45:20,520
Speaker 1: get coverage from like large from like the New York

865
00:45:20,560 --> 00:45:24,080
Speaker 1: Times and shit, like their big journalists start to cover this,

866
00:45:24,239 --> 00:45:27,239
Speaker 1: it becomes kind of a cause celeb among a lot

867
00:45:27,239 --> 00:45:28,840
Speaker 1: of the left. For I think there's you know, a

868
00:45:28,840 --> 00:45:30,400
Speaker 1: period of a couple of months or so where like

869
00:45:30,800 --> 00:45:32,680
Speaker 1: this is sort of the big thing if you're like

870
00:45:32,680 --> 00:45:36,960
Speaker 1: a Northeast liberal elite to be really angry about. And

871
00:45:37,080 --> 00:45:38,880
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that to be like, you should be

872
00:45:38,920 --> 00:45:42,280
Speaker 1: angry about this, and because of how angry people get

873
00:45:42,600 --> 00:45:45,600
Speaker 1: about in nineteen thirty six, which is kind of five

874
00:45:45,680 --> 00:45:48,359
Speaker 1: years after the first men start dying, and thirty five

875
00:45:48,440 --> 00:45:50,800
Speaker 1: thirty six is really when sort of the media attention

876
00:45:50,920 --> 00:45:54,000
Speaker 1: around this starts to starts to hit critical mass. The

877
00:45:54,040 --> 00:45:57,320
Speaker 1: House of Representatives holds their first inquiry into the Hawk's

878
00:45:57,360 --> 00:46:02,000
Speaker 1: Nest Tunnel disaster. NPR rights vote. Representatives from the tunnel

879
00:46:02,000 --> 00:46:04,719
Speaker 1: companies declined to attend. One submitted a letter that called

880
00:46:04,719 --> 00:46:08,040
Speaker 1: witness testimonies slanderous rumors and hearsay. We know of no

881
00:46:08,120 --> 00:46:11,320
Speaker 1: case of silicosis contracted on this job, the letter concluded.

882
00:46:11,840 --> 00:46:14,560
Speaker 1: The Congressional committee said the tunnel was completed with grave

883
00:46:14,920 --> 00:46:18,600
Speaker 1: and inhuman disregard for all consideration for the health, lives

884
00:46:18,640 --> 00:46:22,840
Speaker 1: and future of employees. Congress took no action against the companies,

885
00:46:22,840 --> 00:46:25,160
Speaker 1: but that same year it passed a law requiring the

886
00:46:25,280 --> 00:46:29,080
Speaker 1: use of respirators in dusty working conditions. So they don't

887
00:46:29,080 --> 00:46:32,800
Speaker 1: penalize anyone. But this is where we get the legal requirement.

888
00:46:32,880 --> 00:46:35,719
Speaker 1: It's no longer an option. You have to give respirators

889
00:46:35,719 --> 00:46:37,880
Speaker 1: to your guys if they're working in the dust. So

890
00:46:40,040 --> 00:46:41,799
Speaker 1: it took a lot of death, but we got a

891
00:46:41,840 --> 00:46:44,000
Speaker 1: single regulation, hooray.

892
00:46:44,920 --> 00:46:48,480
Speaker 2: And most regulations that we have in workplace protections.

893
00:46:48,520 --> 00:46:48,640
Speaker 1: Yea.

894
00:46:49,200 --> 00:46:52,640
Speaker 2: There is somewhere at the bottom of it are bones

895
00:46:53,040 --> 00:46:56,120
Speaker 2: and ash and of dead people who died in order

896
00:46:56,160 --> 00:47:00,000
Speaker 2: to It would be grotesque to say they sacrificed themselves

897
00:47:00,160 --> 00:47:02,640
Speaker 2: so that we have these regulations, because they did not

898
00:47:02,719 --> 00:47:04,640
Speaker 2: do that. They were trying to.

899
00:47:04,640 --> 00:47:06,440
Speaker 1: Work so that they wanted to make rent.

900
00:47:06,600 --> 00:47:10,839
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and and not to get rich either. They

901
00:47:10,880 --> 00:47:15,040
Speaker 2: were taking the only work that was available. But you

902
00:47:15,080 --> 00:47:18,359
Speaker 2: know that, and then that's one good thing. And then

903
00:47:18,360 --> 00:47:21,319
Speaker 2: of course knowing that Union Carbide was surely ruined as

904
00:47:21,320 --> 00:47:23,719
Speaker 2: a company and does not Yeah, it never did not

905
00:47:23,800 --> 00:47:27,120
Speaker 2: exist after that because as they mentioned, these payouts, you know,

906
00:47:27,440 --> 00:47:30,319
Speaker 2: of course they could not afford it financially. Must have

907
00:47:30,440 --> 00:47:32,960
Speaker 2: crippled them permanently. They probably had to sell off all

908
00:47:33,000 --> 00:47:36,000
Speaker 2: of their factories, all of their real estate, all their machines.

909
00:47:36,000 --> 00:47:37,759
Speaker 2: Probably they had to sell them all just to pay

910
00:47:37,760 --> 00:47:41,160
Speaker 2: off these ruinous thirty and forty dollars payouts.

911
00:47:41,880 --> 00:47:45,120
Speaker 1: That's why the town of Bopaul, India has a reputation

912
00:47:45,320 --> 00:47:49,239
Speaker 1: for being the least polluted town in India and the

913
00:47:49,280 --> 00:47:52,080
Speaker 1: town motto twenty thousand of us didn't die and an

914
00:47:52,120 --> 00:47:56,160
Speaker 1: industrial accident costs by union garbide great place to go

915
00:47:56,239 --> 00:48:00,799
Speaker 1: visit check it out. So, speaking of death toll, which

916
00:48:00,800 --> 00:48:03,839
Speaker 1: we're obviously talking around, it's kind of hard to determine.

917
00:48:04,120 --> 00:48:07,399
Speaker 1: The Congressional Inquiry estimates a little short of five hundred,

918
00:48:07,520 --> 00:48:11,120
Speaker 1: four hundred and sixty four deaths that they estimate cherny acts.

919
00:48:11,120 --> 00:48:13,000
Speaker 1: So the two books I read for this are Murial

920
00:48:13,080 --> 00:48:15,440
Speaker 1: Rakaiser's The Book of the Dead and then The Hawk's

921
00:48:15,480 --> 00:48:19,399
Speaker 1: Nest Tunnel Disaster by this guy Cherniac, who is He's

922
00:48:19,400 --> 00:48:22,880
Speaker 1: not just a journalist or a writer, he's actually an epidemiologist.

923
00:48:22,920 --> 00:48:25,080
Speaker 1: So when he makes a death toll estimate, this is

924
00:48:25,120 --> 00:48:28,440
Speaker 1: not just some like reporter interviewing people and kind of

925
00:48:28,440 --> 00:48:30,759
Speaker 1: making a guest This is a guy whose professional job

926
00:48:30,840 --> 00:48:33,319
Speaker 1: is to try to calculate this sort of thing. So

927
00:48:33,520 --> 00:48:35,600
Speaker 1: I give, I lend a lot of credibility to cherny

928
00:48:35,640 --> 00:48:39,600
Speaker 1: Act's estimate. He suspects somewhere north of seven hundred and

929
00:48:39,680 --> 00:48:42,680
Speaker 1: fifty people died as a direct result of silicosis from

930
00:48:42,680 --> 00:48:46,279
Speaker 1: this tunnel. There are some more modern estimates that will

931
00:48:46,320 --> 00:48:48,920
Speaker 1: suggest an overall death toll. The highest I've seen is

932
00:48:48,920 --> 00:48:51,480
Speaker 1: about two thousand, right, Because people take a long time

933
00:48:51,520 --> 00:48:53,759
Speaker 1: to die, it can be kind of hard, especially as

934
00:48:53,800 --> 00:48:56,920
Speaker 1: undocumented as a lot of these dudes are. But between

935
00:48:57,080 --> 00:48:59,560
Speaker 1: seven hundred and fifty and two thousand dead is what

936
00:48:59,600 --> 00:49:01,880
Speaker 1: we're looking looking at for the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster,

937
00:49:03,440 --> 00:49:05,920
Speaker 1: which is you know, again that's in access of the

938
00:49:06,000 --> 00:49:09,120
Speaker 1: Chernobyle death toll. You know, that's a lot of fucking people.

939
00:49:09,760 --> 00:49:15,360
Speaker 2: This was. Yeah, even with modern record keeping and computers

940
00:49:15,360 --> 00:49:19,320
Speaker 2: and everything in databases, it's extremely difficult to for example,

941
00:49:19,320 --> 00:49:22,399
Speaker 2: with the you know, the COVID pandemic and the death

942
00:49:22,520 --> 00:49:27,480
Speaker 2: ranges worldwide are swinging wildly because you have a case

943
00:49:27,480 --> 00:49:29,799
Speaker 2: where if someone got very sick and they got over

944
00:49:29,880 --> 00:49:33,520
Speaker 2: and then two years later they got pneumonia, that killed

945
00:49:33,560 --> 00:49:36,800
Speaker 2: them because there's weak their lungs had been so weakened

946
00:49:36,840 --> 00:49:38,759
Speaker 2: by the COVID that they had recovered from. It's like, well,

947
00:49:38,800 --> 00:49:40,520
Speaker 2: do you count that as a COVID death or not?

948
00:49:41,080 --> 00:49:42,440
Speaker 2: And here I think it's kind of the same thing

949
00:49:42,440 --> 00:49:45,440
Speaker 2: where if you had someone who's lung capacity was damaged

950
00:49:45,480 --> 00:49:49,200
Speaker 2: by eighty percent due to the you know from this mind,

951
00:49:49,280 --> 00:49:53,040
Speaker 2: and then three years later they got you know whatever

952
00:49:53,080 --> 00:49:56,839
Speaker 2: pneumonia or something that that finally put them away, well

953
00:49:57,120 --> 00:50:00,680
Speaker 2: there's no way that's going to get recorded as a death.

954
00:50:00,719 --> 00:50:05,040
Speaker 2: But it absolutely was like this person, it doesn't die

955
00:50:05,280 --> 00:50:08,359
Speaker 2: without the damage. It's just that if they didn't die

956
00:50:08,440 --> 00:50:10,839
Speaker 2: on site and then have me buried nearby, if there's

957
00:50:10,840 --> 00:50:14,200
Speaker 2: not a grave you can find. It's so hard to

958
00:50:14,280 --> 00:50:16,560
Speaker 2: know because again, somebody could have went off and then

959
00:50:16,600 --> 00:50:20,160
Speaker 2: died in nineteen thirty eight living in some rural part

960
00:50:20,160 --> 00:50:25,320
Speaker 2: of Montana and to even their family would not necessarily realize.

961
00:50:25,320 --> 00:50:27,359
Speaker 2: They just knew that they were very frail ever since

962
00:50:27,400 --> 00:50:31,120
Speaker 2: they took that mining job. So yeah, the amount of

963
00:50:31,160 --> 00:50:33,879
Speaker 2: investigative work it probably took just to arrive that number

964
00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:38,759
Speaker 2: is probably extraordinary, just trying to track down just all

965
00:50:38,800 --> 00:50:41,360
Speaker 2: of the old documents and the movement of these people

966
00:50:41,360 --> 00:50:43,920
Speaker 2: and then trying to figure out where they eventually wound up.

967
00:50:44,600 --> 00:50:46,920
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's a cherniac puts in. I mean,

968
00:50:46,920 --> 00:50:50,680
Speaker 1: his book is remarkable. It's both very readable and like

969
00:50:50,719 --> 00:50:55,120
Speaker 1: a very kind of scientific forensic analysis. Whereas Rukeiser number one,

970
00:50:55,120 --> 00:50:56,719
Speaker 1: it's kind of actually we're about to talk about her.

971
00:50:56,719 --> 00:50:59,920
Speaker 1: It's a very direct source and a little more emotional.

972
00:51:00,280 --> 00:51:03,799
Speaker 1: I think both together give you a pretty comprehensive understanding

973
00:51:03,800 --> 00:51:06,239
Speaker 1: of what happened here. And I did think it's worth

974
00:51:06,320 --> 00:51:10,680
Speaker 1: talking a little bit more about Muriel Rukaiser because there's

975
00:51:10,719 --> 00:51:13,240
Speaker 1: a lot, there's a lot to say about our country

976
00:51:13,280 --> 00:51:16,200
Speaker 1: and her specific story here. Muriel is one of the

977
00:51:16,200 --> 00:51:19,480
Speaker 1: first people outside of the Galley Bridge area to learn

978
00:51:19,640 --> 00:51:22,560
Speaker 1: what was going on. At twenty three, she was a

979
00:51:22,600 --> 00:51:26,480
Speaker 1: budding author and journalist and an avid leftist. She learned

980
00:51:26,480 --> 00:51:29,120
Speaker 1: about the disaster from radical publications at the time. In

981
00:51:29,200 --> 00:51:31,759
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five, when one of these magazines puts out

982
00:51:31,760 --> 00:51:34,879
Speaker 1: an article about Hawk's Nest, it goes viral among kind

983
00:51:34,880 --> 00:51:37,960
Speaker 1: of the New York intelligencia set and becomes this, as

984
00:51:38,000 --> 00:51:39,680
Speaker 1: I said, this kind of big cause celeb for the

985
00:51:39,719 --> 00:51:42,120
Speaker 1: while and for most people it's a thing, you know,

986
00:51:42,239 --> 00:51:44,000
Speaker 1: maybe you'll do a little march or something on it,

987
00:51:44,040 --> 00:51:46,080
Speaker 1: you'll try to raise some money, and then kind of

988
00:51:46,080 --> 00:51:47,879
Speaker 1: it goes away and you move on to the next thing.

989
00:51:48,400 --> 00:51:53,480
Speaker 1: Rukeaiser never does. And you know, she watches this congressional inquiry,

990
00:51:54,080 --> 00:51:56,880
Speaker 1: and the Congressional inquiry when it ends, it's pretty it

991
00:51:56,960 --> 00:52:00,560
Speaker 1: condemns Union Carbide, and it says we should have a

992
00:52:00,560 --> 00:52:04,040
Speaker 1: full federal investigation. But they never do it. There's never

993
00:52:04,080 --> 00:52:08,640
Speaker 1: any official, full federal investigation into this disaster. And Muriel

994
00:52:08,719 --> 00:52:11,480
Speaker 1: is she's not just furious about that. She's the kind

995
00:52:11,480 --> 00:52:14,440
Speaker 1: of person who is like, she's angry and she's gonna

996
00:52:14,480 --> 00:52:18,520
Speaker 1: fucking do something about this. And so she drives down

997
00:52:18,600 --> 00:52:21,520
Speaker 1: to gally Bridge with a friend to investigate on her own.

998
00:52:21,560 --> 00:52:24,000
Speaker 1: She kind of takes this like road trip, one of

999
00:52:24,000 --> 00:52:26,640
Speaker 1: our country's first great road trip stories. You could say.

1000
00:52:27,080 --> 00:52:29,200
Speaker 1: Now at this point, Muriel's not a nobody. She is

1001
00:52:29,239 --> 00:52:32,720
Speaker 1: already a celebrated poet for her first book, Theory of Flight,

1002
00:52:33,120 --> 00:52:37,400
Speaker 1: which had won a Yale Younger Poets Prize, and the

1003
00:52:37,719 --> 00:52:40,040
Speaker 1: Book of the Dead is kind of based on this

1004
00:52:40,200 --> 00:52:43,600
Speaker 1: road trip she takes through Fayette County and all of

1005
00:52:43,640 --> 00:52:46,080
Speaker 1: these people that she talks to. It's this very remarkable

1006
00:52:46,640 --> 00:52:50,720
Speaker 1: synthesis of gumshoe reporting and high art. It's worth noting

1007
00:52:50,920 --> 00:52:53,160
Speaker 1: that much of what we know about ru Keiser's life

1008
00:52:53,239 --> 00:52:56,560
Speaker 1: and why she did all this comes not from anything

1009
00:52:56,680 --> 00:53:00,000
Speaker 1: she wrote, but from the FBI. J ed Grew Hoover's

1010
00:53:00,120 --> 00:53:03,239
Speaker 1: civically gives orders for this woman to be followed and

1011
00:53:03,280 --> 00:53:05,400
Speaker 1: I'm going to quit from an article in the Oxford American.

1012
00:53:05,480 --> 00:53:09,360
Speaker 1: Here in nineteen forty three, j Edgar Hoover authorized his

1013
00:53:09,400 --> 00:53:11,200
Speaker 1: agency to spy on the poet as part of a

1014
00:53:11,239 --> 00:53:16,080
Speaker 1: probe to uncover Russian spies. Her communistic tendencies placed her

1015
00:53:16,160 --> 00:53:19,720
Speaker 1: under suspicion of being a concealed Communist. When the investigation began,

1016
00:53:19,800 --> 00:53:22,840
Speaker 1: she was noted as thirty dark, heavy with gray eyes.

1017
00:53:23,120 --> 00:53:25,440
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty three, the report reads, she and some

1018
00:53:25,480 --> 00:53:27,840
Speaker 1: friends drove from New York to Alabama to witness the

1019
00:53:27,880 --> 00:53:30,959
Speaker 1: Scottsborough trial. When local police found them talking to black

1020
00:53:31,000 --> 00:53:34,200
Speaker 1: reporters and holding flyers for a Negro student conference. The

1021
00:53:34,200 --> 00:53:38,200
Speaker 1: police accused the group of inciting the Negroes to insurrections. Then,

1022
00:53:38,320 --> 00:53:40,479
Speaker 1: in the summer of nineteen thirty six, after her trip

1023
00:53:40,520 --> 00:53:43,360
Speaker 1: to Galli Bridge. Rukaiser traveled to Spain to report on

1024
00:53:43,440 --> 00:53:47,600
Speaker 1: Barcelona's anti fascist People's Olympiad. In the process, she observed

1025
00:53:47,640 --> 00:53:49,520
Speaker 1: the first days of the Spanish Civil War from a

1026
00:53:49,560 --> 00:53:52,840
Speaker 1: train before evacuating by ship. Her suspicious activities in the

1027
00:53:52,880 --> 00:53:55,920
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties included her appeal for world peace and her

1028
00:53:55,920 --> 00:53:58,560
Speaker 1: civil rights zeal. The FBI mentions The Book of the

1029
00:53:58,600 --> 00:54:00,960
Speaker 1: Dead only once, in passing as a work that dealt

1030
00:54:01,000 --> 00:54:03,839
Speaker 1: with the industrial disintegration of the peoples in a West

1031
00:54:03,880 --> 00:54:08,960
Speaker 1: Virginia village riddled with silicosis. I find a lot interesting there.

1032
00:54:10,640 --> 00:54:13,400
Speaker 2: And it's hard to overstate the degree to which anti

1033
00:54:13,480 --> 00:54:17,880
Speaker 2: communist stuff was really just anti labor stuff, because if

1034
00:54:17,880 --> 00:54:19,520
Speaker 2: you were any kind of like, you didn't have to

1035
00:54:19,560 --> 00:54:22,160
Speaker 2: be that much of a radical to be frank, before

1036
00:54:22,239 --> 00:54:24,480
Speaker 2: they would start looking at you as like, well, you've

1037
00:54:24,480 --> 00:54:27,600
Speaker 2: got communist ties, you got socialist ties. You sat in

1038
00:54:27,680 --> 00:54:30,960
Speaker 2: on this meeting, and in this meeting were some communists,

1039
00:54:30,960 --> 00:54:35,200
Speaker 2: and it's like, well, yeah, because there's overlapping. There's overlap

1040
00:54:35,200 --> 00:54:37,920
Speaker 2: between activistsho are trying to, you know, pushing for better

1041
00:54:38,440 --> 00:54:42,279
Speaker 2: labor rights and everything else and people who wanted to

1042
00:54:42,640 --> 00:54:45,000
Speaker 2: take it Further so, a lot of the persecution of

1043
00:54:45,080 --> 00:54:47,880
Speaker 2: communists was really just people that had spoke out on

1044
00:54:47,920 --> 00:54:51,759
Speaker 2: behalf of labor. It became a very convenient thing for

1045
00:54:51,800 --> 00:54:52,400
Speaker 2: people to do.

1046
00:54:52,840 --> 00:54:55,000
Speaker 1: And I also find one of the other things I

1047
00:54:55,000 --> 00:54:58,440
Speaker 1: find interesting here is like just kind of the disinterest

1048
00:54:59,239 --> 00:55:02,200
Speaker 1: with which her report sums up the Book of the

1049
00:55:02,239 --> 00:55:05,520
Speaker 1: Dead and the disaster that it's reporting on, right, because

1050
00:55:05,520 --> 00:55:08,120
Speaker 1: I think that's obviously the FBI is concerned in other

1051
00:55:08,239 --> 00:55:10,600
Speaker 1: stuff here, But like, I do think that kind of

1052
00:55:10,680 --> 00:55:15,200
Speaker 1: disinterest you see there is emblematic of the overall attitude

1053
00:55:15,320 --> 00:55:18,080
Speaker 1: the federal government has to what happened here, right, And

1054
00:55:18,239 --> 00:55:21,920
Speaker 1: it's worth noting like there are not like all of

1055
00:55:21,960 --> 00:55:26,160
Speaker 1: the people killed by anarchist bombers or whatever in this period,

1056
00:55:26,160 --> 00:55:28,520
Speaker 1: and fuck throw in bank robbers there too, right, which

1057
00:55:28,560 --> 00:55:30,920
Speaker 1: is another thing the FBI deals with, do not equal

1058
00:55:30,920 --> 00:55:33,240
Speaker 1: the death toll of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster.

1059
00:55:33,840 --> 00:55:34,040
Speaker 2: Right.

1060
00:55:34,719 --> 00:55:37,920
Speaker 1: This is a much bigger danger to American citizens by

1061
00:55:38,000 --> 00:55:40,600
Speaker 1: any rate than like, I don't know, the fucking gangster

1062
00:55:41,280 --> 00:55:43,160
Speaker 1: robbing banks and shit in this period.

1063
00:55:43,880 --> 00:55:47,320
Speaker 2: Well, nobils to do the math during Prohibition, the total

1064
00:55:47,400 --> 00:55:50,759
Speaker 2: number of people killed by say al Capone's gain it

1065
00:55:50,920 --> 00:55:52,440
Speaker 2: wasn't a thousand.

1066
00:55:52,560 --> 00:55:56,000
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course, No, you can't make a business doing

1067
00:55:56,040 --> 00:55:58,759
Speaker 1: that like I guess the cartels do. But it's a

1068
00:55:58,760 --> 00:55:59,319
Speaker 1: different era.

1069
00:55:59,440 --> 00:56:02,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, the way we treat different types of crime and

1070
00:56:03,000 --> 00:56:05,839
Speaker 2: the way one thing is like a crisis that we

1071
00:56:05,920 --> 00:56:10,680
Speaker 2: need to completely overturn the entire system to address, versus this,

1072
00:56:10,880 --> 00:56:15,400
Speaker 2: where the amount of disinterest is kind of shocking, like

1073
00:56:15,480 --> 00:56:19,759
Speaker 2: even to this day, like the memorials for this, it's

1074
00:56:19,960 --> 00:56:24,480
Speaker 2: just such an afterthought. The combination between the suffering that

1075
00:56:24,560 --> 00:56:26,520
Speaker 2: was caused the number of people to suffer versus the

1076
00:56:26,600 --> 00:56:29,319
Speaker 2: reaction to it is just so out of whack. It's

1077
00:56:29,360 --> 00:56:34,359
Speaker 2: so crazy the things that we choose to be frightened of.

1078
00:56:37,000 --> 00:56:40,400
Speaker 1: Yeah, it really is so. One of the articles that

1079
00:56:40,440 --> 00:56:44,520
Speaker 1: I came across in my research was a twenty eighteen

1080
00:56:44,600 --> 00:56:48,640
Speaker 1: in PR Frontline investigation. This was not about the Hawk's

1081
00:56:48,680 --> 00:56:53,960
Speaker 1: Nest Tunnel disaster, but was analyzing decades of regulatory data

1082
00:56:54,000 --> 00:56:57,600
Speaker 1: from dust collection monitors in coal mines modern coal mines

1083
00:56:57,680 --> 00:57:02,080
Speaker 1: operating today, and they found evidence that government regulators have

1084
00:57:02,200 --> 00:57:05,359
Speaker 1: had half for the last fifty years. Basically, there has

1085
00:57:05,400 --> 00:57:09,160
Speaker 1: been hard evidence that silica exposure in about fifteen percent

1086
00:57:09,239 --> 00:57:13,719
Speaker 1: of US minds vastly exceeded safe levels. This means that

1087
00:57:13,760 --> 00:57:16,880
Speaker 1: regulators had evidence that a significant number of workers were

1088
00:57:16,920 --> 00:57:20,160
Speaker 1: in unsafe conditions where they would get sick and die,

1089
00:57:20,480 --> 00:57:23,680
Speaker 1: and that our regulators failed to step in and demand

1090
00:57:23,800 --> 00:57:28,560
Speaker 1: direct steps be taken to mitigate this danger. Celeste Montfornton

1091
00:57:29,640 --> 00:57:32,680
Speaker 1: weird last name Celest Montfornton, who is a former MIND

1092
00:57:32,720 --> 00:57:36,960
Speaker 1: safety regulator under Clinton, said this, we failed. Had we

1093
00:57:37,000 --> 00:57:39,280
Speaker 1: taken action at this time, I really believe we would

1094
00:57:39,280 --> 00:57:41,160
Speaker 1: not be seeing the disease we're saying now. And what

1095
00:57:41,200 --> 00:57:44,720
Speaker 1: he's talking about is what the National Institute for Occupational

1096
00:57:44,720 --> 00:57:48,160
Speaker 1: Health and Safety has described as an epidemic of silicosis

1097
00:57:48,240 --> 00:57:51,520
Speaker 1: among miners today. This is happening right now as we

1098
00:57:51,760 --> 00:57:54,439
Speaker 1: as we say this, unless you're listening hundreds of years

1099
00:57:54,440 --> 00:57:59,919
Speaker 1: in the future, it's yeah. One of these epidemiologist Scott

1100
00:58:00,080 --> 00:58:03,520
Speaker 1: Lany is quoted as saying, we're counting thousands of cases,

1101
00:58:03,640 --> 00:58:06,760
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands and thousands of black lung cases, thousands

1102
00:58:06,760 --> 00:58:08,800
Speaker 1: of cases of the most severe form of black lung,

1103
00:58:08,880 --> 00:58:12,720
Speaker 1: and we're not done counting yet. One culprit of all this,

1104
00:58:12,840 --> 00:58:14,840
Speaker 1: one reason this is happening, is that the best and

1105
00:58:14,880 --> 00:58:17,920
Speaker 1: biggest coal seams were all mined out generations ago, so

1106
00:58:18,000 --> 00:58:21,400
Speaker 1: modern coal miners are often drilling thinner seams that are

1107
00:58:21,440 --> 00:58:24,720
Speaker 1: laced with sandstone, and sandstone has a high and elevated

1108
00:58:24,760 --> 00:58:27,040
Speaker 1: silica content. Not as high as what they were removing

1109
00:58:27,080 --> 00:58:29,600
Speaker 1: from the Hawk's nest tunnel, but elevated, and that means

1110
00:58:29,640 --> 00:58:34,480
Speaker 1: people get sicker faster, NPR writes quote. The NPR Frontline

1111
00:58:34,520 --> 00:58:37,840
Speaker 1: investigation found thousands of instances in which miners were exposed

1112
00:58:37,920 --> 00:58:39,840
Speaker 1: not just to col dust, but to dangerous levels of

1113
00:58:39,840 --> 00:58:43,520
Speaker 1: toxic silica dust. The Federal Mind Safety and Health Administrations

1114
00:58:43,520 --> 00:58:47,800
Speaker 1: own data chronicles twenty one thousand instances of excessive exposure

1115
00:58:47,800 --> 00:58:50,880
Speaker 1: to silica since nineteen eighty six. At the same time,

1116
00:58:51,040 --> 00:58:54,680
Speaker 1: NPR identified black lung diagnoses involving miners in their thirties

1117
00:58:54,680 --> 00:58:58,560
Speaker 1: who also experienced rapid progression to the advanced stage. Smith

1118
00:58:58,560 --> 00:59:02,600
Speaker 1: says he was diagnosed at nine. NIOSHA has confirm this

1119
00:59:02,680 --> 00:59:05,120
Speaker 1: trend in its studies. I don't have an exact death

1120
00:59:05,120 --> 00:59:07,320
Speaker 1: toll for you. Now. Obviously there are more things to

1121
00:59:07,400 --> 00:59:10,439
Speaker 1: keep people alive, you know. Now, as Jason keeps saying,

1122
00:59:10,480 --> 00:59:13,160
Speaker 1: there's a lot more these people are. This is a

1123
00:59:13,200 --> 00:59:16,680
Speaker 1: bad situation. It's terrifying, but they do have like much

1124
00:59:16,840 --> 00:59:19,120
Speaker 1: more in the way of support than the folks suffering

1125
00:59:19,120 --> 00:59:22,560
Speaker 1: a hawk's nest. But we are talking thousands and thousands

1126
00:59:22,560 --> 00:59:25,000
Speaker 1: and thousands of cases of people dealing with black lung

1127
00:59:25,080 --> 00:59:28,120
Speaker 1: right now that they didn't need to be dealing with that.

1128
00:59:28,400 --> 00:59:32,520
Speaker 1: The technology existed warning the situation was unsafe, and they

1129
00:59:32,520 --> 00:59:36,760
Speaker 1: were not given the proper equipment. Air circulation systems were

1130
00:59:36,800 --> 00:59:40,240
Speaker 1: not installed, mitigation efforts weren't taken because it would have

1131
00:59:40,320 --> 00:59:42,560
Speaker 1: cut down on the profits of the mining company. You know,

1132
00:59:42,680 --> 00:59:45,760
Speaker 1: that is still happening today. I will say one thing

1133
00:59:45,760 --> 00:59:50,439
Speaker 1: that's good is that there have been some lawsuits, particularly

1134
00:59:50,520 --> 00:59:52,720
Speaker 1: against One of the issues here is that like a

1135
00:59:52,720 --> 00:59:55,400
Speaker 1: lot of dust masks issued to miners were found not

1136
00:59:55,480 --> 00:59:58,480
Speaker 1: to work the company's figure. I think what happened is

1137
00:59:58,520 --> 01:00:02,160
Speaker 1: that some of the masks suppliers just assumed, well, our

1138
01:00:02,760 --> 01:00:06,520
Speaker 1: air circulation shit, the mitigation stuff is so good, nobody's

1139
01:00:06,520 --> 01:00:08,560
Speaker 1: going to know if we kind of cheap out making

1140
01:00:08,600 --> 01:00:12,320
Speaker 1: these masks, these safety masks. And a huge number of

1141
01:00:12,320 --> 01:00:17,800
Speaker 1: miners have actually sued several masks suppliers, filing product liability lawsuits,

1142
01:00:17,960 --> 01:00:20,720
Speaker 1: and there have been a like multi billion dollar verdicts

1143
01:00:20,760 --> 01:00:22,600
Speaker 1: in this. So one of the good things is that

1144
01:00:23,160 --> 01:00:27,440
Speaker 1: there is much more of a protective apparatus. I shouldn't

1145
01:00:27,440 --> 01:00:29,840
Speaker 1: say protective, because it didn't protect these guys they got sick.

1146
01:00:30,240 --> 01:00:32,680
Speaker 1: But there's more of a I guess, apparatus of vengeance

1147
01:00:32,800 --> 01:00:35,000
Speaker 1: to where this is not. You know, when you're talking

1148
01:00:35,080 --> 01:00:38,040
Speaker 1: a multi billion dollar lawsuit, you are talking about something

1149
01:00:38,080 --> 01:00:41,000
Speaker 1: that significantly more of an issue for these companies to

1150
01:00:41,000 --> 01:00:43,640
Speaker 1: deal with than the kind of money that Union Carbide

1151
01:00:43,680 --> 01:00:46,760
Speaker 1: had to pay out. So I'm not gonna say you

1152
01:00:46,800 --> 01:00:50,560
Speaker 1: should take too much be too happy about that, because

1153
01:00:50,640 --> 01:00:53,480
Speaker 1: again it's still fucking happened. But I don't know.

1154
01:00:53,960 --> 01:00:54,440
Speaker 2: There you go.

1155
01:00:54,520 --> 01:00:55,800
Speaker 1: That's what I have to say.

1156
01:00:56,560 --> 01:01:00,919
Speaker 2: One thing that is very that has not change since

1157
01:01:01,000 --> 01:01:03,320
Speaker 2: those days, has not changed the last couple hundred years.

1158
01:01:04,240 --> 01:01:10,439
Speaker 2: Our entire civilization exists because of mining. Everything you have

1159
01:01:10,720 --> 01:01:14,520
Speaker 2: change from a mine. Everything runs on mines. Everything in

1160
01:01:14,560 --> 01:01:16,920
Speaker 2: your phone came from a mine, everything in your PC,

1161
01:01:17,080 --> 01:01:19,880
Speaker 2: everything in this microphone. I'm talking into everything in this chair,

1162
01:01:19,960 --> 01:01:23,560
Speaker 2: I'm sitting on all of the metals, all of the steel, everything,

1163
01:01:23,640 --> 01:01:27,320
Speaker 2: all of the silica. Everything came from a mine. And

1164
01:01:27,560 --> 01:01:30,840
Speaker 2: I don't think on it today. Basis we appreciate this

1165
01:01:31,040 --> 01:01:34,400
Speaker 2: that if the miners went away, all of this stops

1166
01:01:34,600 --> 01:01:37,840
Speaker 2: all of it, because you can't you can't walk two

1167
01:01:37,840 --> 01:01:41,520
Speaker 2: feet without walking on something that came out of a mine.

1168
01:01:42,000 --> 01:01:44,800
Speaker 2: The green energy revolution that we all want with the

1169
01:01:44,840 --> 01:01:48,680
Speaker 2: solar panels and whatever nuclear power plants or fusion plants,

1170
01:01:48,760 --> 01:01:51,960
Speaker 2: or when all of that stuff, the windmills, all of

1171
01:01:52,000 --> 01:01:56,400
Speaker 2: that stuff came out of a mine.

1172
01:01:56,680 --> 01:02:00,960
Speaker 1: Yeah. And the degree to which these are yeah, just

1173
01:02:02,000 --> 01:02:05,560
Speaker 1: disposable people still, I think that's kind of important to

1174
01:02:05,640 --> 01:02:09,280
Speaker 1: note that, like the disposability of the folks who make

1175
01:02:10,160 --> 01:02:14,360
Speaker 1: every aspect of society possible is uh. I mean, I

1176
01:02:14,400 --> 01:02:17,760
Speaker 1: would say it hasn't changed, but it's they're not not

1177
01:02:18,040 --> 01:02:21,160
Speaker 1: disposable still. And by the way, I should also highlight

1178
01:02:21,200 --> 01:02:23,560
Speaker 1: here we're talking about the miner when we say miners

1179
01:02:23,680 --> 01:02:25,760
Speaker 1: are what makes the world possible. When it comes to

1180
01:02:25,800 --> 01:02:28,200
Speaker 1: like the shit mind in your computers, that's not some

1181
01:02:28,400 --> 01:02:31,960
Speaker 1: like hard work and you know man with the fucking

1182
01:02:32,120 --> 01:02:34,600
Speaker 1: creases on his face and whatnot and a big old

1183
01:02:34,640 --> 01:02:37,280
Speaker 1: helmet and the light working in like West Virginia, that's

1184
01:02:37,320 --> 01:02:40,880
Speaker 1: like an eleven year old in Central Africa. Mining mirror

1185
01:02:41,320 --> 01:02:43,880
Speaker 1: rare earth minerals to a significant extent. Right, This is

1186
01:02:43,880 --> 01:02:46,800
Speaker 1: one of the problems with the production of smartphones and

1187
01:02:47,080 --> 01:02:50,560
Speaker 1: computers and stuff is that, like it, there's basically inevitable

1188
01:02:50,760 --> 01:02:53,720
Speaker 1: that there will be human trafficking at some stage of

1189
01:02:53,720 --> 01:02:57,840
Speaker 1: that because some of the critical environment, like ingredients to

1190
01:02:57,880 --> 01:03:03,120
Speaker 1: these machines are only mined through means that are illegal internationally. Right,

1191
01:03:03,400 --> 01:03:05,520
Speaker 1: It's just one of those things where there's so many

1192
01:03:05,600 --> 01:03:08,640
Speaker 1: layers of separation and shit that like you can get

1193
01:03:08,640 --> 01:03:11,680
Speaker 1: away kind of with Nobody wants to talk about where

1194
01:03:11,720 --> 01:03:13,800
Speaker 1: the cobalt comes from or whatever the fuck, Like this

1195
01:03:14,360 --> 01:03:16,720
Speaker 1: is just the way it is, and that.

1196
01:03:16,680 --> 01:03:20,080
Speaker 2: Will always be dirty work. It will always be dangerous work,

1197
01:03:20,480 --> 01:03:23,480
Speaker 2: and we are so disconnected from it, especially people like me,

1198
01:03:24,160 --> 01:03:26,760
Speaker 2: even people who are very progressive. But we work office

1199
01:03:26,800 --> 01:03:29,200
Speaker 2: jobs and we send our emails and we sit at

1200
01:03:29,200 --> 01:03:32,560
Speaker 2: our laptops and really do not think of where that

1201
01:03:32,680 --> 01:03:36,360
Speaker 2: stuff inside the microprocesses came from, because at the end

1202
01:03:36,440 --> 01:03:40,040
Speaker 2: of it is a very dirty mine in a very

1203
01:03:40,120 --> 01:03:43,400
Speaker 2: dark place and someone working very hard, probably in pain.

1204
01:03:44,480 --> 01:03:47,160
Speaker 2: Like you can technology until you have a mind that's

1205
01:03:47,240 --> 01:03:50,760
Speaker 2: entirely run by robots, but even then, the stuff that

1206
01:03:50,800 --> 01:03:52,760
Speaker 2: the robots are made of will have come from a

1207
01:03:52,880 --> 01:03:56,880
Speaker 2: mind like at the base of everything we do, no

1208
01:03:56,880 --> 01:04:00,920
Speaker 2: matter how high minded and sophisticated. When we land a

1209
01:04:01,160 --> 01:04:04,880
Speaker 2: robot on Mars, that robot is made out of materials

1210
01:04:04,920 --> 01:04:08,040
Speaker 2: that came from a mine. Like there's somebody in whatever

1211
01:04:08,160 --> 01:04:12,680
Speaker 2: West Virginia or Africa or somewhere that dug it up

1212
01:04:12,800 --> 01:04:14,920
Speaker 2: out of the ground and put it at a cart

1213
01:04:15,320 --> 01:04:18,600
Speaker 2: and shipped it across the world. Yep.

1214
01:04:20,280 --> 01:04:23,000
Speaker 1: And I guess that's a good place to end, Jason,

1215
01:04:23,000 --> 01:04:24,040
Speaker 1: you want to plug your book.

1216
01:04:24,560 --> 01:04:28,000
Speaker 2: Well, just one final there's one kind of post mortem.

1217
01:04:28,640 --> 01:04:32,280
Speaker 2: The Union Carbide Company. Of course, now as of I

1218
01:04:32,360 --> 01:04:33,920
Speaker 2: try to look them up and see when they went

1219
01:04:33,960 --> 01:04:37,120
Speaker 2: out of business. It turns out that in twenty nineteen

1220
01:04:37,240 --> 01:04:41,840
Speaker 2: they had four point four billion dollars in revenue. Great,

1221
01:04:43,360 --> 01:04:46,520
Speaker 2: but they have now been they've now been swallowed up

1222
01:04:46,520 --> 01:04:49,560
Speaker 2: by the Dal Chemical Company, a small company, a family

1223
01:04:49,560 --> 01:04:52,640
Speaker 2: owned operation that it has a market cap of thirty

1224
01:04:52,680 --> 01:04:55,680
Speaker 2: six billion dollars I believe, yeah.

1225
01:04:55,320 --> 01:04:58,800
Speaker 1: And is not involved in anything horrifying in history. Don't

1226
01:04:58,800 --> 01:05:02,200
Speaker 1: look at don't google down chemical Vietnam right like, there's

1227
01:05:02,200 --> 01:05:04,520
Speaker 1: no reason to do that whatsoever.

1228
01:05:05,920 --> 01:05:10,200
Speaker 2: We are a very forgiving society. Don't you see when

1229
01:05:10,280 --> 01:05:13,800
Speaker 2: people reform themselves as long as you are a gigantic corporation,

1230
01:05:15,200 --> 01:05:19,040
Speaker 2: it's all about second chances in America. Yeah, we're willing

1231
01:05:19,080 --> 01:05:24,480
Speaker 2: to let you turn your life around. Yeah, anyway, yes,

1232
01:05:24,800 --> 01:05:29,320
Speaker 2: thank you. If you want to find me on TikTok,

1233
01:05:29,400 --> 01:05:32,840
Speaker 2: I am Jason K. Pargan. We have repeatedly made jokes

1234
01:05:32,880 --> 01:05:36,960
Speaker 2: about me being reduced to a TikTok person. I have

1235
01:05:37,200 --> 01:05:41,920
Speaker 2: three hundred and thirty thousand followers on there. I'm primarily

1236
01:05:42,000 --> 01:05:45,520
Speaker 2: a TikToker. The author stuff is now just a trivial

1237
01:05:45,560 --> 01:05:49,920
Speaker 2: footnote in my biography. My gravestone will say he was

1238
01:05:49,960 --> 01:05:51,440
Speaker 2: a beloved tich talker and.

1239
01:05:51,480 --> 01:05:54,640
Speaker 1: Prominent talker, prominent TikToker.

1240
01:05:55,320 --> 01:05:58,360
Speaker 2: I'm Jason K. Pargan on TikTok. Also that same thing

1241
01:05:58,440 --> 01:06:01,960
Speaker 2: on Twitter, SAH. Also the same thing on Blue Guy

1242
01:06:02,320 --> 01:06:08,520
Speaker 2: and threads and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and some

1243
01:06:08,600 --> 01:06:10,680
Speaker 2: others that I don't remember to update because there's too

1244
01:06:10,720 --> 01:06:14,560
Speaker 2: many substack, all of them, all of them. Jason K.

1245
01:06:14,720 --> 01:06:17,280
Speaker 2: Pargin P A R G. I N thank you. You know.

1246
01:06:17,400 --> 01:06:18,880
Speaker 2: I do.

1247
01:06:18,920 --> 01:06:22,640
Speaker 1: We shit talk TikTok a lot us olds, but I

1248
01:06:22,680 --> 01:06:25,040
Speaker 1: will say it's actually kind of helpful that that's how

1249
01:06:25,120 --> 01:06:28,280
Speaker 1: you initially learned. It's kind of hopeful that that is

1250
01:06:28,320 --> 01:06:31,200
Speaker 1: how you found out about this because this is like

1251
01:06:31,640 --> 01:06:35,560
Speaker 1: so important, right, this is like critical history. It's critical

1252
01:06:35,600 --> 01:06:39,320
Speaker 1: for understanding a lot of things about this country today.

1253
01:06:39,440 --> 01:06:41,360
Speaker 1: And it's just critical because you need to know about

1254
01:06:41,360 --> 01:06:44,720
Speaker 1: what happened to these people. And the fact that this

1255
01:06:44,880 --> 01:06:48,720
Speaker 1: story spread widely on TikTok, I think is pretty rad actually,

1256
01:06:48,880 --> 01:06:51,040
Speaker 1: so that's good, that's.

1257
01:06:51,040 --> 01:06:53,800
Speaker 2: Nice, and to be that serious. There's a lot of

1258
01:06:53,920 --> 01:06:57,720
Speaker 2: really cool stuff on TikTok, and it's it's not fifteen

1259
01:06:57,760 --> 01:07:01,439
Speaker 2: second long clips of like teenage girls asy and people

1260
01:07:01,440 --> 01:07:03,440
Speaker 2: will hear that I'm on TikTok. They think, oh, so

1261
01:07:03,440 --> 01:07:07,760
Speaker 2: you're on there with the fifteen year old girls, that's

1262
01:07:07,800 --> 01:07:11,240
Speaker 2: your thing. It's like, no, TikTok. Now, there's long form

1263
01:07:11,280 --> 01:07:13,680
Speaker 2: stuff on there. Let's say long form, I mean seven, eight,

1264
01:07:13,760 --> 01:07:17,200
Speaker 2: nine minutes long for TikTok getting into subjects like this.

1265
01:07:17,240 --> 01:07:19,480
Speaker 2: Because this video had a lot of views on it,

1266
01:07:19,520 --> 01:07:22,560
Speaker 2: that's how I saw it. That's what cued me into this.

1267
01:07:22,600 --> 01:07:24,080
Speaker 2: And then when I went to look it up found

1268
01:07:24,080 --> 01:07:28,040
Speaker 2: out that there's barely anything on Wikipedia because it's kind

1269
01:07:28,040 --> 01:07:32,560
Speaker 2: of flew under the radar, and so that inspired me

1270
01:07:32,640 --> 01:07:34,360
Speaker 2: to see if we want to do an episode about this,

1271
01:07:34,400 --> 01:07:36,960
Speaker 2: because I suspected that there was a lot to unearth.

1272
01:07:37,320 --> 01:07:41,120
Speaker 2: It was worse than I thought, as it always is

1273
01:07:41,240 --> 01:07:44,680
Speaker 2: every time I come on here. The details are always

1274
01:07:44,680 --> 01:07:47,960
Speaker 2: worse than what you've heard. But this is the kind

1275
01:07:48,000 --> 01:07:51,680
Speaker 2: of story. For whatever reason, we love to make movies

1276
01:07:51,720 --> 01:07:55,800
Speaker 2: about serial killers that killed five people, but a corporation

1277
01:07:55,880 --> 01:08:01,040
Speaker 2: that kills a thousand through being exactly as cruel and whatever.

1278
01:08:01,480 --> 01:08:03,720
Speaker 2: We kind of just like, well, yeah, but their job creators,

1279
01:08:03,800 --> 01:08:06,240
Speaker 2: and they made that tunnel, Like, don't they get credit

1280
01:08:06,280 --> 01:08:06,880
Speaker 2: for making that.

1281
01:08:06,840 --> 01:08:08,360
Speaker 1: Tunnel solid tunnel?

1282
01:08:08,440 --> 01:08:11,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like they didn't make. A whole bunch of

1283
01:08:12,000 --> 01:08:14,640
Speaker 2: people whose names you'll never know made that tunnel. Yeah,

1284
01:08:14,680 --> 01:08:16,640
Speaker 2: and they broke their bodies to make it.

1285
01:08:17,080 --> 01:08:21,280
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I don't know, go off into the world.

1286
01:08:21,720 --> 01:08:29,080
Speaker 1: Buy Jason's book, Remain Angry at Union Carbide. Definitely do that. Okay,

1287
01:08:29,520 --> 01:08:34,439
Speaker 1: that's the episode, Go away now, everybody. Hey everyone, Robert

1288
01:08:34,479 --> 01:08:37,360
Speaker 1: Evans here. As we mentioned in the first episode, Jason

1289
01:08:37,800 --> 01:08:40,360
Speaker 1: asked for this as the result of a TikTok that

1290
01:08:40,400 --> 01:08:42,680
Speaker 1: they'd seen. I'm not waunch of a TikTok guy. So

1291
01:08:42,800 --> 01:08:45,160
Speaker 1: I just kind of went on and did my research.

1292
01:08:45,320 --> 01:08:48,280
Speaker 1: But I've been informed that the person who put together

1293
01:08:48,320 --> 01:08:51,560
Speaker 1: this TikTok, which is an account called Schoolhouse Clock like

1294
01:08:51,840 --> 01:08:56,920
Speaker 1: like the buildings supply c a ulk. Schoolhouse Clock, who's

1295
01:08:57,240 --> 01:09:00,200
Speaker 1: creator is a fellow named Michael, put out a video

1296
01:09:00,280 --> 01:09:03,519
Speaker 1: specifically talking to us. He wanted to let us know.

1297
01:09:03,680 --> 01:09:07,960
Speaker 1: There's a website hawksnest names dot org that was created

1298
01:09:08,040 --> 01:09:10,719
Speaker 1: quite a while ago to try and put together an actual,

1299
01:09:10,840 --> 01:09:14,160
Speaker 1: definitive list of the men who died as a result

1300
01:09:14,200 --> 01:09:18,080
Speaker 1: of this. They've got both a list of death certificates,

1301
01:09:18,120 --> 01:09:21,840
Speaker 1: worker names, some reports on you andion carbide, and some

1302
01:09:21,880 --> 01:09:23,960
Speaker 1: other information. Really good info if you're interested in this,

1303
01:09:24,000 --> 01:09:26,160
Speaker 1: and you can also if you're someone who may have

1304
01:09:26,240 --> 01:09:28,840
Speaker 1: lost a family member obviously a long time ago in

1305
01:09:28,920 --> 01:09:31,000
Speaker 1: this disaster, there's a way for you to kind of

1306
01:09:31,040 --> 01:09:32,800
Speaker 1: reach out to them and try to add that name.

1307
01:09:33,960 --> 01:09:37,960
Speaker 1: That website was offline for a while, but then Michael,

1308
01:09:38,040 --> 01:09:40,439
Speaker 1: the fellow with the TikTok apparently was able to raise

1309
01:09:40,439 --> 01:09:44,320
Speaker 1: some money through his viewers or listeners whatever you call

1310
01:09:44,360 --> 01:09:47,519
Speaker 1: them on TikTok to put it back up, which is great,

1311
01:09:48,080 --> 01:09:50,120
Speaker 1: and so they he asked that we put in a

1312
01:09:50,200 --> 01:09:53,080
Speaker 1: shout out, which I am doing now. So please check

1313
01:09:53,120 --> 01:09:57,400
Speaker 1: out hawksnest names dot org for more information on this disaster.

1314
01:09:57,760 --> 01:10:03,960
Speaker 1: Thanks everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool

1315
01:10:04,040 --> 01:10:06,880
Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our

1316
01:10:06,920 --> 01:10:10,640
Speaker 1: website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the

1317
01:10:10,680 --> 01:10:14,200
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.