Speaker 1: Who Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards show,
Speaker 1: where I enunciate the title slightly differently so that you
Speaker 1: stay interested and don't slip into a belief that you
Speaker 1: all of these episodes are just kind of like one
Speaker 1: long episode and you're just sort of like lost in
Speaker 1: space consuming it. Anyway, that was that what you were
Speaker 1: going for there, buddy? Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a k hole but for your ears, speaking of while
Speaker 1: not really speaking about ketamine, but anyway, Jason pargin.
Speaker 2: Part two, The Triumphant Part two, the first part kind
Speaker 2: of ended on an Empire strikes back a down note.
Speaker 2: This is going to get us through to the Return
Speaker 2: of the Jedi, when the Empire is finally finally going
Speaker 2: to fall in. This company, this evil corporation behind this
Speaker 2: disaster going to be dissolved. That they could clearly not
Speaker 2: still in business after nineteen thirty whatever, once this stuff
Speaker 2: all comes out. I'm sure I've not looked it up.
Speaker 2: I'm sure they were not allowed to operate anywhere in
Speaker 2: the world after this.
Speaker 1: I've forgotten most of what I wrote here, but I'm
Speaker 1: sure you're right on that one.
Speaker 2: Jason.
Speaker 1: Now, Jason, are you do you have a thing that
Speaker 1: you've got a plug here that you yes, yeah, moving.
Speaker 2: The new book is called Zoe is Too Drunk for
Speaker 2: This Dystopia. Add in all formats on October thirty first,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three. If you are listening to this after
Speaker 2: that date, it should be out wherever books are sold
Speaker 2: in any possible format. If it is not out, boy,
Speaker 2: google my name, because something terrible must have happened. I
Speaker 2: can't imagine. It must have gotten canceled and pulled from shelves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jason got canceled for his clandestine work in Nicaragua
Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties or something like that. Look, we
Speaker 1: all have we all have a dark history of clandestine
Speaker 1: work in Latin America at some point in the nineties.
Speaker 1: You know, don't don't be judgmental people, they'll come for
Speaker 1: you next. This is the problem with cancel culture.
Speaker 2: And also that does not get you canceled. Those people are.
Speaker 1: Those people are very much you know, they're all fine.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about another kind of canceled silicosis. So
Speaker 1: one of the you know you mentioned there's not a
Speaker 1: lot of sources on this. There there are some very
Speaker 1: good sources on this, but they are kind of obscure
Speaker 1: and buried, and honestly the very best, like early like
Speaker 1: the the in terms of like stuff that how close
Speaker 1: it is to the actual disaster, probably the best overall
Speaker 1: work kind of covering this at least that that's kind
Speaker 1: of contemporary to it. Happening is not a piece of
Speaker 1: traditional journalism or like a traditional nonfiction book. It's a poem,
Speaker 1: an epic poem. So we're not talking about like a
Speaker 1: little rhyming thing. We're talking about almost like the Illea
Speaker 1: or the Odyssey. Right, there's an epic poem about the
Speaker 1: Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, The Book of the Dead, written
Speaker 1: by Muriel Rukeiser. She was, you know, someone who grew
Speaker 1: up soon after the disaster and came to west you know,
Speaker 1: this part of West Virginia and was able to meet
Speaker 1: and interview a bunch of the survivors and their family members.
Speaker 1: And so it's this mix of you know, art where
Speaker 1: where she is, you know, using kind of the medium
Speaker 1: of poetry to talk through, to kind of set the
Speaker 1: scene and to talk through you know, how horrifying this was.
Speaker 1: But also large chunks of it are straight up interviews
Speaker 1: with survivors and their family members that have been kind
Speaker 1: of set to meet her in order to fit into
Speaker 1: the work. I haven't ever encountered anything like this before actually,
Speaker 1: and within sort of West Virginia, you know, academic spheres.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty famous book. I had to, you know,
Speaker 1: actually buy a physical copy of it because it's not online.
Speaker 1: But it's it's very good. It's it's really remarkable, and
Speaker 1: it is considered one of the more important pieces of
Speaker 1: kind of labor journalism of this era. I think it's
Speaker 1: been forgotten by most people now, but it shouldn't be.
Speaker 1: It is a pretty remarkable work of art. So I
Speaker 1: do want to encourage people check out Muriel Rakaiser's Book
Speaker 1: of the Dead. We're going to be quoting from it
Speaker 1: a couple of times here because it contains interviews with
Speaker 1: people from that period of time.
Speaker 2: In the last episode, we kind of joked about the
Speaker 2: fact that I'm mostly known for TikTok, which is true.
Speaker 2: Far more people have watched my tech talks and have
Speaker 2: read any of my books. But I on there, I
Speaker 2: talked about the HBO mini series they did about Chernobyl, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I talked about how they made it not as
Speaker 2: a documentary or as a docuseries or anything like that.
Speaker 2: They made it as a horror movie. Yeah, Like it
Speaker 2: is highly stylized, and I was in that technok. I
Speaker 2: was defending that choice because I was like, you can't
Speaker 2: convey the reality of Chernobyl without trying to convey the
Speaker 2: fact that it played out like cosmic horror to these people,
Speaker 2: that you had this church demon thing you brought into
Speaker 2: the world, and that everyone who looked at it their
Speaker 2: flesh started melting off their bones. So it is highly
Speaker 2: stylized because that's the only thing to really drive home,
Speaker 2: Whereas if you just try to convey it as a
Speaker 2: clinical piece of journalism, it doesn't hit the same way.
Speaker 2: It is trying to bring you into what it was
Speaker 2: like to live that situation that no one had ever
Speaker 2: lived through before. There had never been a meltdown before.
Speaker 2: Where here, I think it's the same thing if you're
Speaker 2: trying to convey the actual horror of what occurred. Because
Speaker 2: this mind, as we described in the previous episode. Please
Speaker 2: go back to listen to that one if you have
Speaker 2: not yet, it was hell on Earth. Yeah, Like you're
Speaker 2: in this dark space that is cramped. Even if it's
Speaker 2: a spacious mind, you're still you know, it's now far
Speaker 2: enough that you're long out of the sunlight, and the
Speaker 2: air is burning you. It's burning your eyes, it's burning
Speaker 2: your nose, it's burning your lungs. It's probably burning your
Speaker 2: skin like you're the teeny tiny pieces of glass. An
Speaker 2: epic poem is as appropriate as anything as I can
Speaker 2: think of to try to convey that this is an
Speaker 2: epic tragedy. It's so easy to talk about this in
Speaker 2: a way that we talk about numbers in the science
Speaker 2: of it that doesn't convey what it was like to
Speaker 2: get up and go to work in this place every day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, absolutely, And I think Rukeiser does a really
Speaker 1: admirable job of that. One of the accounts that she
Speaker 1: provides is from a woman, and this is from one
Speaker 1: of the relatively small number of laborers who were from
Speaker 1: the nearby town of golly Bridge. This woman, this mother,
Speaker 1: is named Absalom, and she has three sons who all
Speaker 1: go to work in this tunnel. They had been coal
Speaker 1: miners previously, but work was uneven, and as ru Keiser writes, quote,
Speaker 1: a power company foreman learned that we made homebrew. He
Speaker 1: formed a habit of dropping by in the evenings to drink,
Speaker 1: persuading the boys and my husband to give up their
Speaker 1: jobs and take this other work. It would pay them better.
Speaker 1: Sureley is my youngest boy. He went into the tunnel.
Speaker 1: I saw the dust at the bottom of the tub.
Speaker 1: The boy worked there about eighteen months. Came home one
Speaker 1: evening with a shortness of breath. He said, mother, I
Speaker 1: cannot get my breath. Shirley was sick about three months.
Speaker 1: I would carry him from his bed to the table,
Speaker 1: from his bed to the porch in my arms. So
Speaker 1: that's terrible, but it's also worth noting Absalom and her
Speaker 1: family are kind of among the luckier victims in that
Speaker 1: her kids and her husband, when they get sick, they
Speaker 1: have a home in town that's stable, they have family
Speaker 1: to take care of them. They're not completely in the wind.
Speaker 1: So when Shirley gets sick, he's able to stay with
Speaker 1: his mom and get care from his mom. This does
Speaker 1: not ultimately save his life, but it's a less horrific
Speaker 1: experience than a lot of these black laborers are forced
Speaker 1: to endure. I want you to imagine not just the
Speaker 1: tunnel horror, which Jason just described pretty ably, but living
Speaker 1: and working in a camp outside the dig project. Right,
Speaker 1: you're in these cramped quarters. You're in a tiny box
Speaker 1: of a room with ten to fifteen other guys. None
Speaker 1: of you are able to There's not hygiene facilities that
Speaker 1: are good or super regular, so everything reeks. There's also
Speaker 1: this chloeing silica dust that you just can't get all
Speaker 1: the way off you. It's always on everything, and one
Speaker 1: day you find that you just can't draw in breath.
Speaker 1: It feels like a flu at first, maybe that's what
Speaker 1: it is, you think, and you start coughing incessantly, But
Speaker 1: the misery is so intense eventually that you stop being
Speaker 1: able to work, and you can't sleep at night. Right,
Speaker 1: So in the morning when it's time to go in,
Speaker 1: you're not like you can't function right, you can't go
Speaker 1: in there and do your job. You're coughing up a
Speaker 1: lung and you haven't slept in days. This is an
Speaker 1: experience that happens to a lot of these guys. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six, a newsreel interviewed one of these hawks
Speaker 1: next workers after the fact, who claimed, quote, each and
Speaker 1: every day I worked in that tunnel, I helped carry
Speaker 1: off ten to fourteen men who was overcome by the
Speaker 1: dust now there's no sick days in this period of time,
Speaker 1: especially not for black migrant laborers in the midst of
Speaker 1: a massive labor surplus. From Maine harton Davis's perspective, right,
Speaker 1: the contractor union Carbide is directing to do all this.
Speaker 1: Workers staying in their shanties are taking up space, and
Speaker 1: if they're not working, that space has to go to
Speaker 1: someone who will. So they hired security from the nearby
Speaker 1: town to go through the camp after everyone had left
Speaker 1: for work and hunt down the sick people who might
Speaker 1: be like hiding, trying to like sneak a day sleeping
Speaker 1: or something while their lungs rot in their chests. Cherniac
Speaker 1: writes of this quote, Ryan Hart and Dennis retained as
Speaker 1: an enforcement officer and formerly called a shack rouster. A
Speaker 1: Georgian named McLeod, who was assisted by a black camp
Speaker 1: overseer called Big John McLoud, carried firearms in a club.
Speaker 1: With these, he is said to have forced black workers
Speaker 1: to vacate the camp at the start of each work shift.
Speaker 1: According to a surviving black tunnel worker, beatings were routinely
Speaker 1: administered as part of this early morning ritual. The camps
Speaker 1: of the colored men we're not close to the camps
Speaker 1: of the for the white men. If a colored man
Speaker 1: was sick and really couldn't go out to work in
Speaker 1: the morning, he had to hide out before the shock
Speaker 1: rouster came about. That fellow had two pistols in a
Speaker 1: blackjack to force men to go to work. And it's
Speaker 1: worth highlighting here the two pistols because rousters there's other rousters.
Speaker 1: They're usually listed as carrying one. McLoud is carrying two.
Speaker 1: Because the only reason to do that if you're in
Speaker 1: this situation is if you're worried that you might find
Speaker 1: yourself at the center of a mob of angry, sick
Speaker 1: workers and need to kind of blast your way through
Speaker 1: a bunch of people. Right, that's the only reason you
Speaker 1: would need that for this job, which is basically just
Speaker 1: like poking people in their bed and getting them up,
Speaker 1: so kind of let you know the quality of dudes
Speaker 1: who are doing this job.
Speaker 2: You made a mention that these are very replaceable workers
Speaker 2: because there's a labor surplus, and this is something we
Speaker 2: imaged the first episode. I really want to reiterate this context.
Speaker 2: There are so many people out of work and so
Speaker 2: many people desperate for work. Again, at a level of
Speaker 2: abject poverty that we kind of don't have anymore in America, Like,
Speaker 2: no matter how bad it gets, it doesn't get bad
Speaker 2: like this was because again, they didn't have the infrastructure
Speaker 2: back then. So the fact that it is so easy
Speaker 2: that when somebody dies or somebody is incapacitated, that you
Speaker 2: can drag them away and know that when you post
Speaker 2: that job you will have one hundred guys or migrants
Speaker 2: willing to come in and fill it. The value of
Speaker 2: a human life drops blow zero because they're costing you
Speaker 2: money for every minute they're not up and working. It's
Speaker 2: that is the context that they know they can replace
Speaker 2: these people, because it would be different if you were
Speaker 2: talking about a core group of guys who have been
Speaker 2: trained for months and had to do a job, and
Speaker 2: then when one goes down, the productivity drops. Now you
Speaker 2: have to be concerned, not at for humanitarian reasons, but
Speaker 2: for productivity reasons, like if they're all sick, like we
Speaker 2: got to fix this, We got to get them because
Speaker 2: they're not working. It's not like that they're all so
Speaker 2: interchangeable that when one of them drops, they can just
Speaker 2: plug another one in.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And that really is the core of like
Speaker 1: why they're able to get away with a lot of this.
Speaker 1: So there are reports that sick men were sometimes even
Speaker 1: killed by rousters for refusing to leave. MacLeod and his
Speaker 1: men were essentially immune to the consequences of whatever actions
Speaker 1: they took. He had been deputized by the Sheriff of
Speaker 1: Fayette County, so he's legally a law enforcement officer. This
Speaker 1: like maniac who's like rolling into shacks full of dying
Speaker 1: people with two handguns to like force them out, is
Speaker 1: a cop at this point in time too. He's in
Speaker 1: the pay directly of the Union Carbide Corporation. And McLoud
Speaker 1: also runs a Saturday night saloon. It's illegal to drink
Speaker 1: and gamble in this area at this point, but you know,
Speaker 1: he's a cop, so he's able to get away with it.
Speaker 1: And it was specifically a Saturday night saloon for black laborers.
Speaker 1: So McLeod is kind of getting you know, when these
Speaker 1: guys get out of work exault, they need something to
Speaker 1: distract them. He runs this thing that takes their money
Speaker 1: for booze and for gambling. And then when they're out
Speaker 1: of work and they're sick, or when they're out of
Speaker 1: money and they're sick. He'll make money kicking them out
Speaker 1: of these shacks that they stay. And it's also when
Speaker 1: he does this night saloon, most nights will end with
Speaker 1: a raid and a mass arrest because he's. Part of
Speaker 1: why he's allowed to do this is he's coordinating with
Speaker 1: the sheriff of Fayette County and the sheriff of Fayett County.
Speaker 1: When they arrest these guys for gambling and drinking, they
Speaker 1: don't take them to jail. So that's good because that
Speaker 1: would hurt Union Carbide, right, that would slow down production.
Speaker 1: They find them all right, so they just take money
Speaker 1: from them because they got caught drinking at this thing
Speaker 1: that the police are basically helping to run. It's just
Speaker 1: like these black labors are being so comprehensively mined while
Speaker 1: they are mining. Right, That's one of the things that
Speaker 1: is kind of worth acknowledging about how unjust this situation is.
Speaker 2: A corporate world, they call this synergy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is synergy.
Speaker 2: There's snitchs all possible angles to make sure that you're
Speaker 2: maximizing the every possible dime you could squeeze from this
Speaker 2: human being before they can no longer stand up.
Speaker 1: And again you couldn't do the sheriffa Fayette County wouldn't
Speaker 1: do this to a workforce that was local, right because
Speaker 1: number one, those are your voters, right, And number two,
Speaker 1: that'll endanger you. Someone's got to kill you eventually for
Speaker 1: doing that in town if you're doing that to your neighbors.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But these guys they're not from town. They're black, and
Speaker 1: they're dying so quickly that there's very little institutional memory
Speaker 1: that can protect them from scams like this, right, by
Speaker 1: which I mean you get in there and maybe your
Speaker 1: fellow workers have only been there for a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks because people are turning over so quickly, so like
Speaker 1: nobody really knows how much they're getting fucked with, so
Speaker 1: there's not much warning to get There's not old timers
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases, right, because they die so quickly.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Cherniac is also careful to note that racism was experienced
Speaker 1: by black ow workers, often at the hands of their
Speaker 1: fellow victims, white tunnel workers who are also getting silicosis.
Speaker 1: So you know that is a dimension here. Quote discipline
Speaker 1: of blacks by whites is similarly recalled by a gully
Speaker 1: Bridge man whose elder brother worked on the tunnel and
Speaker 1: later died from silicosis. He described his brother as not
Speaker 1: liking the and then he uses a slur, an attribute
Speaker 1: which apparently served to qualify him as a foreman for
Speaker 1: Ryan Harton Dennis. He routinely attended to his duties in
Speaker 1: the tunnel armed with a baseball bat. And again he
Speaker 1: was one of the guys. He's forcing these black laborers
Speaker 1: forward into this dust cloud, but he is also entering
Speaker 1: the dust cloud without protection. So that's a decent number
Speaker 1: of the men who die are the guys who kind
Speaker 1: of do this and don't realize that, like, as they
Speaker 1: sign the death warrants of these other men, they're also
Speaker 1: killing themselves.
Speaker 2: I realize that it sounds like we're making some sort
Speaker 2: of a ham fisted metaphor that these guys don't realize
Speaker 2: they're breathing the same they're all breathing the same poison
Speaker 2: air that, like their race, convinces them that somehow they're
Speaker 2: coming out on top, even though the bosses equally don't
Speaker 2: care about their lives. Really, but it's not really a metaphor.
Speaker 2: It's just a thing that's literally happening.
Speaker 1: In this case. It's just what's going down, Yeah, Joe,
Speaker 1: it's yeah, cool stuff. Sometimes reality provides us with those moments.
Speaker 1: I guess, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Do you think there would be a solidarity in those
Speaker 2: tunnels with those white guys saying, hey, I now kind
Speaker 2: of get it. I get it. I see we're on
Speaker 2: the same team against the people who control the capital.
Speaker 2: Maybe we should all join up together. It's like, no,
Speaker 2: as long as I have my racism, I don't need
Speaker 2: clean air.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is it. Really, there's a lot to dig
Speaker 1: into here. This is part of the way I think
Speaker 1: this is such a worthwhile moment and disaster for people
Speaker 1: to know more about. Like, it really is important for
Speaker 1: people to be aware of this history, and that's one
Speaker 1: reason why. So Also, you know, if we're talking about
Speaker 1: outside of the rate and the speed of silicosis here,
Speaker 1: these are all things happening in other minds and industrial
Speaker 1: construction projects around the country, right. The use of white
Speaker 1: workers to do violence to black workers to force them
Speaker 1: to labor. You know, these kind of like cops basically
Speaker 1: hired by these companies to enforce their who take advantage
Speaker 1: of them, rob them, beat them, kill them. All. All
Speaker 1: of that is common in other projects. The difference here
Speaker 1: is that at Hawk's Nest, they're doing it to men
Speaker 1: who are dying in a matter of weeks, sometimes of
Speaker 1: an easily preventable illness caused by the labor. Right, sixty
Speaker 1: percent of the men who work in this tunnel last
Speaker 1: less than two months. Eighty percent lasts less than six months.
Speaker 1: Virtually everyone quits, dies or becomes too sick to work
Speaker 1: in less than a year. You know, when we're talking
Speaker 1: about these low skilled, unprotected workers, right, almost no one
Speaker 1: makes it a year. Right again, sixty percent less than
Speaker 1: two months. Now, a lot of those guys are leaving
Speaker 1: because they're like, maybe they've got a little more options,
Speaker 1: they've got some money, and they're like, well, this is
Speaker 1: a death trap. I'm not going to stay here. But
Speaker 1: a significant chunk of that sixty percent are getting sick
Speaker 1: and eventually dying, you know, after just a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks of labor. Absalom's son, Shirley, who we heard from
Speaker 1: earlier from that poem, was one of the first to
Speaker 1: fall ill before the company admitted any awareness to the
Speaker 1: dangers of silicosis, and before the local medical community realized
Speaker 1: what was happening. Her story lays out in horrifying detail,
Speaker 1: how frustrating the process of trying to find any answer
Speaker 1: could be quote, and this is Ruke Heiser kind of
Speaker 1: quoting from her interview of this mother. When they took sick,
Speaker 1: right at the start, I saw a doctor. I tried
Speaker 1: to get doctor Harlest to x ray the boys. He
Speaker 1: was the only man I had any confidence in the
Speaker 1: company doctor in the Copper's mind. But he would not
Speaker 1: see Shirley. He did not know where his money was
Speaker 1: coming from. I promised him half if he'd worked to
Speaker 1: get compensation, but even then he would not do anything.
Speaker 1: I went on the road and begged x ray money.
Speaker 1: The Charleston hospital made the lung pictures. He took the
Speaker 1: case after the pictures were made. After two or three
Speaker 1: doctors said the same thing. The youngest boy, Shirley did
Speaker 1: not go down there with me. He lay and said, Mother,
Speaker 1: when I die, I want you to have them open
Speaker 1: me up and see if that dust killed me. Try
Speaker 1: to get compensation. You will not have any way of
Speaker 1: making your living when we are gone, and the rest
Speaker 1: are going too. And what surely means by that is
Speaker 1: her husband and all three of her sons are in
Speaker 1: this mine, and as he gets sick. Shirley realizes we
Speaker 1: are all dead. Mom's going to be alone. She'll have
Speaker 1: no like the only hope of support is for us
Speaker 1: to get compensation through some sort of lawsuit right for
Speaker 1: our deaths, because we're already dead men. That's about as
Speaker 1: bad as it gets already.
Speaker 2: I think there are some listeners out there who are
Speaker 2: feeling a sense of dread because at the very top
Speaker 2: of the first episode we mentioned how the death toll
Speaker 2: from this disaster ranges from a couple hundred to two over
Speaker 2: a thousand, and I think there are some people saying, well,
Speaker 2: how can they not know? Like, you've got doctor visits,
Speaker 2: You've got aren't there records? Aren't there records of who
Speaker 2: joined the project and of what happened to those people.
Speaker 2: We're going to get into that because the answer of
Speaker 2: how you can lose hundreds of dead people, this is
Speaker 2: something that you could do in the nineteen thirties. You
Speaker 2: could not do now because everyone has tracked, everyone has papers,
Speaker 2: everyone has a social security number, driver's license, on and
Speaker 2: on and on. This was an era when that stuff
Speaker 2: did not exist to a very large degree. This was
Speaker 2: an era when if you wanted to leave and abandon
Speaker 2: your family. You could just move like five miles down
Speaker 2: the road and you just tell people you went by
Speaker 2: a different name, and that's it, Like there was there's
Speaker 2: esuchally as photo ID is. So you could just lose people.
Speaker 2: And I do not think people appreciate the opportunities it
Speaker 2: creates for everything from serial killers to industrial disasters, that
Speaker 2: you could just pile people in a mass grave and
Speaker 2: literally nobody knows what happened to them. Somewhere in another state,
Speaker 2: in Virginia or Tennessee or North Carolina. You've got some
Speaker 2: family and they know that this guy went off to
Speaker 2: go take a job in West Virginia and he just
Speaker 2: never came back. And you don't know if maybe he
Speaker 2: just stayed there, maybe changed his name, maybe passed some
Speaker 2: unrelated reason. Maybe he moved and now he lives in Montana.
Speaker 2: You just didn't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's you know, it's it's it's particularly like
Speaker 1: fucked up that like that story we told of Absalom
Speaker 1: horrible because she's a local, because she lives, she's part
Speaker 1: of a community, she has some stability. She's going to
Speaker 1: be able to like sue and stuff like that. That
Speaker 1: is how this gets out like when this becomes known,
Speaker 1: when there start to be news articles about it, when
Speaker 1: there's investigations. It's because of the fairly small minority of
Speaker 1: locals who lose family members. These black were are like
Speaker 1: you said, they don't exist once they reach the mind right,
Speaker 1: like they die, and you as we'll talk about like
Speaker 1: you can kind of make them disappear so that there's
Speaker 1: not going to be any kind of like justice for
Speaker 1: most of these guys. Their families never find out what's happening.
Speaker 1: Now when it comes to the rate at which sort
Speaker 1: of it becomes obvious what's making these people sick, there
Speaker 1: is that mortician who finds out earlier that doesn't get
Speaker 1: out very far past. Like executives at the company, Ryan
Speaker 1: Hart and Dennis employed two physicians in order to like
Speaker 1: watch over the workforce, take care of people who get
Speaker 1: sick and injured, and both men primarily existed to deny
Speaker 1: sick workers that their ailments had anything to do with
Speaker 1: the tunnel project. They would usually say it was pneumonia
Speaker 1: or some other communicable disease. They would tell people to
Speaker 1: keep working. They would tell them that they did not
Speaker 1: need any protective gear, and then they would give them pills.
Speaker 1: These two guys, doctor Simmons and doctor Mitchell, their primary
Speaker 1: path like method whenever someone comes in with silicosis is
Speaker 1: to give them and these pills called little black devils,
Speaker 1: these little black pills that are just their placebos. It's
Speaker 1: baking soda covered in sugar. Like they know that they're
Speaker 1: not giving people real medicine. It's a delaying tactic. And
Speaker 1: another thing you have to realize when it's like, how
Speaker 1: did this they get away with this? This is all
Speaker 1: taking place pretty much in a year or so, right,
Speaker 1: eighteen months for some of the work, I think, but
Speaker 1: it happens very quickly. So both Union Carbide and Ryan
Speaker 1: Hart and Dennis know all we got to do is
Speaker 1: push through to the completion line and then our lawyers
Speaker 1: can handle the fallout. Right, So give these guys some
Speaker 1: fake medicine. Maybe that'll keep them at Bay another couple
Speaker 1: of months. A lot so many of them will die
Speaker 1: that then we won't have to deal with those guys.
Speaker 1: And like, every week we can put this off gets
Speaker 1: us closer to the finish line.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There's also you know a decent amount of ignorance basically
Speaker 1: among the local medical community, and it's not because they
Speaker 1: don't know about silicosis. As I said, this is a
Speaker 1: really well known illness, but it normally takes years, even
Speaker 1: decades for people to get black lung of this severity.
Speaker 1: No one has mined silica this peer and this quantity before,
Speaker 1: Like it's pretty much unprecedented. I don't think there were
Speaker 1: really any minds of this size dealing with this quantity
Speaker 1: of pure silica. So there there are doctors who know
Speaker 1: about silica who are not you know, unethical men, but
Speaker 1: they're just seeing how much this is. This is hitting people,
Speaker 1: killing them, you know, three four, five hundred percent faster
Speaker 1: than they're used to. So they don't they don't necessarily
Speaker 1: know that. They're like I have, I don't. Maybe this
Speaker 1: is something different, right, Maybe this is some new virus
Speaker 1: that's sweeping through town. So there is among some of
Speaker 1: the medical professionals who are trying to puzzle this out,
Speaker 1: there is reason to be consumed concerned, right, But within
Speaker 1: the company doctors, there's there's evidence that the company has
Speaker 1: access to that makes it much clearer what's happening, and
Speaker 1: that would have made it clearer to everyone earlier on
Speaker 1: that they delect, like deliberately keep away from people, right,
Speaker 1: So yeah, further evidence for this comes from the fact
Speaker 1: that company policies on stuff like wetting the drills would
Speaker 1: change depending on whether or not government observers were in
Speaker 1: town to monitor the work. Right when people start dying,
Speaker 1: the government sends in teams to like monitor, and so
Speaker 1: Ryan Hart and Dennis will say, Okay, everybody, today, we're
Speaker 1: going to wet down the drills and we're going to
Speaker 1: wait two hours after blasting to send new teams in.
Speaker 1: And then when the government observers leave, they go right
Speaker 1: back to the old procedures that are much faster and
Speaker 1: much more dangerous.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Again, you can't just like regulate by having a guy
Speaker 1: come by once to check something like this. That's easy
Speaker 1: to deal with.
Speaker 2: There's Yeah, there's a very much things worked on the
Speaker 2: honor system in that era. Like there may have been
Speaker 2: a perfunctory check or whatever, but if they had really
Speaker 2: wanted to make sure they were, you know, abiding by
Speaker 2: the rules, there's ways you can do it. You can
Speaker 2: plan somebody there for a week, like you know, make them,
Speaker 2: make them do it the whole time you're there, and
Speaker 2: pay attention to do They seem to have respirators for
Speaker 2: everyone because the inspectors wore them, is my understanding. When
Speaker 2: they showed up to take a look, they did not
Speaker 2: go in that mind without breathing equipments like what are
Speaker 2: you nuts?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, so yeah. It seems safe to say that
Speaker 1: Union Carbide deliberately avoided acquiring information that would have forced
Speaker 1: them to improve safety practices and thus slow production. The
Speaker 1: American Society of Safety Professionals their analysis, notes Union Carbide
Speaker 1: had taken core samples along the course of the proposed
Speaker 1: tunnel before construction began, and knew the rock was extremely
Speaker 1: high in silica. Despite the generally well understood relationship between
Speaker 1: exposure to airborne silica and death by silicosis, neither Union Carbide,
Speaker 1: New Canawa Power, nor Rhin Harton Dennis ever measured dust
Speaker 1: levels in the tunnel. Rhine Harton Dennis only conducted two
Speaker 1: tests for carbon monoxide during the seventeen month duration of
Speaker 1: the dig. A proven technology existed to measure clouds of dust.
Speaker 1: The impinger was developed in nineteen sixteen by the US
Speaker 1: Public Health Service. Impingers, also known as bubblers or small bottles,
Speaker 1: used with an air pump to collect airborne contaminants into
Speaker 1: designated collection liquids for later laboratory analysis. So they again
Speaker 1: this is not don't just because this is ancient. They
Speaker 1: have the ability to test and know their silica in
Speaker 1: the air. It is standard on mines. But this isn't
Speaker 1: a mine, even though they're mining, it's not a mine.
Speaker 2: But also it's it's absurd because the idea of saying that, well,
Speaker 2: we never got a chance to bring the instruments in
Speaker 2: to see if the air was bad. That would be
Speaker 2: like a house fire, and like, well, I never put it.
Speaker 2: I never took up therrometer in there. See It's like, well, okay,
Speaker 2: it was not there was no visibility in the tunnel
Speaker 2: for the dust. Yeah, So like that, even that's not
Speaker 2: an excuse. I get what they're saying is ludicrous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's obscene. And what's also obscene are
Speaker 1: the low low prices our advertisers have or their product. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back back from that glorious pivot. So as the
Speaker 1: death toll starts to accelerate, which happens again that first
Speaker 1: start dying after two months. By the six month point,
Speaker 1: a lot of people are getting sick and dying, and
Speaker 1: Ryan Hart and Dennis find themselves with a new logistical problem,
Speaker 1: what do we do with all these corpses? Right, white
Speaker 1: workers could be buried in local cemeteries pretty easily, especially
Speaker 1: local workers who died, but most of the workers dying
Speaker 1: are black laborers, and these white you know, the cemeteries
Speaker 1: in town are whites only establishments. Right, They're so racist
Speaker 1: that it's like, well, we're not going to let black
Speaker 1: people into our cemetery. So at first, the majority of
Speaker 1: these black tunnel workers who have died are are sent
Speaker 1: to like a local cemetery. Specifically, it's an old local
Speaker 1: slave cemetery, right, Like that's literally where they are burying
Speaker 1: these men. Records suggest that only ten of the black
Speaker 1: of the hundreds of black laborers who die on this
Speaker 1: project are shipped back to their homes after death. So
Speaker 1: the vast majority of these guys, to all their family knows,
Speaker 1: just disappear forever. This leaves hundreds, you know, the fact
Speaker 1: that you fit I think a couple one hundred in
Speaker 1: the slave cemetery, but there's still a lot more people
Speaker 1: who are dying. So rhin Hart and Dennis, you know,
Speaker 1: they've got the resources obviously to transport all these buckets
Speaker 1: of silica, but they don't want to use their own resort.
Speaker 1: They don't want to like deal with the dead people
Speaker 1: that they're creating themselves, So they have Union Carbide pay
Speaker 1: contractors to deal with all of the dead people. And
Speaker 1: the contractor that they hire is a local undertaker named
Speaker 1: Hadley White. They pay him fifty five dollars for each
Speaker 1: body he will take out of their hands and bury. Now,
Speaker 1: Hadley is running the same calculation as every other unethical
Speaker 1: contractor and company in this. They're paying him to bury
Speaker 1: people in theoretically in coffins in a cemetery, and he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's cheaper than a coffin is throwing people
Speaker 1: in a bag and putting them in a mass grave.
Speaker 1: That's much less expensive, right, So Hadley is going to
Speaker 1: transfer pretty rapidly from burying people the way that he's
Speaker 1: being paid to to you know, doing a mass grave
Speaker 1: kind of situation. So once they run out of room
Speaker 1: at that old slave cemetery behind the church where the
Speaker 1: behind a local church where his company is located, he
Speaker 1: starts driving the corpses forty miles away. He will just
Speaker 1: stack them. It's often described as being stacked like cordwood,
Speaker 1: like firewood. In the back of a truck, like just
Speaker 1: this kind of like wrap stuffed in the clothes that
Speaker 1: they died, and stuffed into canvas bags and thrown into
Speaker 1: a mass grave in Somersville out of you know, within
Speaker 1: hours of dying, right, like just kind of taken immediately
Speaker 1: off the line, or you know, in their beds where
Speaker 1: they pass thrown into a bag, stuck in a truck
Speaker 1: and then tossed into a mass grave again within hours
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases. In the Book of the Dead,
Speaker 1: Rukaiser cites the testimony of a worker named George Robinson
Speaker 1: on this matter, quote, I knew a man who died
Speaker 1: at four in the morning at the camp. At seven,
Speaker 1: his wife took clothes to dress her dead husband. At
Speaker 1: the end at the undertakers, they told her the husband
Speaker 1: was already buried.
Speaker 2: So like.
Speaker 1: That's you know, how they're treating It's just like trash, right,
Speaker 1: that's how they're treating these these people Like we're not
Speaker 1: even going to wait for their loved ones to you know,
Speaker 1: have any sort of like when they have loved ones, Like,
Speaker 1: we don't even care to know if there's anyone who
Speaker 1: like will want to do a funeral. We're just going
Speaker 1: to toss them in a mass grave and sorry, your
Speaker 1: husband's gone already.
Speaker 2: You know, maybe what I'm about to say is obvious,
Speaker 2: But this was not that long ago.
Speaker 1: Now there's people alive from then.
Speaker 2: Still, there are people alive from they're very old, but
Speaker 2: there were people that were born in this Sarah that
Speaker 2: are still alive. This was We are talking about this
Speaker 2: like it is another planet that something like this could happen,
Speaker 2: and could happen in public, in broad daylight. And that
Speaker 2: mostly to the indifference of all the local officials and
Speaker 2: everyone around there living there, because at this point a
Speaker 2: lot of people got to know. You have a lot
Speaker 2: of dead people. Now, a lot of those bodies have
Speaker 2: passed through a lot of hands. A lot of people know,
Speaker 2: and this is just the kind of thing that happens
Speaker 2: at this time and in this place. And it is
Speaker 2: not that long ago. It's one long lifetime ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you want an idea of like how recent
Speaker 1: this is, this is all happening about five years before
Speaker 1: Hunter S. Thompson is born, Right, He's not a figure
Speaker 1: from the distant past, you know, Like this is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that is important, Like how how kind of
Speaker 1: directly connected this is to us. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: treating people this way does not seem like a kind
Speaker 1: of thing you would get away with. But there's not
Speaker 1: a lot separating us from a period of time in
Speaker 1: which people were getting away with this directly, just kind
Speaker 1: of literally treating these people like like a fucking sprocket
Speaker 1: or something that breaks in a machine and he just
Speaker 1: toss in the trash. You will not be surprised to
Speaker 1: hear that. The exact number of workers who die this
Speaker 1: way is unclear. About three hundred certainly are buried by
Speaker 1: Hadley White, maybe significantly more, we don't know. It might
Speaker 1: have been a couple one hundred more than that. More
Speaker 1: lingered on sick in the town of Gawley Mountain, or
Speaker 1: they either had to rely on the family members or
Speaker 1: the kindness of strangers. So many pale, gasping men spent
Speaker 1: their last years shambling around Golly That acquired a new
Speaker 1: nickname among locals, the town of the living dead. That's
Speaker 1: like what they would call this place because of all
Speaker 1: of the fucking black lung sufferers. No effort was made
Speaker 1: to inform the family of dead migrant workers, and this
Speaker 1: is shown well by the story of Dewey Flack. Dewey
Speaker 1: was a seventeen or eighteen year old black man who
Speaker 1: left his home in North Carolina on a one way
Speaker 1: train ticket to West Virginia Yea. The last his family
Speaker 1: saw him, he promised to send back the money he
Speaker 1: made to help them. Quote from an article in NPR,
Speaker 1: Flak died on May twentieth, nineteen thirty one, two weeks
Speaker 1: after his last shift in the tunnel. His death certificate
Speaker 1: said he died of pneumonia, but according to Cherniac, company
Speaker 1: doctors often misdiagnosed workers' deaths or attributed them to a
Speaker 1: disease they called tunnel ititis. The company would later use
Speaker 1: those death certificates to prove there were few, if any,
Speaker 1: silicosis deaths in the tunnel. NPR did find one relative,
Speaker 1: Sheila Flack Jones of Charlotte, North Carolina, who was Dewey
Speaker 1: Flack's niece. My father mentioned when I was younger that
Speaker 1: he did have a brother, but the brother he thought
Speaker 1: he'd run away, Black Jones says of learning her uncle's fate.
Speaker 1: I'm heartbroken that my family died thinking that he had
Speaker 1: run away, and they never knew the real truth. And
Speaker 1: I think that Dewey's death here kind of stands in
Speaker 1: for hundreds of these black migrant labors. You know, you
Speaker 1: tell your family you're going. I'll send back money, you know,
Speaker 1: I'll try to set up a place, you know, get
Speaker 1: money so we can move to this northern town, and
Speaker 1: ever hear from your husband, your son, your nephew, ever again,
Speaker 1: Like that's the reality for a lot of these people.
Speaker 2: What was the specific year you just mentioned there.
Speaker 1: I believe he's nineteen thirty one. Yeah, May twentieth, nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty one.
Speaker 2: That's the year William Shatner was born, right, right, So
Speaker 2: Clint Eastwood was one year old by the time this happened. Again,
Speaker 2: they they lived long enough to see a world where
Speaker 2: this happened. I brought up this thing about this not
Speaker 2: being that long because I knew that thing about the town,
Speaker 2: this village of the walking Dead was coming, because that,
Speaker 2: to me, is the most nightmarish part of this, because
Speaker 2: eventually you had these people in no place to go. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they couldn't afford to travel, they were kicked off the
Speaker 2: job site, they couldn't work, and so they were just
Speaker 2: sent back to this town. As town started to become
Speaker 2: overwhelmed of these people who were just walking around drowning
Speaker 2: in the air, like they can't gasping for breath, and
Speaker 2: they're getting sicker and just kind of shambling around this town.
Speaker 2: And you have dozens or hundreds of them, we don't
Speaker 2: know how many. They just had nowhere to go and
Speaker 2: they're human beings and there's no support system. There's no
Speaker 2: support system. I don't know how to convey that to people,
Speaker 2: like they had no one to go to for help.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard to imagine a situation that, like anything
Speaker 1: worse than that, right, Like that's as desperate as it
Speaker 1: fucking gets. So disinformation about the causes of the illness
Speaker 1: and the demographic realities of the workforce delayed the coalescence
Speaker 1: of any sort of effective resistance to what was happening
Speaker 1: by workers. The first public warnings about what was happening
Speaker 1: came courtesy of the local radical press. And we're talking
Speaker 1: unions off and run newspapers here, so some of this
Speaker 1: is coming out through that. And there's like socialist papers
Speaker 1: in the area, and these are the first people to
Speaker 1: start reporting on this sickness sweeping through the camps. As
Speaker 1: one of these papers, this is like a very new
Speaker 1: deal supporting like left wing paper The State Sentinel warned,
Speaker 1: quote strange and weird tales are a concerning the number
Speaker 1: of fatalities. They are said to number four a week.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Radical papers kind of different in how radical they were.
Speaker 1: In the case of the State Sentinel, they do note
Speaker 1: later on that they were sure Union Carbide was in
Speaker 1: a sense of any wrongdoing because Ryan Harton Dennis had
Speaker 1: been contracted to handle the actual construction. It's worth noting
Speaker 1: people that's not necessarily them trying to protect Union Carbide
Speaker 1: at this stage. These random little papers you don't know
Speaker 1: necessarily the relationship between these two companies. It becomes obvious
Speaker 1: later that Union Carbide has engineers who are their employees
Speaker 1: on scene, they are directing rehin harton Dennis, they are
Speaker 1: in charge of the project, right, But that's not really
Speaker 1: known necessarily to all these papers at the time. So
Speaker 1: I don't think it's really anything against them. It's worth
Speaker 1: noting it is through these little radical presses that like,
Speaker 1: that's where this story gets out to start. It will
Speaker 1: eventually be picked up by kind of larger news organs.
Speaker 1: Lawsuits start to fly, and from mid to late nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty two. This is late in the construction process, more
Speaker 1: than eighty separate claims are filed from workers seeking compensation
Speaker 1: for silicosis. Cases start winding their way up rapidly to
Speaker 1: the state Supreme Court. There's a case there. They rule
Speaker 1: on it and it opens. The ruling that the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court gives basically is that you can sue rhine Hart
Speaker 1: and Dennis for your silicosis. Right. So after this, this
Speaker 1: kind of opens the floodgates and this ocean of new
Speaker 1: claims start to flood in several hundred, eventually totaling two
Speaker 1: point seven two five million dollars in damages is what
Speaker 1: they're requesting. That's a lot more money. Back then, rehin
Speaker 1: Hart and Dennis file injunction. After injunction, they're trying to delay,
Speaker 1: and this is they know they're going to have to
Speaker 1: make some sort of payout right. They know they can't
Speaker 1: avoid this. This was kind of always in their calculations,
Speaker 1: but injunctions delay sort of the start of that process,
Speaker 1: and it allows them to Again, the whole goal is
Speaker 1: as long as we finish ahead of schedule, we get
Speaker 1: enough extra money to make this worthwhile, right, So that's
Speaker 1: what they're doing. Union Carbide also starts hiring rein Hart
Speaker 1: and Davis executives away from the contractor, right, and these
Speaker 1: guys are still doing the job they were doing from
Speaker 1: rein Hart and Davis. They're just Union Carbide employees now.
Speaker 1: And the reason that Union Carbide is doing this is
Speaker 1: that when you have these guys in house, you have
Speaker 1: legal excuses to talk them through and direct their court
Speaker 1: because you shouldn't be directing their responses to their court case.
Speaker 1: But once you bring them on, you have all these
Speaker 1: sort of excuses to talk to them. You can have
Speaker 1: your lawyers represent them. It's just another way to kind
Speaker 1: of protect the bag, right, And it's more evidence of
Speaker 1: how closely tied these companies really are. So yeah, there's
Speaker 1: also significant evidence that they bribe government officials. Union Carbide
Speaker 1: does in order to try and delay the start of
Speaker 1: any kind of like accountability. After this first wave of
Speaker 1: lawsuits hits, the Department of Minds sins in an inspector,
Speaker 1: a guy named Robert Lamby to investigate conditions at the
Speaker 1: tunnel complex and particularly the death of black workers. Lamby
Speaker 1: carries out a full inspection and he's pretty critical of
Speaker 1: the mind There's like a lot of people see him.
Speaker 1: He's yelling at a company for men about how unacceptable
Speaker 1: this is. He's like, it seems for a little bit
Speaker 1: like oh, the government sent a man. He's seen how
Speaker 1: bad this is, and something's going to get done. And
Speaker 1: you know, he does act. Initially, he sends a letter
Speaker 1: to an executive at the New Kanawa Power Company, which
Speaker 1: is again remember that's Union Carbide, and he lays out
Speaker 1: like this is dangerous. All you need to do all
Speaker 1: this stuff to make it safer, you have to start
Speaker 1: issuing respirators to your men. He orders them. This is
Speaker 1: a government official ordering New Canawa to put respirators on workers,
Speaker 1: and New Canawa just says, now, we're not going to
Speaker 1: do that. They ignore it, and they continue sending unmasked
Speaker 1: workers into the tunnel. Now this should be pretty damning
Speaker 1: for what happens in court. But two years later, you know,
Speaker 1: after Lamby gets there, and after some five hundred lawsuits
Speaker 1: from survivors are kind of churning their way through the
Speaker 1: legal process, Lamby gets called into court and you would
Speaker 1: expect him to be a pretty devastating testimony on behalf
Speaker 1: of these miners. I told them to give respirators to
Speaker 1: these guys, and they did not write. But he behaves
Speaker 1: very differently once he's in a court room, as Cherniac writes.
Speaker 1: Testifying on behalf of Ryan Hart and Dennis for a
Speaker 1: whole day on tenth of April nineteen thirty three, he
Speaker 1: described exemplary conditions in the tunnel, where air was supplied
Speaker 1: at a face velocity of twenty seven miles per hour,
Speaker 1: visibility was to f from five to seven hundred feet,
Speaker 1: and water was constantly used to suppress dust. Vigorously cross
Speaker 1: examined about the extreme inconsistencies between this testimony and his
Speaker 1: earlier condemnatory letters, which had been read into the court
Speaker 1: record by the attorney for Raymond Johnson, that's the miner
Speaker 1: in this case two weeks earlier. Lamby blamed an accurate
Speaker 1: information supplied by his staff. Although he conceded that he
Speaker 1: had ordered respirators in writing, he said that he had
Speaker 1: later countermanded this order orally when he better appreciated the
Speaker 1: excellent working conditions and clearness of the air in the tunnel.
Speaker 1: Two of Lambie's staff inspectors, who had originally filed highly
Speaker 1: critical reports, now shared in their director's change of heart.
Speaker 1: Testifying on The following day, C. B. Bishop and D. R.
Speaker 1: Sullivan joined him in tribute to the admirable conditions at
Speaker 1: Hawk's Nest. They indicated that Ryan, Hart and Dennis had
Speaker 1: always cooperated fully and repeated Lamby's praise of the freedom
Speaker 1: from dust and wet drilling. They described the reports they
Speaker 1: had made in nineteen thirty one as purely precautionary and
Speaker 1: unrelated to actual conditions. Lamby's startling about face was never
Speaker 1: explained to everyone's satisfaction. Less than a week after his testimony, however,
Speaker 1: the Charleston Gazette reported a remarkable coincidence. The former director
Speaker 1: of the West Virginia Department of Mines had just opened
Speaker 1: his doors to the prestigious Canawa Valley Building in the
Speaker 1: capital city as a private consultant to the leading mining
Speaker 1: and industrial corporations of the state.
Speaker 2: Now, fortunately, that kind of revolving door is long in
Speaker 2: the past. Like that's the kind of thing that today
Speaker 2: would be outrageous to even.
Speaker 1: And you know, as an aside, don't look up people
Speaker 1: who have been a poor pointed in the last twenty
Speaker 1: years to had regulatory agencies and what they did after
Speaker 1: the period of time at which they headed those agencies.
Speaker 1: Don't go Google in that because there's nothing to find, right,
Speaker 1: that never.
Speaker 2: Occurring to your results.
Speaker 1: Yeah, serier results. So yeah, construction on the Hawk's Nest
Speaker 1: tunnel was completed by nineteen thirty two. This is about
Speaker 1: twice as fast, a little less than twice as fast
Speaker 1: as had been initially expected. So that's a lot of
Speaker 1: extra money for rehin harten Davis. By all accounts, it
Speaker 1: was a marvel of engineering and craftsmanship. It is still
Speaker 1: in works today. It's considered an exemplary I forgot how
Speaker 1: to pronounce a word I've known since I was a
Speaker 1: small child for just a second. There. It's considered to
Speaker 1: be an exemplary piece of construction, and Union Carbides shareholders
Speaker 1: make a fortune the equivalent of many billions of dollars
Speaker 1: in modern money from the subsequent projects that this enables.
Speaker 1: For the families of the men who die, though, money
Speaker 1: is a lot harder to find. And we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about that, but first maybe an ad product service
Speaker 1: or too, you know. Yeah, and we're back. So for
Speaker 1: the families of these guys who died, money is going
Speaker 1: to be a lot scarcer than it is for the
Speaker 1: executives who will spend the rest of their lives and
Speaker 1: their grandchildren's lives profiting off of this project. There are
Speaker 1: two massive state trials in nineteen thirty three and nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four, but only a fraction of the requested damages
Speaker 1: or ever paid out in settlements, about two hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: And I should note here the amount of money awarded
Speaker 1: to black laborers for the same ailments as white labors.
Speaker 1: It's about half. I think individual awards are anywhere from
Speaker 1: thirty dollars to sixteen hundred dollars, which is minimal, I
Speaker 1: would say. But Union Carbide executives still complained was ruinous
Speaker 1: to them. They described sick workers as mooches seeking to
Speaker 1: get rich out of frivolous lawsuits. The West Virginia Encyclopedia
Speaker 1: notes of this case, the largest trial ended with a
Speaker 1: hung jury, evidence of jury tampering, and generous compensation to
Speaker 1: the plaintiff's attorneys. It's you know, this is corrupt as hell.
Speaker 1: This whole thing is just pretty fucked. That said, the
Speaker 1: story does not go away, and over time, you know,
Speaker 1: it starts in these radical papers, but it starts to
Speaker 1: get coverage from like large from like the New York
Speaker 1: Times and shit, like their big journalists start to cover this,
Speaker 1: it becomes kind of a cause celeb among a lot
Speaker 1: of the left. For I think there's you know, a
Speaker 1: period of a couple of months or so where like
Speaker 1: this is sort of the big thing if you're like
Speaker 1: a Northeast liberal elite to be really angry about. And
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that to be like, you should be
Speaker 1: angry about this, and because of how angry people get
Speaker 1: about in nineteen thirty six, which is kind of five
Speaker 1: years after the first men start dying, and thirty five
Speaker 1: thirty six is really when sort of the media attention
Speaker 1: around this starts to starts to hit critical mass. The
Speaker 1: House of Representatives holds their first inquiry into the Hawk's
Speaker 1: Nest Tunnel disaster. NPR rights vote. Representatives from the tunnel
Speaker 1: companies declined to attend. One submitted a letter that called
Speaker 1: witness testimonies slanderous rumors and hearsay. We know of no
Speaker 1: case of silicosis contracted on this job, the letter concluded.
Speaker 1: The Congressional committee said the tunnel was completed with grave
Speaker 1: and inhuman disregard for all consideration for the health, lives
Speaker 1: and future of employees. Congress took no action against the companies,
Speaker 1: but that same year it passed a law requiring the
Speaker 1: use of respirators in dusty working conditions. So they don't
Speaker 1: penalize anyone. But this is where we get the legal requirement.
Speaker 1: It's no longer an option. You have to give respirators
Speaker 1: to your guys if they're working in the dust. So
Speaker 1: it took a lot of death, but we got a
Speaker 1: single regulation, hooray.
Speaker 2: And most regulations that we have in workplace protections.
Speaker 1: Yea.
Speaker 2: There is somewhere at the bottom of it are bones
Speaker 2: and ash and of dead people who died in order
Speaker 2: to It would be grotesque to say they sacrificed themselves
Speaker 2: so that we have these regulations, because they did not
Speaker 2: do that. They were trying to.
Speaker 1: Work so that they wanted to make rent.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and and not to get rich either. They
Speaker 2: were taking the only work that was available. But you
Speaker 2: know that, and then that's one good thing. And then
Speaker 2: of course knowing that Union Carbide was surely ruined as
Speaker 2: a company and does not Yeah, it never did not
Speaker 2: exist after that because as they mentioned, these payouts, you know,
Speaker 2: of course they could not afford it financially. Must have
Speaker 2: crippled them permanently. They probably had to sell off all
Speaker 2: of their factories, all of their real estate, all their machines.
Speaker 2: Probably they had to sell them all just to pay
Speaker 2: off these ruinous thirty and forty dollars payouts.
Speaker 1: That's why the town of Bopaul, India has a reputation
Speaker 1: for being the least polluted town in India and the
Speaker 1: town motto twenty thousand of us didn't die and an
Speaker 1: industrial accident costs by union garbide great place to go
Speaker 1: visit check it out. So, speaking of death toll, which
Speaker 1: we're obviously talking around, it's kind of hard to determine.
Speaker 1: The Congressional Inquiry estimates a little short of five hundred,
Speaker 1: four hundred and sixty four deaths that they estimate cherny acts.
Speaker 1: So the two books I read for this are Murial
Speaker 1: Rakaiser's The Book of the Dead and then The Hawk's
Speaker 1: Nest Tunnel Disaster by this guy Cherniac, who is He's
Speaker 1: not just a journalist or a writer, he's actually an epidemiologist.
Speaker 1: So when he makes a death toll estimate, this is
Speaker 1: not just some like reporter interviewing people and kind of
Speaker 1: making a guest This is a guy whose professional job
Speaker 1: is to try to calculate this sort of thing. So
Speaker 1: I give, I lend a lot of credibility to cherny
Speaker 1: Act's estimate. He suspects somewhere north of seven hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty people died as a direct result of silicosis from
Speaker 1: this tunnel. There are some more modern estimates that will
Speaker 1: suggest an overall death toll. The highest I've seen is
Speaker 1: about two thousand, right, Because people take a long time
Speaker 1: to die, it can be kind of hard, especially as
Speaker 1: undocumented as a lot of these dudes are. But between
Speaker 1: seven hundred and fifty and two thousand dead is what
Speaker 1: we're looking looking at for the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster,
Speaker 1: which is you know, again that's in access of the
Speaker 1: Chernobyle death toll. You know, that's a lot of fucking people.
Speaker 2: This was. Yeah, even with modern record keeping and computers
Speaker 2: and everything in databases, it's extremely difficult to for example,
Speaker 2: with the you know, the COVID pandemic and the death
Speaker 2: ranges worldwide are swinging wildly because you have a case
Speaker 2: where if someone got very sick and they got over
Speaker 2: and then two years later they got pneumonia, that killed
Speaker 2: them because there's weak their lungs had been so weakened
Speaker 2: by the COVID that they had recovered from. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: do you count that as a COVID death or not?
Speaker 2: And here I think it's kind of the same thing
Speaker 2: where if you had someone who's lung capacity was damaged
Speaker 2: by eighty percent due to the you know from this mind,
Speaker 2: and then three years later they got you know whatever
Speaker 2: pneumonia or something that that finally put them away, well
Speaker 2: there's no way that's going to get recorded as a death.
Speaker 2: But it absolutely was like this person, it doesn't die
Speaker 2: without the damage. It's just that if they didn't die
Speaker 2: on site and then have me buried nearby, if there's
Speaker 2: not a grave you can find. It's so hard to
Speaker 2: know because again, somebody could have went off and then
Speaker 2: died in nineteen thirty eight living in some rural part
Speaker 2: of Montana and to even their family would not necessarily realize.
Speaker 2: They just knew that they were very frail ever since
Speaker 2: they took that mining job. So yeah, the amount of
Speaker 2: investigative work it probably took just to arrive that number
Speaker 2: is probably extraordinary, just trying to track down just all
Speaker 2: of the old documents and the movement of these people
Speaker 2: and then trying to figure out where they eventually wound up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's a cherniac puts in. I mean,
Speaker 1: his book is remarkable. It's both very readable and like
Speaker 1: a very kind of scientific forensic analysis. Whereas Rukeiser number one,
Speaker 1: it's kind of actually we're about to talk about her.
Speaker 1: It's a very direct source and a little more emotional.
Speaker 1: I think both together give you a pretty comprehensive understanding
Speaker 1: of what happened here. And I did think it's worth
Speaker 1: talking a little bit more about Muriel Rukaiser because there's
Speaker 1: a lot, there's a lot to say about our country
Speaker 1: and her specific story here. Muriel is one of the
Speaker 1: first people outside of the Galley Bridge area to learn
Speaker 1: what was going on. At twenty three, she was a
Speaker 1: budding author and journalist and an avid leftist. She learned
Speaker 1: about the disaster from radical publications at the time. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five, when one of these magazines puts out
Speaker 1: an article about Hawk's Nest, it goes viral among kind
Speaker 1: of the New York intelligencia set and becomes this, as
Speaker 1: I said, this kind of big cause celeb for the
Speaker 1: while and for most people it's a thing, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you'll do a little march or something on it,
Speaker 1: you'll try to raise some money, and then kind of
Speaker 1: it goes away and you move on to the next thing.
Speaker 1: Rukeaiser never does. And you know, she watches this congressional inquiry,
Speaker 1: and the Congressional inquiry when it ends, it's pretty it
Speaker 1: condemns Union Carbide, and it says we should have a
Speaker 1: full federal investigation. But they never do it. There's never
Speaker 1: any official, full federal investigation into this disaster. And Muriel
Speaker 1: is she's not just furious about that. She's the kind
Speaker 1: of person who is like, she's angry and she's gonna
Speaker 1: fucking do something about this. And so she drives down
Speaker 1: to gally Bridge with a friend to investigate on her own.
Speaker 1: She kind of takes this like road trip, one of
Speaker 1: our country's first great road trip stories. You could say.
Speaker 1: Now at this point, Muriel's not a nobody. She is
Speaker 1: already a celebrated poet for her first book, Theory of Flight,
Speaker 1: which had won a Yale Younger Poets Prize, and the
Speaker 1: Book of the Dead is kind of based on this
Speaker 1: road trip she takes through Fayette County and all of
Speaker 1: these people that she talks to. It's this very remarkable
Speaker 1: synthesis of gumshoe reporting and high art. It's worth noting
Speaker 1: that much of what we know about ru Keiser's life
Speaker 1: and why she did all this comes not from anything
Speaker 1: she wrote, but from the FBI. J ed Grew Hoover's
Speaker 1: civically gives orders for this woman to be followed and
Speaker 1: I'm going to quit from an article in the Oxford American.
Speaker 1: Here in nineteen forty three, j Edgar Hoover authorized his
Speaker 1: agency to spy on the poet as part of a
Speaker 1: probe to uncover Russian spies. Her communistic tendencies placed her
Speaker 1: under suspicion of being a concealed Communist. When the investigation began,
Speaker 1: she was noted as thirty dark, heavy with gray eyes.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty three, the report reads, she and some
Speaker 1: friends drove from New York to Alabama to witness the
Speaker 1: Scottsborough trial. When local police found them talking to black
Speaker 1: reporters and holding flyers for a Negro student conference. The
Speaker 1: police accused the group of inciting the Negroes to insurrections. Then,
Speaker 1: in the summer of nineteen thirty six, after her trip
Speaker 1: to Galli Bridge. Rukaiser traveled to Spain to report on
Speaker 1: Barcelona's anti fascist People's Olympiad. In the process, she observed
Speaker 1: the first days of the Spanish Civil War from a
Speaker 1: train before evacuating by ship. Her suspicious activities in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties included her appeal for world peace and her
Speaker 1: civil rights zeal. The FBI mentions The Book of the
Speaker 1: Dead only once, in passing as a work that dealt
Speaker 1: with the industrial disintegration of the peoples in a West
Speaker 1: Virginia village riddled with silicosis. I find a lot interesting there.
Speaker 2: And it's hard to overstate the degree to which anti
Speaker 2: communist stuff was really just anti labor stuff, because if
Speaker 2: you were any kind of like, you didn't have to
Speaker 2: be that much of a radical to be frank, before
Speaker 2: they would start looking at you as like, well, you've
Speaker 2: got communist ties, you got socialist ties. You sat in
Speaker 2: on this meeting, and in this meeting were some communists,
Speaker 2: and it's like, well, yeah, because there's overlapping. There's overlap
Speaker 2: between activistsho are trying to, you know, pushing for better
Speaker 2: labor rights and everything else and people who wanted to
Speaker 2: take it Further so, a lot of the persecution of
Speaker 2: communists was really just people that had spoke out on
Speaker 2: behalf of labor. It became a very convenient thing for
Speaker 2: people to do.
Speaker 1: And I also find one of the other things I
Speaker 1: find interesting here is like just kind of the disinterest
Speaker 1: with which her report sums up the Book of the
Speaker 1: Dead and the disaster that it's reporting on, right, because
Speaker 1: I think that's obviously the FBI is concerned in other
Speaker 1: stuff here, But like, I do think that kind of
Speaker 1: disinterest you see there is emblematic of the overall attitude
Speaker 1: the federal government has to what happened here, right, And
Speaker 1: it's worth noting like there are not like all of
Speaker 1: the people killed by anarchist bombers or whatever in this period,
Speaker 1: and fuck throw in bank robbers there too, right, which
Speaker 1: is another thing the FBI deals with, do not equal
Speaker 1: the death toll of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: This is a much bigger danger to American citizens by
Speaker 1: any rate than like, I don't know, the fucking gangster
Speaker 1: robbing banks and shit in this period.
Speaker 2: Well, nobils to do the math during Prohibition, the total
Speaker 2: number of people killed by say al Capone's gain it
Speaker 2: wasn't a thousand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course, No, you can't make a business doing
Speaker 1: that like I guess the cartels do. But it's a
Speaker 1: different era.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the way we treat different types of crime and
Speaker 2: the way one thing is like a crisis that we
Speaker 2: need to completely overturn the entire system to address, versus this,
Speaker 2: where the amount of disinterest is kind of shocking, like
Speaker 2: even to this day, like the memorials for this, it's
Speaker 2: just such an afterthought. The combination between the suffering that
Speaker 2: was caused the number of people to suffer versus the
Speaker 2: reaction to it is just so out of whack. It's
Speaker 2: so crazy the things that we choose to be frightened of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it really is so. One of the articles that
Speaker 1: I came across in my research was a twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: in PR Frontline investigation. This was not about the Hawk's
Speaker 1: Nest Tunnel disaster, but was analyzing decades of regulatory data
Speaker 1: from dust collection monitors in coal mines modern coal mines
Speaker 1: operating today, and they found evidence that government regulators have
Speaker 1: had half for the last fifty years. Basically, there has
Speaker 1: been hard evidence that silica exposure in about fifteen percent
Speaker 1: of US minds vastly exceeded safe levels. This means that
Speaker 1: regulators had evidence that a significant number of workers were
Speaker 1: in unsafe conditions where they would get sick and die,
Speaker 1: and that our regulators failed to step in and demand
Speaker 1: direct steps be taken to mitigate this danger. Celeste Montfornton
Speaker 1: weird last name Celest Montfornton, who is a former MIND
Speaker 1: safety regulator under Clinton, said this, we failed. Had we
Speaker 1: taken action at this time, I really believe we would
Speaker 1: not be seeing the disease we're saying now. And what
Speaker 1: he's talking about is what the National Institute for Occupational
Speaker 1: Health and Safety has described as an epidemic of silicosis
Speaker 1: among miners today. This is happening right now as we
Speaker 1: as we say this, unless you're listening hundreds of years
Speaker 1: in the future, it's yeah. One of these epidemiologist Scott
Speaker 1: Lany is quoted as saying, we're counting thousands of cases,
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands and thousands of black lung cases, thousands
Speaker 1: of cases of the most severe form of black lung,
Speaker 1: and we're not done counting yet. One culprit of all this,
Speaker 1: one reason this is happening, is that the best and
Speaker 1: biggest coal seams were all mined out generations ago, so
Speaker 1: modern coal miners are often drilling thinner seams that are
Speaker 1: laced with sandstone, and sandstone has a high and elevated
Speaker 1: silica content. Not as high as what they were removing
Speaker 1: from the Hawk's nest tunnel, but elevated, and that means
Speaker 1: people get sicker faster, NPR writes quote. The NPR Frontline
Speaker 1: investigation found thousands of instances in which miners were exposed
Speaker 1: not just to col dust, but to dangerous levels of
Speaker 1: toxic silica dust. The Federal Mind Safety and Health Administrations
Speaker 1: own data chronicles twenty one thousand instances of excessive exposure
Speaker 1: to silica since nineteen eighty six. At the same time,
Speaker 1: NPR identified black lung diagnoses involving miners in their thirties
Speaker 1: who also experienced rapid progression to the advanced stage. Smith
Speaker 1: says he was diagnosed at nine. NIOSHA has confirm this
Speaker 1: trend in its studies. I don't have an exact death
Speaker 1: toll for you. Now. Obviously there are more things to
Speaker 1: keep people alive, you know. Now, as Jason keeps saying,
Speaker 1: there's a lot more these people are. This is a
Speaker 1: bad situation. It's terrifying, but they do have like much
Speaker 1: more in the way of support than the folks suffering
Speaker 1: a hawk's nest. But we are talking thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of cases of people dealing with black lung
Speaker 1: right now that they didn't need to be dealing with that.
Speaker 1: The technology existed warning the situation was unsafe, and they
Speaker 1: were not given the proper equipment. Air circulation systems were
Speaker 1: not installed, mitigation efforts weren't taken because it would have
Speaker 1: cut down on the profits of the mining company. You know,
Speaker 1: that is still happening today. I will say one thing
Speaker 1: that's good is that there have been some lawsuits, particularly
Speaker 1: against One of the issues here is that like a
Speaker 1: lot of dust masks issued to miners were found not
Speaker 1: to work the company's figure. I think what happened is
Speaker 1: that some of the masks suppliers just assumed, well, our
Speaker 1: air circulation shit, the mitigation stuff is so good, nobody's
Speaker 1: going to know if we kind of cheap out making
Speaker 1: these masks, these safety masks. And a huge number of
Speaker 1: miners have actually sued several masks suppliers, filing product liability lawsuits,
Speaker 1: and there have been a like multi billion dollar verdicts
Speaker 1: in this. So one of the good things is that
Speaker 1: there is much more of a protective apparatus. I shouldn't
Speaker 1: say protective, because it didn't protect these guys they got sick.
Speaker 1: But there's more of a I guess, apparatus of vengeance
Speaker 1: to where this is not. You know, when you're talking
Speaker 1: a multi billion dollar lawsuit, you are talking about something
Speaker 1: that significantly more of an issue for these companies to
Speaker 1: deal with than the kind of money that Union Carbide
Speaker 1: had to pay out. So I'm not gonna say you
Speaker 1: should take too much be too happy about that, because
Speaker 1: again it's still fucking happened. But I don't know.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: That's what I have to say.
Speaker 2: One thing that is very that has not change since
Speaker 2: those days, has not changed the last couple hundred years.
Speaker 2: Our entire civilization exists because of mining. Everything you have
Speaker 2: change from a mine. Everything runs on mines. Everything in
Speaker 2: your phone came from a mine, everything in your PC,
Speaker 2: everything in this microphone. I'm talking into everything in this chair,
Speaker 2: I'm sitting on all of the metals, all of the steel, everything,
Speaker 2: all of the silica. Everything came from a mine. And
Speaker 2: I don't think on it today. Basis we appreciate this
Speaker 2: that if the miners went away, all of this stops
Speaker 2: all of it, because you can't you can't walk two
Speaker 2: feet without walking on something that came out of a mine.
Speaker 2: The green energy revolution that we all want with the
Speaker 2: solar panels and whatever nuclear power plants or fusion plants,
Speaker 2: or when all of that stuff, the windmills, all of
Speaker 2: that stuff came out of a mine.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And the degree to which these are yeah, just
Speaker 1: disposable people still, I think that's kind of important to
Speaker 1: note that, like the disposability of the folks who make
Speaker 1: every aspect of society possible is uh. I mean, I
Speaker 1: would say it hasn't changed, but it's they're not not
Speaker 1: disposable still. And by the way, I should also highlight
Speaker 1: here we're talking about the miner when we say miners
Speaker 1: are what makes the world possible. When it comes to
Speaker 1: like the shit mind in your computers, that's not some
Speaker 1: like hard work and you know man with the fucking
Speaker 1: creases on his face and whatnot and a big old
Speaker 1: helmet and the light working in like West Virginia, that's
Speaker 1: like an eleven year old in Central Africa. Mining mirror
Speaker 1: rare earth minerals to a significant extent. Right, This is
Speaker 1: one of the problems with the production of smartphones and
Speaker 1: computers and stuff is that, like it, there's basically inevitable
Speaker 1: that there will be human trafficking at some stage of
Speaker 1: that because some of the critical environment, like ingredients to
Speaker 1: these machines are only mined through means that are illegal internationally. Right,
Speaker 1: It's just one of those things where there's so many
Speaker 1: layers of separation and shit that like you can get
Speaker 1: away kind of with Nobody wants to talk about where
Speaker 1: the cobalt comes from or whatever the fuck, Like this
Speaker 1: is just the way it is, and that.
Speaker 2: Will always be dirty work. It will always be dangerous work,
Speaker 2: and we are so disconnected from it, especially people like me,
Speaker 2: even people who are very progressive. But we work office
Speaker 2: jobs and we send our emails and we sit at
Speaker 2: our laptops and really do not think of where that
Speaker 2: stuff inside the microprocesses came from, because at the end
Speaker 2: of it is a very dirty mine in a very
Speaker 2: dark place and someone working very hard, probably in pain.
Speaker 2: Like you can technology until you have a mind that's
Speaker 2: entirely run by robots, but even then, the stuff that
Speaker 2: the robots are made of will have come from a
Speaker 2: mind like at the base of everything we do, no
Speaker 2: matter how high minded and sophisticated. When we land a
Speaker 2: robot on Mars, that robot is made out of materials
Speaker 2: that came from a mine. Like there's somebody in whatever
Speaker 2: West Virginia or Africa or somewhere that dug it up
Speaker 2: out of the ground and put it at a cart
Speaker 2: and shipped it across the world. Yep.
Speaker 1: And I guess that's a good place to end, Jason,
Speaker 1: you want to plug your book.
Speaker 2: Well, just one final there's one kind of post mortem.
Speaker 2: The Union Carbide Company. Of course, now as of I
Speaker 2: try to look them up and see when they went
Speaker 2: out of business. It turns out that in twenty nineteen
Speaker 2: they had four point four billion dollars in revenue. Great,
Speaker 2: but they have now been they've now been swallowed up
Speaker 2: by the Dal Chemical Company, a small company, a family
Speaker 2: owned operation that it has a market cap of thirty
Speaker 2: six billion dollars I believe, yeah.
Speaker 1: And is not involved in anything horrifying in history. Don't
Speaker 1: look at don't google down chemical Vietnam right like, there's
Speaker 1: no reason to do that whatsoever.
Speaker 2: We are a very forgiving society. Don't you see when
Speaker 2: people reform themselves as long as you are a gigantic corporation,
Speaker 2: it's all about second chances in America. Yeah, we're willing
Speaker 2: to let you turn your life around. Yeah, anyway, yes,
Speaker 2: thank you. If you want to find me on TikTok,
Speaker 2: I am Jason K. Pargan. We have repeatedly made jokes
Speaker 2: about me being reduced to a TikTok person. I have
Speaker 2: three hundred and thirty thousand followers on there. I'm primarily
Speaker 2: a TikToker. The author stuff is now just a trivial
Speaker 2: footnote in my biography. My gravestone will say he was
Speaker 2: a beloved tich talker and.
Speaker 1: Prominent talker, prominent TikToker.
Speaker 2: I'm Jason K. Pargan on TikTok. Also that same thing
Speaker 2: on Twitter, SAH. Also the same thing on Blue Guy
Speaker 2: and threads and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and some
Speaker 2: others that I don't remember to update because there's too
Speaker 2: many substack, all of them, all of them. Jason K.
Speaker 2: Pargin P A R G. I N thank you. You know.
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 1: We shit talk TikTok a lot us olds, but I
Speaker 1: will say it's actually kind of helpful that that's how
Speaker 1: you initially learned. It's kind of hopeful that that is
Speaker 1: how you found out about this because this is like
Speaker 1: so important, right, this is like critical history. It's critical
Speaker 1: for understanding a lot of things about this country today.
Speaker 1: And it's just critical because you need to know about
Speaker 1: what happened to these people. And the fact that this
Speaker 1: story spread widely on TikTok, I think is pretty rad actually,
Speaker 1: so that's good, that's.
Speaker 2: Nice, and to be that serious. There's a lot of
Speaker 2: really cool stuff on TikTok, and it's it's not fifteen
Speaker 2: second long clips of like teenage girls asy and people
Speaker 2: will hear that I'm on TikTok. They think, oh, so
Speaker 2: you're on there with the fifteen year old girls, that's
Speaker 2: your thing. It's like, no, TikTok. Now, there's long form
Speaker 2: stuff on there. Let's say long form, I mean seven, eight,
Speaker 2: nine minutes long for TikTok getting into subjects like this.
Speaker 2: Because this video had a lot of views on it,
Speaker 2: that's how I saw it. That's what cued me into this.
Speaker 2: And then when I went to look it up found
Speaker 2: out that there's barely anything on Wikipedia because it's kind
Speaker 2: of flew under the radar, and so that inspired me
Speaker 2: to see if we want to do an episode about this,
Speaker 2: because I suspected that there was a lot to unearth.
Speaker 2: It was worse than I thought, as it always is
Speaker 2: every time I come on here. The details are always
Speaker 2: worse than what you've heard. But this is the kind
Speaker 2: of story. For whatever reason, we love to make movies
Speaker 2: about serial killers that killed five people, but a corporation
Speaker 2: that kills a thousand through being exactly as cruel and whatever.
Speaker 2: We kind of just like, well, yeah, but their job creators,
Speaker 2: and they made that tunnel, Like, don't they get credit
Speaker 2: for making that.
Speaker 1: Tunnel solid tunnel?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like they didn't make. A whole bunch of
Speaker 2: people whose names you'll never know made that tunnel. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they broke their bodies to make it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I don't know, go off into the world.
Speaker 1: Buy Jason's book, Remain Angry at Union Carbide. Definitely do that. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's the episode, Go away now, everybody. Hey everyone, Robert
Speaker 1: Evans here. As we mentioned in the first episode, Jason
Speaker 1: asked for this as the result of a TikTok that
Speaker 1: they'd seen. I'm not waunch of a TikTok guy. So
Speaker 1: I just kind of went on and did my research.
Speaker 1: But I've been informed that the person who put together
Speaker 1: this TikTok, which is an account called Schoolhouse Clock like
Speaker 1: like the buildings supply c a ulk. Schoolhouse Clock, who's
Speaker 1: creator is a fellow named Michael, put out a video
Speaker 1: specifically talking to us. He wanted to let us know.
Speaker 1: There's a website hawksnest names dot org that was created
Speaker 1: quite a while ago to try and put together an actual,
Speaker 1: definitive list of the men who died as a result
Speaker 1: of this. They've got both a list of death certificates,
Speaker 1: worker names, some reports on you andion carbide, and some
Speaker 1: other information. Really good info if you're interested in this,
Speaker 1: and you can also if you're someone who may have
Speaker 1: lost a family member obviously a long time ago in
Speaker 1: this disaster, there's a way for you to kind of
Speaker 1: reach out to them and try to add that name.
Speaker 1: That website was offline for a while, but then Michael,
Speaker 1: the fellow with the TikTok apparently was able to raise
Speaker 1: some money through his viewers or listeners whatever you call
Speaker 1: them on TikTok to put it back up, which is great,
Speaker 1: and so they he asked that we put in a
Speaker 1: shout out, which I am doing now. So please check
Speaker 1: out hawksnest names dot org for more information on this disaster.
Speaker 1: Thanks everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
Speaker 1: website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.