WEBVTT - Part Two:The Deadliest Workplace Disaster in U.S. History 0:00:01.760 --> 0:00:09.639 Who Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards show, 0:00:09.800 --> 0:00:14.080 where I enunciate the title slightly differently so that you 0:00:14.160 --> 0:00:18.040 stay interested and don't slip into a belief that you 0:00:18.320 --> 0:00:20.279 all of these episodes are just kind of like one 0:00:20.360 --> 0:00:24.200 long episode and you're just sort of like lost in 0:00:24.320 --> 0:00:27.640 space consuming it. Anyway, that was that what you were 0:00:27.680 --> 0:00:30.000 going for there, buddy? Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like 0:00:30.040 --> 0:00:33.880 a k hole but for your ears, speaking of while 0:00:33.920 --> 0:00:37.280 not really speaking about ketamine, but anyway, Jason pargin. 0:00:39.080 --> 0:00:41.839 Part two, The Triumphant Part two, the first part kind 0:00:41.840 --> 0:00:45.360 of ended on an Empire strikes back a down note. 0:00:45.479 --> 0:00:47.880 This is going to get us through to the Return 0:00:47.920 --> 0:00:50.920 of the Jedi, when the Empire is finally finally going 0:00:50.960 --> 0:00:54.040 to fall in. This company, this evil corporation behind this 0:00:54.160 --> 0:00:57.600 disaster going to be dissolved. That they could clearly not 0:00:57.880 --> 0:01:01.240 still in business after nineteen thirty whatever, once this stuff 0:01:01.240 --> 0:01:03.040 all comes out. I'm sure I've not looked it up. 0:01:03.080 --> 0:01:06.679 I'm sure they were not allowed to operate anywhere in 0:01:06.680 --> 0:01:07.720 the world after this. 0:01:08.560 --> 0:01:10.880 I've forgotten most of what I wrote here, but I'm 0:01:10.920 --> 0:01:12.040 sure you're right on that one. 0:01:12.120 --> 0:01:12.480 Jason. 0:01:12.600 --> 0:01:18.560 Now, Jason, are you do you have a thing that 0:01:18.600 --> 0:01:22.400 you've got a plug here that you yes, yeah, moving. 0:01:22.560 --> 0:01:26.200 The new book is called Zoe is Too Drunk for 0:01:26.240 --> 0:01:29.680 This Dystopia. Add in all formats on October thirty first, 0:01:29.720 --> 0:01:32.240 twenty twenty three. If you are listening to this after 0:01:32.280 --> 0:01:35.160 that date, it should be out wherever books are sold 0:01:35.920 --> 0:01:39.640 in any possible format. If it is not out, boy, 0:01:39.760 --> 0:01:42.800 google my name, because something terrible must have happened. I 0:01:42.840 --> 0:01:47.120 can't imagine. It must have gotten canceled and pulled from shelves. 0:01:47.600 --> 0:01:52.720 Yeah, Jason got canceled for his clandestine work in Nicaragua 0:01:52.760 --> 0:01:56.360 in the nineteen nineties or something like that. Look, we 0:01:56.440 --> 0:01:58.880 all have we all have a dark history of clandestine 0:01:58.880 --> 0:02:01.400 work in Latin America at some point in the nineties. 0:02:01.440 --> 0:02:03.880 You know, don't don't be judgmental people, they'll come for 0:02:03.960 --> 0:02:06.520 you next. This is the problem with cancel culture. 0:02:07.440 --> 0:02:10.120 And also that does not get you canceled. Those people are. 0:02:10.240 --> 0:02:13.760 Those people are very much you know, they're all fine. 0:02:14.440 --> 0:02:20.080 So let's talk about another kind of canceled silicosis. So 0:02:20.160 --> 0:02:22.519 one of the you know you mentioned there's not a 0:02:22.560 --> 0:02:26.040 lot of sources on this. There there are some very 0:02:26.160 --> 0:02:29.560 good sources on this, but they are kind of obscure 0:02:29.680 --> 0:02:34.640 and buried, and honestly the very best, like early like 0:02:34.680 --> 0:02:37.079 the the in terms of like stuff that how close 0:02:37.120 --> 0:02:41.239 it is to the actual disaster, probably the best overall 0:02:41.440 --> 0:02:45.680 work kind of covering this at least that that's kind 0:02:45.720 --> 0:02:48.840 of contemporary to it. Happening is not a piece of 0:02:48.919 --> 0:02:54.160 traditional journalism or like a traditional nonfiction book. It's a poem, 0:02:54.760 --> 0:02:56.799 an epic poem. So we're not talking about like a 0:02:57.160 --> 0:02:59.959 little rhyming thing. We're talking about almost like the Illea 0:03:00.160 --> 0:03:03.280 or the Odyssey. Right, there's an epic poem about the 0:03:03.320 --> 0:03:06.480 Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, The Book of the Dead, written 0:03:06.480 --> 0:03:10.240 by Muriel Rukeiser. She was, you know, someone who grew 0:03:10.320 --> 0:03:14.320 up soon after the disaster and came to west you know, 0:03:14.360 --> 0:03:16.200 this part of West Virginia and was able to meet 0:03:16.280 --> 0:03:18.840 and interview a bunch of the survivors and their family members. 0:03:18.919 --> 0:03:22.520 And so it's this mix of you know, art where 0:03:22.639 --> 0:03:25.160 where she is, you know, using kind of the medium 0:03:25.160 --> 0:03:27.800 of poetry to talk through, to kind of set the 0:03:27.840 --> 0:03:31.280 scene and to talk through you know, how horrifying this was. 0:03:31.320 --> 0:03:34.920 But also large chunks of it are straight up interviews 0:03:34.920 --> 0:03:37.240 with survivors and their family members that have been kind 0:03:37.240 --> 0:03:39.240 of set to meet her in order to fit into 0:03:39.320 --> 0:03:43.320 the work. I haven't ever encountered anything like this before actually, 0:03:43.640 --> 0:03:47.160 and within sort of West Virginia, you know, academic spheres. 0:03:47.280 --> 0:03:49.240 It's a pretty famous book. I had to, you know, 0:03:49.280 --> 0:03:52.400 actually buy a physical copy of it because it's not online. 0:03:52.400 --> 0:03:55.040 But it's it's very good. It's it's really remarkable, and 0:03:55.080 --> 0:03:59.760 it is considered one of the more important pieces of 0:04:00.360 --> 0:04:03.120 kind of labor journalism of this era. I think it's 0:04:03.120 --> 0:04:06.520 been forgotten by most people now, but it shouldn't be. 0:04:06.600 --> 0:04:09.080 It is a pretty remarkable work of art. So I 0:04:09.080 --> 0:04:12.800 do want to encourage people check out Muriel Rakaiser's Book 0:04:12.840 --> 0:04:14.280 of the Dead. We're going to be quoting from it 0:04:14.320 --> 0:04:16.800 a couple of times here because it contains interviews with 0:04:16.839 --> 0:04:18.440 people from that period of time. 0:04:18.960 --> 0:04:20.839 In the last episode, we kind of joked about the 0:04:20.839 --> 0:04:24.200 fact that I'm mostly known for TikTok, which is true. 0:04:24.440 --> 0:04:26.200 Far more people have watched my tech talks and have 0:04:26.240 --> 0:04:28.400 read any of my books. But I on there, I 0:04:28.440 --> 0:04:32.560 talked about the HBO mini series they did about Chernobyl, Yeah, 0:04:32.600 --> 0:04:35.080 and I talked about how they made it not as 0:04:35.120 --> 0:04:37.440 a documentary or as a docuseries or anything like that. 0:04:37.480 --> 0:04:40.520 They made it as a horror movie. Yeah, Like it 0:04:40.600 --> 0:04:43.480 is highly stylized, and I was in that technok. I 0:04:43.520 --> 0:04:46.880 was defending that choice because I was like, you can't 0:04:46.920 --> 0:04:54.120 convey the reality of Chernobyl without trying to convey the 0:04:54.600 --> 0:04:58.240 fact that it played out like cosmic horror to these people, 0:04:58.839 --> 0:05:02.120 that you had this church demon thing you brought into 0:05:02.160 --> 0:05:04.480 the world, and that everyone who looked at it their 0:05:04.600 --> 0:05:09.560 flesh started melting off their bones. So it is highly 0:05:09.560 --> 0:05:12.640 stylized because that's the only thing to really drive home, 0:05:12.960 --> 0:05:14.640 Whereas if you just try to convey it as a 0:05:14.680 --> 0:05:17.360 clinical piece of journalism, it doesn't hit the same way. 0:05:17.400 --> 0:05:20.279 It is trying to bring you into what it was 0:05:20.440 --> 0:05:24.000 like to live that situation that no one had ever 0:05:24.040 --> 0:05:26.480 lived through before. There had never been a meltdown before. 0:05:27.120 --> 0:05:29.880 Where here, I think it's the same thing if you're 0:05:29.920 --> 0:05:34.039 trying to convey the actual horror of what occurred. Because 0:05:34.080 --> 0:05:36.600 this mind, as we described in the previous episode. Please 0:05:36.600 --> 0:05:38.040 go back to listen to that one if you have 0:05:38.160 --> 0:05:41.560 not yet, it was hell on Earth. Yeah, Like you're 0:05:41.600 --> 0:05:45.080 in this dark space that is cramped. Even if it's 0:05:45.120 --> 0:05:47.400 a spacious mind, you're still you know, it's now far 0:05:47.520 --> 0:05:51.320 enough that you're long out of the sunlight, and the 0:05:51.360 --> 0:05:55.560 air is burning you. It's burning your eyes, it's burning 0:05:55.600 --> 0:05:58.760 your nose, it's burning your lungs. It's probably burning your 0:05:58.800 --> 0:06:03.039 skin like you're the teeny tiny pieces of glass. An 0:06:03.080 --> 0:06:07.920 epic poem is as appropriate as anything as I can 0:06:08.040 --> 0:06:11.440 think of to try to convey that this is an 0:06:11.480 --> 0:06:15.680 epic tragedy. It's so easy to talk about this in 0:06:15.720 --> 0:06:18.320 a way that we talk about numbers in the science 0:06:18.360 --> 0:06:20.640 of it that doesn't convey what it was like to 0:06:20.680 --> 0:06:24.520 get up and go to work in this place every day. 0:06:25.080 --> 0:06:29.320 Yeah, Yeah, absolutely, And I think Rukeiser does a really 0:06:29.360 --> 0:06:32.200 admirable job of that. One of the accounts that she 0:06:32.360 --> 0:06:34.640 provides is from a woman, and this is from one 0:06:34.640 --> 0:06:38.359 of the relatively small number of laborers who were from 0:06:38.720 --> 0:06:42.560 the nearby town of golly Bridge. This woman, this mother, 0:06:42.720 --> 0:06:46.039 is named Absalom, and she has three sons who all 0:06:46.080 --> 0:06:48.480 go to work in this tunnel. They had been coal 0:06:48.520 --> 0:06:53.440 miners previously, but work was uneven, and as ru Keiser writes, quote, 0:06:53.760 --> 0:06:56.760 a power company foreman learned that we made homebrew. He 0:06:56.880 --> 0:06:59.279 formed a habit of dropping by in the evenings to drink, 0:06:59.360 --> 0:07:01.480 persuading the boys and my husband to give up their 0:07:01.560 --> 0:07:04.080 jobs and take this other work. It would pay them better. 0:07:04.600 --> 0:07:07.120 Sureley is my youngest boy. He went into the tunnel. 0:07:07.200 --> 0:07:09.040 I saw the dust at the bottom of the tub. 0:07:09.279 --> 0:07:11.800 The boy worked there about eighteen months. Came home one 0:07:11.840 --> 0:07:14.400 evening with a shortness of breath. He said, mother, I 0:07:14.440 --> 0:07:17.640 cannot get my breath. Shirley was sick about three months. 0:07:17.680 --> 0:07:19.520 I would carry him from his bed to the table, 0:07:19.560 --> 0:07:22.720 from his bed to the porch in my arms. So 0:07:24.160 --> 0:07:27.240 that's terrible, but it's also worth noting Absalom and her 0:07:27.280 --> 0:07:30.320 family are kind of among the luckier victims in that 0:07:31.400 --> 0:07:34.720 her kids and her husband, when they get sick, they 0:07:34.760 --> 0:07:38.000 have a home in town that's stable, they have family 0:07:38.280 --> 0:07:41.480 to take care of them. They're not completely in the wind. 0:07:41.560 --> 0:07:43.520 So when Shirley gets sick, he's able to stay with 0:07:43.600 --> 0:07:46.080 his mom and get care from his mom. This does 0:07:46.080 --> 0:07:48.600 not ultimately save his life, but it's a less horrific 0:07:48.640 --> 0:07:51.080 experience than a lot of these black laborers are forced 0:07:51.120 --> 0:07:54.000 to endure. I want you to imagine not just the 0:07:54.040 --> 0:07:58.400 tunnel horror, which Jason just described pretty ably, but living 0:07:58.480 --> 0:08:00.800 and working in a camp outside the dig project. Right, 0:08:01.000 --> 0:08:03.800 you're in these cramped quarters. You're in a tiny box 0:08:03.840 --> 0:08:06.480 of a room with ten to fifteen other guys. None 0:08:06.520 --> 0:08:09.160 of you are able to There's not hygiene facilities that 0:08:09.520 --> 0:08:14.840 are good or super regular, so everything reeks. There's also 0:08:14.920 --> 0:08:17.800 this chloeing silica dust that you just can't get all 0:08:17.840 --> 0:08:21.200 the way off you. It's always on everything, and one 0:08:21.280 --> 0:08:23.680 day you find that you just can't draw in breath. 0:08:23.760 --> 0:08:26.080 It feels like a flu at first, maybe that's what 0:08:26.120 --> 0:08:28.920 it is, you think, and you start coughing incessantly, But 0:08:28.960 --> 0:08:31.880 the misery is so intense eventually that you stop being 0:08:31.880 --> 0:08:33.839 able to work, and you can't sleep at night. Right, 0:08:33.880 --> 0:08:35.880 So in the morning when it's time to go in, 0:08:36.000 --> 0:08:38.880 you're not like you can't function right, you can't go 0:08:38.960 --> 0:08:41.120 in there and do your job. You're coughing up a 0:08:41.200 --> 0:08:44.040 lung and you haven't slept in days. This is an 0:08:44.080 --> 0:08:47.440 experience that happens to a lot of these guys. In 0:08:47.520 --> 0:08:50.800 nineteen thirty six, a newsreel interviewed one of these hawks 0:08:50.840 --> 0:08:54.600 next workers after the fact, who claimed, quote, each and 0:08:54.640 --> 0:08:56.920 every day I worked in that tunnel, I helped carry 0:08:56.960 --> 0:08:59.120 off ten to fourteen men who was overcome by the 0:08:59.200 --> 0:09:03.320 dust now there's no sick days in this period of time, 0:09:03.400 --> 0:09:05.880 especially not for black migrant laborers in the midst of 0:09:05.960 --> 0:09:09.880 a massive labor surplus. From Maine harton Davis's perspective, right, 0:09:09.880 --> 0:09:12.520 the contractor union Carbide is directing to do all this. 0:09:13.040 --> 0:09:16.480 Workers staying in their shanties are taking up space, and 0:09:16.559 --> 0:09:18.760 if they're not working, that space has to go to 0:09:18.800 --> 0:09:22.040 someone who will. So they hired security from the nearby 0:09:22.120 --> 0:09:24.560 town to go through the camp after everyone had left 0:09:24.600 --> 0:09:27.079 for work and hunt down the sick people who might 0:09:27.120 --> 0:09:30.520 be like hiding, trying to like sneak a day sleeping 0:09:30.640 --> 0:09:34.440 or something while their lungs rot in their chests. Cherniac 0:09:34.520 --> 0:09:37.240 writes of this quote, Ryan Hart and Dennis retained as 0:09:37.280 --> 0:09:40.480 an enforcement officer and formerly called a shack rouster. A 0:09:40.520 --> 0:09:43.320 Georgian named McLeod, who was assisted by a black camp 0:09:43.360 --> 0:09:47.199 overseer called Big John McLoud, carried firearms in a club. 0:09:47.360 --> 0:09:49.360 With these, he is said to have forced black workers 0:09:49.400 --> 0:09:51.480 to vacate the camp at the start of each work shift. 0:09:51.800 --> 0:09:54.880 According to a surviving black tunnel worker, beatings were routinely 0:09:54.920 --> 0:09:57.800 administered as part of this early morning ritual. The camps 0:09:57.840 --> 0:09:59.800 of the colored men we're not close to the camps 0:09:59.800 --> 0:10:01.520 of the for the white men. If a colored man 0:10:01.640 --> 0:10:03.320 was sick and really couldn't go out to work in 0:10:03.360 --> 0:10:05.240 the morning, he had to hide out before the shock 0:10:05.360 --> 0:10:07.960 rouster came about. That fellow had two pistols in a 0:10:08.000 --> 0:10:11.880 blackjack to force men to go to work. And it's 0:10:11.880 --> 0:10:17.040 worth highlighting here the two pistols because rousters there's other rousters. 0:10:17.080 --> 0:10:20.320 They're usually listed as carrying one. McLoud is carrying two. 0:10:20.880 --> 0:10:22.840 Because the only reason to do that if you're in 0:10:22.840 --> 0:10:25.520 this situation is if you're worried that you might find 0:10:25.559 --> 0:10:28.400 yourself at the center of a mob of angry, sick 0:10:28.440 --> 0:10:30.640 workers and need to kind of blast your way through 0:10:30.720 --> 0:10:33.000 a bunch of people. Right, that's the only reason you 0:10:33.000 --> 0:10:35.160 would need that for this job, which is basically just 0:10:35.200 --> 0:10:38.080 like poking people in their bed and getting them up, 0:10:38.120 --> 0:10:42.960 so kind of let you know the quality of dudes 0:10:43.679 --> 0:10:45.559 who are doing this job. 0:10:46.080 --> 0:10:51.160 You made a mention that these are very replaceable workers 0:10:51.200 --> 0:10:53.680 because there's a labor surplus, and this is something we 0:10:53.679 --> 0:10:56.880 imaged the first episode. I really want to reiterate this context. 0:10:57.480 --> 0:10:59.400 There are so many people out of work and so 0:10:59.480 --> 0:11:03.640 many people desperate for work. Again, at a level of 0:11:03.760 --> 0:11:07.800 abject poverty that we kind of don't have anymore in America, Like, 0:11:07.840 --> 0:11:10.960 no matter how bad it gets, it doesn't get bad 0:11:11.160 --> 0:11:13.920 like this was because again, they didn't have the infrastructure 0:11:14.440 --> 0:11:18.280 back then. So the fact that it is so easy 0:11:18.160 --> 0:11:21.840 that when somebody dies or somebody is incapacitated, that you 0:11:21.880 --> 0:11:24.040 can drag them away and know that when you post 0:11:24.040 --> 0:11:26.800 that job you will have one hundred guys or migrants 0:11:26.920 --> 0:11:30.600 willing to come in and fill it. The value of 0:11:30.640 --> 0:11:35.760 a human life drops blow zero because they're costing you 0:11:35.880 --> 0:11:39.800 money for every minute they're not up and working. It's 0:11:39.920 --> 0:11:42.480 that is the context that they know they can replace 0:11:42.520 --> 0:11:44.640 these people, because it would be different if you were 0:11:44.640 --> 0:11:46.600 talking about a core group of guys who have been 0:11:46.600 --> 0:11:48.120 trained for months and had to do a job, and 0:11:48.120 --> 0:11:51.120 then when one goes down, the productivity drops. Now you 0:11:51.160 --> 0:11:53.640 have to be concerned, not at for humanitarian reasons, but 0:11:53.679 --> 0:11:56.360 for productivity reasons, like if they're all sick, like we 0:11:56.480 --> 0:11:58.000 got to fix this, We got to get them because 0:11:58.000 --> 0:12:00.800 they're not working. It's not like that they're all so 0:12:01.000 --> 0:12:03.600 interchangeable that when one of them drops, they can just 0:12:03.679 --> 0:12:04.760 plug another one in. 0:12:06.400 --> 0:12:09.080 Yeah. Yeah, And that really is the core of like 0:12:09.160 --> 0:12:12.040 why they're able to get away with a lot of this. 0:12:12.600 --> 0:12:16.400 So there are reports that sick men were sometimes even 0:12:16.480 --> 0:12:19.760 killed by rousters for refusing to leave. MacLeod and his 0:12:19.800 --> 0:12:22.760 men were essentially immune to the consequences of whatever actions 0:12:22.760 --> 0:12:25.599 they took. He had been deputized by the Sheriff of 0:12:25.679 --> 0:12:28.640 Fayette County, so he's legally a law enforcement officer. This 0:12:28.840 --> 0:12:31.920 like maniac who's like rolling into shacks full of dying 0:12:31.960 --> 0:12:34.640 people with two handguns to like force them out, is 0:12:35.200 --> 0:12:38.040 a cop at this point in time too. He's in 0:12:38.080 --> 0:12:41.520 the pay directly of the Union Carbide Corporation. And McLoud 0:12:41.559 --> 0:12:45.679 also runs a Saturday night saloon. It's illegal to drink 0:12:45.720 --> 0:12:49.160 and gamble in this area at this point, but you know, 0:12:49.280 --> 0:12:51.520 he's a cop, so he's able to get away with it. 0:12:51.679 --> 0:12:54.920 And it was specifically a Saturday night saloon for black laborers. 0:12:55.080 --> 0:12:58.839 So McLeod is kind of getting you know, when these 0:12:58.840 --> 0:13:01.200 guys get out of work exault, they need something to 0:13:01.200 --> 0:13:03.839 distract them. He runs this thing that takes their money 0:13:03.880 --> 0:13:06.880 for booze and for gambling. And then when they're out 0:13:06.960 --> 0:13:09.280 of work and they're sick, or when they're out of 0:13:09.280 --> 0:13:13.120 money and they're sick. He'll make money kicking them out 0:13:13.200 --> 0:13:15.400 of these shacks that they stay. And it's also when 0:13:15.400 --> 0:13:18.520 he does this night saloon, most nights will end with 0:13:18.600 --> 0:13:21.000 a raid and a mass arrest because he's. Part of 0:13:21.000 --> 0:13:23.360 why he's allowed to do this is he's coordinating with 0:13:23.400 --> 0:13:25.800 the sheriff of Fayette County and the sheriff of Fayett County. 0:13:26.200 --> 0:13:28.800 When they arrest these guys for gambling and drinking, they 0:13:28.800 --> 0:13:30.760 don't take them to jail. So that's good because that 0:13:30.760 --> 0:13:33.520 would hurt Union Carbide, right, that would slow down production. 0:13:34.000 --> 0:13:37.360 They find them all right, so they just take money 0:13:37.360 --> 0:13:39.760 from them because they got caught drinking at this thing 0:13:39.800 --> 0:13:43.240 that the police are basically helping to run. It's just 0:13:43.280 --> 0:13:47.640 like these black labors are being so comprehensively mined while 0:13:47.679 --> 0:13:50.199 they are mining. Right, That's one of the things that 0:13:51.120 --> 0:13:55.560 is kind of worth acknowledging about how unjust this situation is. 0:13:56.880 --> 0:13:59.240 A corporate world, they call this synergy. 0:13:59.559 --> 0:14:01.080 Yeah, this is synergy. 0:14:01.240 --> 0:14:05.000 There's snitchs all possible angles to make sure that you're 0:14:05.040 --> 0:14:08.840 maximizing the every possible dime you could squeeze from this 0:14:09.120 --> 0:14:11.280 human being before they can no longer stand up. 0:14:11.679 --> 0:14:14.960 And again you couldn't do the sheriffa Fayette County wouldn't 0:14:15.000 --> 0:14:18.720 do this to a workforce that was local, right because 0:14:18.800 --> 0:14:20.840 number one, those are your voters, right, And number two, 0:14:21.080 --> 0:14:23.760 that'll endanger you. Someone's got to kill you eventually for 0:14:23.880 --> 0:14:26.600 doing that in town if you're doing that to your neighbors. 0:14:26.720 --> 0:14:26.880 Right. 0:14:27.480 --> 0:14:29.920 But these guys they're not from town. They're black, and 0:14:29.960 --> 0:14:33.720 they're dying so quickly that there's very little institutional memory 0:14:33.760 --> 0:14:37.040 that can protect them from scams like this, right, by 0:14:37.080 --> 0:14:39.960 which I mean you get in there and maybe your 0:14:40.000 --> 0:14:42.200 fellow workers have only been there for a couple of 0:14:42.280 --> 0:14:45.680 weeks because people are turning over so quickly, so like 0:14:45.800 --> 0:14:48.720 nobody really knows how much they're getting fucked with, so 0:14:48.720 --> 0:14:51.480 there's not much warning to get There's not old timers 0:14:51.640 --> 0:14:53.920 in a lot of cases, right, because they die so quickly. 0:14:54.640 --> 0:14:54.920 Now. 0:14:55.640 --> 0:14:59.040 Cherniac is also careful to note that racism was experienced 0:14:59.320 --> 0:15:01.920 by black ow workers, often at the hands of their 0:15:01.960 --> 0:15:05.520 fellow victims, white tunnel workers who are also getting silicosis. 0:15:06.360 --> 0:15:10.680 So you know that is a dimension here. Quote discipline 0:15:10.720 --> 0:15:13.280 of blacks by whites is similarly recalled by a gully 0:15:13.360 --> 0:15:15.440 Bridge man whose elder brother worked on the tunnel and 0:15:15.520 --> 0:15:19.200 later died from silicosis. He described his brother as not 0:15:19.400 --> 0:15:22.480 liking the and then he uses a slur, an attribute 0:15:22.480 --> 0:15:24.880 which apparently served to qualify him as a foreman for 0:15:24.960 --> 0:15:27.600 Ryan Harton Dennis. He routinely attended to his duties in 0:15:27.600 --> 0:15:30.320 the tunnel armed with a baseball bat. And again he 0:15:30.400 --> 0:15:33.640 was one of the guys. He's forcing these black laborers 0:15:33.640 --> 0:15:36.080 forward into this dust cloud, but he is also entering 0:15:36.080 --> 0:15:38.920 the dust cloud without protection. So that's a decent number 0:15:38.960 --> 0:15:40.760 of the men who die are the guys who kind 0:15:40.800 --> 0:15:44.120 of do this and don't realize that, like, as they 0:15:44.400 --> 0:15:47.040 sign the death warrants of these other men, they're also 0:15:47.200 --> 0:15:48.119 killing themselves. 0:15:49.600 --> 0:15:51.960 I realize that it sounds like we're making some sort 0:15:51.960 --> 0:15:55.360 of a ham fisted metaphor that these guys don't realize 0:15:55.360 --> 0:15:58.440 they're breathing the same they're all breathing the same poison 0:15:58.520 --> 0:16:02.000 air that, like their race, convinces them that somehow they're 0:16:02.040 --> 0:16:06.000 coming out on top, even though the bosses equally don't 0:16:06.040 --> 0:16:09.520 care about their lives. Really, but it's not really a metaphor. 0:16:09.600 --> 0:16:11.520 It's just a thing that's literally happening. 0:16:12.360 --> 0:16:15.400 In this case. It's just what's going down, Yeah, Joe, 0:16:15.520 --> 0:16:22.560 it's yeah, cool stuff. Sometimes reality provides us with those moments. 0:16:22.600 --> 0:16:23.520 I guess, I don't know. 0:16:23.600 --> 0:16:25.680 Do you think there would be a solidarity in those 0:16:25.720 --> 0:16:29.320 tunnels with those white guys saying, hey, I now kind 0:16:29.320 --> 0:16:32.520 of get it. I get it. I see we're on 0:16:32.600 --> 0:16:35.720 the same team against the people who control the capital. 0:16:35.800 --> 0:16:37.920 Maybe we should all join up together. It's like, no, 0:16:38.560 --> 0:16:40.880 as long as I have my racism, I don't need 0:16:41.000 --> 0:16:41.560 clean air. 0:16:42.040 --> 0:16:45.400 Yeah, it is it. Really, there's a lot to dig 0:16:45.440 --> 0:16:46.920 into here. This is part of the way I think 0:16:46.920 --> 0:16:50.640 this is such a worthwhile moment and disaster for people 0:16:50.720 --> 0:16:53.040 to know more about. Like, it really is important for 0:16:53.080 --> 0:16:55.640 people to be aware of this history, and that's one 0:16:56.160 --> 0:17:00.680 reason why. So Also, you know, if we're talking about 0:17:00.680 --> 0:17:03.960 outside of the rate and the speed of silicosis here, 0:17:04.280 --> 0:17:07.720 these are all things happening in other minds and industrial 0:17:07.760 --> 0:17:11.120 construction projects around the country, right. The use of white 0:17:11.160 --> 0:17:13.600 workers to do violence to black workers to force them 0:17:13.640 --> 0:17:16.240 to labor. You know, these kind of like cops basically 0:17:16.320 --> 0:17:20.160 hired by these companies to enforce their who take advantage 0:17:20.200 --> 0:17:23.360 of them, rob them, beat them, kill them. All. All 0:17:23.400 --> 0:17:26.920 of that is common in other projects. The difference here 0:17:27.080 --> 0:17:29.200 is that at Hawk's Nest, they're doing it to men 0:17:29.240 --> 0:17:32.520 who are dying in a matter of weeks, sometimes of 0:17:32.560 --> 0:17:36.640 an easily preventable illness caused by the labor. Right, sixty 0:17:36.720 --> 0:17:39.919 percent of the men who work in this tunnel last 0:17:40.040 --> 0:17:44.240 less than two months. Eighty percent lasts less than six months. 0:17:44.640 --> 0:17:49.280 Virtually everyone quits, dies or becomes too sick to work 0:17:49.320 --> 0:17:51.280 in less than a year. You know, when we're talking 0:17:51.320 --> 0:17:55.160 about these low skilled, unprotected workers, right, almost no one 0:17:55.200 --> 0:17:58.280 makes it a year. Right again, sixty percent less than 0:17:58.280 --> 0:18:00.440 two months. Now, a lot of those guys are leaving 0:18:00.480 --> 0:18:02.680 because they're like, maybe they've got a little more options, 0:18:02.840 --> 0:18:05.080 they've got some money, and they're like, well, this is 0:18:05.080 --> 0:18:07.080 a death trap. I'm not going to stay here. But 0:18:07.160 --> 0:18:10.440 a significant chunk of that sixty percent are getting sick 0:18:10.480 --> 0:18:13.359 and eventually dying, you know, after just a couple of 0:18:13.400 --> 0:18:17.800 weeks of labor. Absalom's son, Shirley, who we heard from 0:18:17.840 --> 0:18:20.240 earlier from that poem, was one of the first to 0:18:20.320 --> 0:18:23.119 fall ill before the company admitted any awareness to the 0:18:23.200 --> 0:18:26.880 dangers of silicosis, and before the local medical community realized 0:18:26.880 --> 0:18:30.520 what was happening. Her story lays out in horrifying detail, 0:18:30.560 --> 0:18:33.560 how frustrating the process of trying to find any answer 0:18:33.560 --> 0:18:38.119 could be quote, and this is Ruke Heiser kind of 0:18:38.240 --> 0:18:43.080 quoting from her interview of this mother. When they took sick, 0:18:43.200 --> 0:18:45.240 right at the start, I saw a doctor. I tried 0:18:45.240 --> 0:18:47.199 to get doctor Harlest to x ray the boys. He 0:18:47.280 --> 0:18:49.720 was the only man I had any confidence in the 0:18:49.760 --> 0:18:52.159 company doctor in the Copper's mind. But he would not 0:18:52.280 --> 0:18:54.720 see Shirley. He did not know where his money was 0:18:54.720 --> 0:18:56.800 coming from. I promised him half if he'd worked to 0:18:56.800 --> 0:18:59.800 get compensation, but even then he would not do anything. 0:19:00.040 --> 0:19:01.920 I went on the road and begged x ray money. 0:19:01.960 --> 0:19:04.760 The Charleston hospital made the lung pictures. He took the 0:19:04.840 --> 0:19:07.120 case after the pictures were made. After two or three 0:19:07.160 --> 0:19:10.640 doctors said the same thing. The youngest boy, Shirley did 0:19:10.640 --> 0:19:13.280 not go down there with me. He lay and said, Mother, 0:19:13.480 --> 0:19:15.600 when I die, I want you to have them open 0:19:15.640 --> 0:19:18.200 me up and see if that dust killed me. Try 0:19:18.200 --> 0:19:20.840 to get compensation. You will not have any way of 0:19:20.840 --> 0:19:23.040 making your living when we are gone, and the rest 0:19:23.040 --> 0:19:25.960 are going too. And what surely means by that is 0:19:26.440 --> 0:19:29.560 her husband and all three of her sons are in 0:19:29.640 --> 0:19:32.359 this mine, and as he gets sick. Shirley realizes we 0:19:32.400 --> 0:19:35.959 are all dead. Mom's going to be alone. She'll have 0:19:36.000 --> 0:19:39.560 no like the only hope of support is for us 0:19:39.600 --> 0:19:42.720 to get compensation through some sort of lawsuit right for 0:19:42.840 --> 0:19:46.080 our deaths, because we're already dead men. That's about as 0:19:46.440 --> 0:19:49.280 bad as it gets already. 0:19:49.320 --> 0:19:51.320 I think there are some listeners out there who are 0:19:51.400 --> 0:19:54.120 feeling a sense of dread because at the very top 0:19:54.119 --> 0:19:56.680 of the first episode we mentioned how the death toll 0:19:56.760 --> 0:20:00.520 from this disaster ranges from a couple hundred to two over 0:20:00.600 --> 0:20:03.320 a thousand, and I think there are some people saying, well, 0:20:03.320 --> 0:20:07.320 how can they not know? Like, you've got doctor visits, 0:20:07.320 --> 0:20:10.520 You've got aren't there records? Aren't there records of who 0:20:10.640 --> 0:20:12.959 joined the project and of what happened to those people. 0:20:14.800 --> 0:20:17.040 We're going to get into that because the answer of 0:20:17.080 --> 0:20:22.000 how you can lose hundreds of dead people, this is 0:20:22.000 --> 0:20:23.960 something that you could do in the nineteen thirties. You 0:20:23.960 --> 0:20:27.200 could not do now because everyone has tracked, everyone has papers, 0:20:27.200 --> 0:20:30.000 everyone has a social security number, driver's license, on and 0:20:30.040 --> 0:20:32.520 on and on. This was an era when that stuff 0:20:32.560 --> 0:20:35.080 did not exist to a very large degree. This was 0:20:35.119 --> 0:20:37.840 an era when if you wanted to leave and abandon 0:20:37.880 --> 0:20:41.200 your family. You could just move like five miles down 0:20:41.280 --> 0:20:44.199 the road and you just tell people you went by 0:20:44.200 --> 0:20:46.120 a different name, and that's it, Like there was there's 0:20:46.240 --> 0:20:50.840 esuchally as photo ID is. So you could just lose people. 0:20:50.920 --> 0:20:55.600 And I do not think people appreciate the opportunities it 0:20:55.720 --> 0:20:59.439 creates for everything from serial killers to industrial disasters, that 0:20:59.480 --> 0:21:02.760 you could just pile people in a mass grave and 0:21:02.920 --> 0:21:07.560 literally nobody knows what happened to them. Somewhere in another state, 0:21:07.880 --> 0:21:11.639 in Virginia or Tennessee or North Carolina. You've got some 0:21:11.800 --> 0:21:14.199 family and they know that this guy went off to 0:21:14.200 --> 0:21:16.320 go take a job in West Virginia and he just 0:21:17.080 --> 0:21:18.840 never came back. And you don't know if maybe he 0:21:18.960 --> 0:21:21.520 just stayed there, maybe changed his name, maybe passed some 0:21:21.640 --> 0:21:24.720 unrelated reason. Maybe he moved and now he lives in Montana. 0:21:25.040 --> 0:21:26.560 You just didn't know. 0:21:27.640 --> 0:21:34.239 Yeah, And it's you know, it's it's it's particularly like 0:21:34.320 --> 0:21:37.359 fucked up that like that story we told of Absalom 0:21:37.640 --> 0:21:41.440 horrible because she's a local, because she lives, she's part 0:21:41.480 --> 0:21:44.119 of a community, she has some stability. She's going to 0:21:44.160 --> 0:21:46.720 be able to like sue and stuff like that. That 0:21:46.840 --> 0:21:50.400 is how this gets out like when this becomes known, 0:21:50.440 --> 0:21:52.239 when there start to be news articles about it, when 0:21:52.240 --> 0:21:56.800 there's investigations. It's because of the fairly small minority of 0:21:56.880 --> 0:22:01.000 locals who lose family members. These black were are like 0:22:01.040 --> 0:22:04.200 you said, they don't exist once they reach the mind right, 0:22:04.359 --> 0:22:07.239 like they die, and you as we'll talk about like 0:22:07.520 --> 0:22:10.640 you can kind of make them disappear so that there's 0:22:10.680 --> 0:22:12.439 not going to be any kind of like justice for 0:22:12.560 --> 0:22:15.240 most of these guys. Their families never find out what's happening. 0:22:15.640 --> 0:22:17.800 Now when it comes to the rate at which sort 0:22:17.800 --> 0:22:21.120 of it becomes obvious what's making these people sick, there 0:22:21.160 --> 0:22:24.280 is that mortician who finds out earlier that doesn't get 0:22:24.280 --> 0:22:28.200 out very far past. Like executives at the company, Ryan 0:22:28.240 --> 0:22:31.280 Hart and Dennis employed two physicians in order to like 0:22:31.680 --> 0:22:34.160 watch over the workforce, take care of people who get 0:22:34.200 --> 0:22:38.679 sick and injured, and both men primarily existed to deny 0:22:38.840 --> 0:22:41.280 sick workers that their ailments had anything to do with 0:22:41.400 --> 0:22:44.280 the tunnel project. They would usually say it was pneumonia 0:22:44.400 --> 0:22:47.040 or some other communicable disease. They would tell people to 0:22:47.160 --> 0:22:49.240 keep working. They would tell them that they did not 0:22:49.400 --> 0:22:52.520 need any protective gear, and then they would give them pills. 0:22:52.800 --> 0:22:56.320 These two guys, doctor Simmons and doctor Mitchell, their primary 0:22:56.400 --> 0:22:59.520 path like method whenever someone comes in with silicosis is 0:22:59.560 --> 0:23:01.960 to give them and these pills called little black devils, 0:23:02.000 --> 0:23:05.360 these little black pills that are just their placebos. It's 0:23:05.400 --> 0:23:08.760 baking soda covered in sugar. Like they know that they're 0:23:08.800 --> 0:23:12.639 not giving people real medicine. It's a delaying tactic. And 0:23:12.760 --> 0:23:14.719 another thing you have to realize when it's like, how 0:23:14.760 --> 0:23:16.880 did this they get away with this? This is all 0:23:16.880 --> 0:23:19.280 taking place pretty much in a year or so, right, 0:23:20.240 --> 0:23:22.280 eighteen months for some of the work, I think, but 0:23:22.480 --> 0:23:27.280 it happens very quickly. So both Union Carbide and Ryan 0:23:27.280 --> 0:23:29.520 Hart and Dennis know all we got to do is 0:23:29.600 --> 0:23:31.920 push through to the completion line and then our lawyers 0:23:31.920 --> 0:23:34.560 can handle the fallout. Right, So give these guys some 0:23:34.640 --> 0:23:37.560 fake medicine. Maybe that'll keep them at Bay another couple 0:23:37.560 --> 0:23:39.840 of months. A lot so many of them will die 0:23:39.880 --> 0:23:41.480 that then we won't have to deal with those guys. 0:23:41.520 --> 0:23:44.240 And like, every week we can put this off gets 0:23:44.280 --> 0:23:45.720 us closer to the finish line. 0:23:45.880 --> 0:23:46.080 Right. 0:23:46.720 --> 0:23:51.320 There's also you know a decent amount of ignorance basically 0:23:52.119 --> 0:23:54.720 among the local medical community, and it's not because they 0:23:54.760 --> 0:23:56.719 don't know about silicosis. As I said, this is a 0:23:56.760 --> 0:24:01.080 really well known illness, but it normally takes years, even 0:24:01.200 --> 0:24:05.080 decades for people to get black lung of this severity. 0:24:05.320 --> 0:24:09.199 No one has mined silica this peer and this quantity before, 0:24:09.320 --> 0:24:11.840 Like it's pretty much unprecedented. I don't think there were 0:24:11.880 --> 0:24:15.240 really any minds of this size dealing with this quantity 0:24:15.280 --> 0:24:19.239 of pure silica. So there there are doctors who know 0:24:19.400 --> 0:24:23.199 about silica who are not you know, unethical men, but 0:24:23.680 --> 0:24:27.359 they're just seeing how much this is. This is hitting people, 0:24:27.520 --> 0:24:31.479 killing them, you know, three four, five hundred percent faster 0:24:31.800 --> 0:24:34.360 than they're used to. So they don't they don't necessarily 0:24:34.560 --> 0:24:36.560 know that. They're like I have, I don't. Maybe this 0:24:36.600 --> 0:24:38.679 is something different, right, Maybe this is some new virus 0:24:38.720 --> 0:24:42.159 that's sweeping through town. So there is among some of 0:24:42.200 --> 0:24:44.840 the medical professionals who are trying to puzzle this out, 0:24:45.119 --> 0:24:48.359 there is reason to be consumed concerned, right, But within 0:24:48.400 --> 0:24:51.520 the company doctors, there's there's evidence that the company has 0:24:51.560 --> 0:24:53.960 access to that makes it much clearer what's happening, and 0:24:54.000 --> 0:24:56.520 that would have made it clearer to everyone earlier on 0:24:56.920 --> 0:25:01.120 that they delect, like deliberately keep away from people, right, 0:25:01.760 --> 0:25:04.720 So yeah, further evidence for this comes from the fact 0:25:04.720 --> 0:25:08.120 that company policies on stuff like wetting the drills would 0:25:08.280 --> 0:25:10.840 change depending on whether or not government observers were in 0:25:10.880 --> 0:25:13.399 town to monitor the work. Right when people start dying, 0:25:13.760 --> 0:25:17.240 the government sends in teams to like monitor, and so 0:25:17.520 --> 0:25:19.960 Ryan Hart and Dennis will say, Okay, everybody, today, we're 0:25:20.000 --> 0:25:22.399 going to wet down the drills and we're going to 0:25:22.480 --> 0:25:25.760 wait two hours after blasting to send new teams in. 0:25:26.119 --> 0:25:28.720 And then when the government observers leave, they go right 0:25:28.760 --> 0:25:31.280 back to the old procedures that are much faster and 0:25:31.359 --> 0:25:32.280 much more dangerous. 0:25:33.280 --> 0:25:33.480 You know. 0:25:33.840 --> 0:25:37.200 Again, you can't just like regulate by having a guy 0:25:37.320 --> 0:25:39.920 come by once to check something like this. That's easy 0:25:39.920 --> 0:25:40.399 to deal with. 0:25:41.840 --> 0:25:45.280 There's Yeah, there's a very much things worked on the 0:25:45.359 --> 0:25:49.919 honor system in that era. Like there may have been 0:25:49.960 --> 0:25:53.160 a perfunctory check or whatever, but if they had really 0:25:53.720 --> 0:25:56.360 wanted to make sure they were, you know, abiding by 0:25:56.359 --> 0:25:58.360 the rules, there's ways you can do it. You can 0:25:58.440 --> 0:26:02.719 plan somebody there for a week, like you know, make them, 0:26:02.880 --> 0:26:04.840 make them do it the whole time you're there, and 0:26:05.280 --> 0:26:07.960 pay attention to do They seem to have respirators for 0:26:08.000 --> 0:26:11.600 everyone because the inspectors wore them, is my understanding. When 0:26:11.640 --> 0:26:13.320 they showed up to take a look, they did not 0:26:13.400 --> 0:26:15.959 go in that mind without breathing equipments like what are 0:26:16.000 --> 0:26:16.480 you nuts? 0:26:16.920 --> 0:26:21.520 Yeah, yep, so yeah. It seems safe to say that 0:26:21.640 --> 0:26:26.119 Union Carbide deliberately avoided acquiring information that would have forced 0:26:26.200 --> 0:26:30.119 them to improve safety practices and thus slow production. The 0:26:30.160 --> 0:26:34.160 American Society of Safety Professionals their analysis, notes Union Carbide 0:26:34.160 --> 0:26:36.520 had taken core samples along the course of the proposed 0:26:36.520 --> 0:26:40.000 tunnel before construction began, and knew the rock was extremely 0:26:40.080 --> 0:26:43.560 high in silica. Despite the generally well understood relationship between 0:26:43.600 --> 0:26:48.000 exposure to airborne silica and death by silicosis, neither Union Carbide, 0:26:48.080 --> 0:26:51.160 New Canawa Power, nor Rhin Harton Dennis ever measured dust 0:26:51.280 --> 0:26:54.480 levels in the tunnel. Rhine Harton Dennis only conducted two 0:26:54.520 --> 0:26:57.960 tests for carbon monoxide during the seventeen month duration of 0:26:58.000 --> 0:27:01.760 the dig. A proven technology existed to measure clouds of dust. 0:27:01.880 --> 0:27:04.480 The impinger was developed in nineteen sixteen by the US 0:27:04.520 --> 0:27:08.400 Public Health Service. Impingers, also known as bubblers or small bottles, 0:27:08.760 --> 0:27:11.440 used with an air pump to collect airborne contaminants into 0:27:11.480 --> 0:27:16.040 designated collection liquids for later laboratory analysis. So they again 0:27:16.080 --> 0:27:18.119 this is not don't just because this is ancient. They 0:27:18.119 --> 0:27:20.679 have the ability to test and know their silica in 0:27:20.760 --> 0:27:23.560 the air. It is standard on mines. But this isn't 0:27:23.560 --> 0:27:26.040 a mine, even though they're mining, it's not a mine. 0:27:26.600 --> 0:27:29.800 But also it's it's absurd because the idea of saying that, well, 0:27:29.840 --> 0:27:32.040 we never got a chance to bring the instruments in 0:27:32.080 --> 0:27:33.679 to see if the air was bad. That would be 0:27:33.800 --> 0:27:36.560 like a house fire, and like, well, I never put it. 0:27:36.600 --> 0:27:40.040 I never took up therrometer in there. See It's like, well, okay, 0:27:40.400 --> 0:27:42.719 it was not there was no visibility in the tunnel 0:27:42.720 --> 0:27:45.959 for the dust. Yeah, So like that, even that's not 0:27:46.000 --> 0:27:48.600 an excuse. I get what they're saying is ludicrous. 0:27:48.880 --> 0:27:52.880 Yeah, it's it's it's obscene. And what's also obscene are 0:27:52.920 --> 0:28:01.959 the low low prices our advertisers have or their product. Ah, 0:28:02.000 --> 0:28:06.560 we're back back from that glorious pivot. So as the 0:28:06.600 --> 0:28:09.600 death toll starts to accelerate, which happens again that first 0:28:09.640 --> 0:28:12.200 start dying after two months. By the six month point, 0:28:12.280 --> 0:28:15.159 a lot of people are getting sick and dying, and 0:28:15.240 --> 0:28:18.280 Ryan Hart and Dennis find themselves with a new logistical problem, 0:28:18.560 --> 0:28:21.560 what do we do with all these corpses? Right, white 0:28:21.600 --> 0:28:25.160 workers could be buried in local cemeteries pretty easily, especially 0:28:25.200 --> 0:28:27.919 local workers who died, but most of the workers dying 0:28:28.320 --> 0:28:32.760 are black laborers, and these white you know, the cemeteries 0:28:32.760 --> 0:28:36.000 in town are whites only establishments. Right, They're so racist 0:28:36.040 --> 0:28:37.760 that it's like, well, we're not going to let black 0:28:37.760 --> 0:28:41.760 people into our cemetery. So at first, the majority of 0:28:41.760 --> 0:28:45.160 these black tunnel workers who have died are are sent 0:28:45.360 --> 0:28:48.960 to like a local cemetery. Specifically, it's an old local 0:28:49.040 --> 0:28:52.560 slave cemetery, right, Like that's literally where they are burying 0:28:52.600 --> 0:28:55.800 these men. Records suggest that only ten of the black 0:28:55.840 --> 0:28:57.960 of the hundreds of black laborers who die on this 0:28:58.040 --> 0:29:00.760 project are shipped back to their homes after death. So 0:29:00.800 --> 0:29:03.880 the vast majority of these guys, to all their family knows, 0:29:03.920 --> 0:29:06.840 just disappear forever. This leaves hundreds, you know, the fact 0:29:06.880 --> 0:29:09.760 that you fit I think a couple one hundred in 0:29:09.800 --> 0:29:13.080 the slave cemetery, but there's still a lot more people 0:29:13.120 --> 0:29:15.800 who are dying. So rhin Hart and Dennis, you know, 0:29:15.840 --> 0:29:18.680 they've got the resources obviously to transport all these buckets 0:29:18.680 --> 0:29:21.440 of silica, but they don't want to use their own resort. 0:29:21.480 --> 0:29:23.600 They don't want to like deal with the dead people 0:29:23.720 --> 0:29:28.240 that they're creating themselves, So they have Union Carbide pay 0:29:28.520 --> 0:29:31.680 contractors to deal with all of the dead people. And 0:29:31.720 --> 0:29:34.600 the contractor that they hire is a local undertaker named 0:29:34.600 --> 0:29:38.120 Hadley White. They pay him fifty five dollars for each 0:29:38.160 --> 0:29:40.960 body he will take out of their hands and bury. Now, 0:29:41.240 --> 0:29:44.240 Hadley is running the same calculation as every other unethical 0:29:44.280 --> 0:29:47.200 contractor and company in this. They're paying him to bury 0:29:47.240 --> 0:29:52.120 people in theoretically in coffins in a cemetery, and he's like, 0:29:52.240 --> 0:29:55.200 you know, it's cheaper than a coffin is throwing people 0:29:55.240 --> 0:29:57.080 in a bag and putting them in a mass grave. 0:29:57.680 --> 0:30:01.920 That's much less expensive, right, So Hadley is going to 0:30:02.000 --> 0:30:05.760 transfer pretty rapidly from burying people the way that he's 0:30:05.800 --> 0:30:08.640 being paid to to you know, doing a mass grave 0:30:08.760 --> 0:30:11.720 kind of situation. So once they run out of room 0:30:11.840 --> 0:30:15.240 at that old slave cemetery behind the church where the 0:30:15.360 --> 0:30:18.560 behind a local church where his company is located, he 0:30:18.640 --> 0:30:21.600 starts driving the corpses forty miles away. He will just 0:30:21.680 --> 0:30:24.280 stack them. It's often described as being stacked like cordwood, 0:30:24.360 --> 0:30:27.080 like firewood. In the back of a truck, like just 0:30:27.080 --> 0:30:29.160 this kind of like wrap stuffed in the clothes that 0:30:29.160 --> 0:30:33.320 they died, and stuffed into canvas bags and thrown into 0:30:33.360 --> 0:30:37.400 a mass grave in Somersville out of you know, within 0:30:37.480 --> 0:30:41.600 hours of dying, right, like just kind of taken immediately 0:30:41.640 --> 0:30:44.200 off the line, or you know, in their beds where 0:30:44.200 --> 0:30:47.360 they pass thrown into a bag, stuck in a truck 0:30:47.520 --> 0:30:51.120 and then tossed into a mass grave again within hours 0:30:51.160 --> 0:30:53.640 in a lot of cases. In the Book of the Dead, 0:30:53.800 --> 0:30:57.280 Rukaiser cites the testimony of a worker named George Robinson 0:30:57.320 --> 0:30:59.960 on this matter, quote, I knew a man who died 0:31:00.120 --> 0:31:02.120 at four in the morning at the camp. At seven, 0:31:02.200 --> 0:31:05.080 his wife took clothes to dress her dead husband. At 0:31:05.080 --> 0:31:07.400 the end at the undertakers, they told her the husband 0:31:07.440 --> 0:31:08.320 was already buried. 0:31:09.320 --> 0:31:09.720 So like. 0:31:12.080 --> 0:31:15.840 That's you know, how they're treating It's just like trash, right, 0:31:15.880 --> 0:31:18.640 that's how they're treating these these people Like we're not 0:31:18.640 --> 0:31:21.120 even going to wait for their loved ones to you know, 0:31:22.360 --> 0:31:24.480 have any sort of like when they have loved ones, Like, 0:31:24.520 --> 0:31:26.840 we don't even care to know if there's anyone who 0:31:26.920 --> 0:31:29.600 like will want to do a funeral. We're just going 0:31:29.680 --> 0:31:31.440 to toss them in a mass grave and sorry, your 0:31:31.480 --> 0:31:32.480 husband's gone already. 0:31:32.880 --> 0:31:35.600 You know, maybe what I'm about to say is obvious, 0:31:35.760 --> 0:31:39.800 But this was not that long ago. 0:31:40.760 --> 0:31:42.840 Now there's people alive from then. 0:31:42.920 --> 0:31:45.680 Still, there are people alive from they're very old, but 0:31:45.680 --> 0:31:47.480 there were people that were born in this Sarah that 0:31:47.520 --> 0:31:49.960 are still alive. This was We are talking about this 0:31:50.120 --> 0:31:55.280 like it is another planet that something like this could happen, 0:31:55.520 --> 0:31:58.800 and could happen in public, in broad daylight. And that 0:32:00.160 --> 0:32:02.880 mostly to the indifference of all the local officials and 0:32:02.920 --> 0:32:07.200 everyone around there living there, because at this point a 0:32:07.240 --> 0:32:09.480 lot of people got to know. You have a lot 0:32:09.520 --> 0:32:11.880 of dead people. Now, a lot of those bodies have 0:32:11.920 --> 0:32:14.760 passed through a lot of hands. A lot of people know, 0:32:15.480 --> 0:32:18.680 and this is just the kind of thing that happens 0:32:19.360 --> 0:32:21.320 at this time and in this place. And it is 0:32:21.400 --> 0:32:24.880 not that long ago. It's one long lifetime ago. 0:32:25.440 --> 0:32:27.200 Yeah, if you want an idea of like how recent 0:32:27.280 --> 0:32:30.760 this is, this is all happening about five years before 0:32:30.880 --> 0:32:33.840 Hunter S. Thompson is born, Right, He's not a figure 0:32:33.920 --> 0:32:40.360 from the distant past, you know, Like this is like, yeah, 0:32:40.560 --> 0:32:43.400 I think that is important, Like how how kind of 0:32:43.440 --> 0:32:48.200 directly connected this is to us. You know, it's like 0:32:48.320 --> 0:32:51.120 treating people this way does not seem like a kind 0:32:51.120 --> 0:32:54.760 of thing you would get away with. But there's not 0:32:54.800 --> 0:32:57.200 a lot separating us from a period of time in 0:32:57.200 --> 0:33:00.080 which people were getting away with this directly, just kind 0:32:59.880 --> 0:33:05.160 of literally treating these people like like a fucking sprocket 0:33:05.240 --> 0:33:07.200 or something that breaks in a machine and he just 0:33:07.240 --> 0:33:10.120 toss in the trash. You will not be surprised to 0:33:10.160 --> 0:33:12.560 hear that. The exact number of workers who die this 0:33:12.640 --> 0:33:17.560 way is unclear. About three hundred certainly are buried by 0:33:17.640 --> 0:33:21.480 Hadley White, maybe significantly more, we don't know. It might 0:33:21.480 --> 0:33:24.560 have been a couple one hundred more than that. More 0:33:24.640 --> 0:33:28.000 lingered on sick in the town of Gawley Mountain, or 0:33:28.000 --> 0:33:30.880 they either had to rely on the family members or 0:33:30.880 --> 0:33:34.880 the kindness of strangers. So many pale, gasping men spent 0:33:34.920 --> 0:33:38.520 their last years shambling around Golly That acquired a new 0:33:38.600 --> 0:33:42.120 nickname among locals, the town of the living dead. That's 0:33:42.200 --> 0:33:44.680 like what they would call this place because of all 0:33:44.680 --> 0:33:48.240 of the fucking black lung sufferers. No effort was made 0:33:48.280 --> 0:33:50.800 to inform the family of dead migrant workers, and this 0:33:50.920 --> 0:33:53.920 is shown well by the story of Dewey Flack. Dewey 0:33:53.960 --> 0:33:56.440 was a seventeen or eighteen year old black man who 0:33:56.520 --> 0:33:58.720 left his home in North Carolina on a one way 0:33:58.760 --> 0:34:01.520 train ticket to West Virginia Yea. The last his family 0:34:01.600 --> 0:34:03.959 saw him, he promised to send back the money he 0:34:04.000 --> 0:34:07.160 made to help them. Quote from an article in NPR, 0:34:07.920 --> 0:34:10.880 Flak died on May twentieth, nineteen thirty one, two weeks 0:34:10.880 --> 0:34:13.400 after his last shift in the tunnel. His death certificate 0:34:13.440 --> 0:34:16.440 said he died of pneumonia, but according to Cherniac, company 0:34:16.480 --> 0:34:19.600 doctors often misdiagnosed workers' deaths or attributed them to a 0:34:19.600 --> 0:34:22.640 disease they called tunnel ititis. The company would later use 0:34:22.680 --> 0:34:24.839 those death certificates to prove there were few, if any, 0:34:24.880 --> 0:34:28.920 silicosis deaths in the tunnel. NPR did find one relative, 0:34:29.040 --> 0:34:32.120 Sheila Flack Jones of Charlotte, North Carolina, who was Dewey 0:34:32.160 --> 0:34:35.400 Flack's niece. My father mentioned when I was younger that 0:34:35.440 --> 0:34:37.279 he did have a brother, but the brother he thought 0:34:37.320 --> 0:34:40.479 he'd run away, Black Jones says of learning her uncle's fate. 0:34:40.560 --> 0:34:43.040 I'm heartbroken that my family died thinking that he had 0:34:43.120 --> 0:34:46.680 run away, and they never knew the real truth. And 0:34:46.719 --> 0:34:49.200 I think that Dewey's death here kind of stands in 0:34:49.320 --> 0:34:52.239 for hundreds of these black migrant labors. You know, you 0:34:52.280 --> 0:34:55.520 tell your family you're going. I'll send back money, you know, 0:34:55.760 --> 0:34:57.759 I'll try to set up a place, you know, get 0:34:57.800 --> 0:34:59.600 money so we can move to this northern town, and 0:35:00.040 --> 0:35:03.160 ever hear from your husband, your son, your nephew, ever again, 0:35:03.320 --> 0:35:05.840 Like that's the reality for a lot of these people. 0:35:06.360 --> 0:35:08.760 What was the specific year you just mentioned there. 0:35:09.080 --> 0:35:12.000 I believe he's nineteen thirty one. Yeah, May twentieth, nineteen 0:35:12.000 --> 0:35:12.400 thirty one. 0:35:13.000 --> 0:35:16.920 That's the year William Shatner was born, right, right, So 0:35:17.600 --> 0:35:20.719 Clint Eastwood was one year old by the time this happened. Again, 0:35:20.800 --> 0:35:23.919 they they lived long enough to see a world where 0:35:24.000 --> 0:35:26.560 this happened. I brought up this thing about this not 0:35:26.600 --> 0:35:29.080 being that long because I knew that thing about the town, 0:35:29.239 --> 0:35:32.840 this village of the walking Dead was coming, because that, 0:35:32.920 --> 0:35:35.440 to me, is the most nightmarish part of this, because 0:35:35.480 --> 0:35:38.440 eventually you had these people in no place to go. Yeah, 0:35:38.760 --> 0:35:40.960 they couldn't afford to travel, they were kicked off the 0:35:41.040 --> 0:35:42.560 job site, they couldn't work, and so they were just 0:35:42.600 --> 0:35:44.560 sent back to this town. As town started to become 0:35:44.640 --> 0:35:48.680 overwhelmed of these people who were just walking around drowning 0:35:49.600 --> 0:35:53.080 in the air, like they can't gasping for breath, and 0:35:53.120 --> 0:35:56.759 they're getting sicker and just kind of shambling around this town. 0:35:56.840 --> 0:36:00.000 And you have dozens or hundreds of them, we don't 0:36:00.160 --> 0:36:03.440 know how many. They just had nowhere to go and 0:36:03.480 --> 0:36:07.520 they're human beings and there's no support system. There's no 0:36:07.680 --> 0:36:11.680 support system. I don't know how to convey that to people, 0:36:11.800 --> 0:36:13.960 like they had no one to go to for help. 0:36:14.400 --> 0:36:20.200 Yeah, it's hard to imagine a situation that, like anything 0:36:20.280 --> 0:36:22.799 worse than that, right, Like that's as desperate as it 0:36:22.840 --> 0:36:27.080 fucking gets. So disinformation about the causes of the illness 0:36:27.120 --> 0:36:30.440 and the demographic realities of the workforce delayed the coalescence 0:36:30.480 --> 0:36:33.600 of any sort of effective resistance to what was happening 0:36:33.640 --> 0:36:37.120 by workers. The first public warnings about what was happening 0:36:37.239 --> 0:36:39.960 came courtesy of the local radical press. And we're talking 0:36:40.560 --> 0:36:42.719 unions off and run newspapers here, so some of this 0:36:42.760 --> 0:36:44.880 is coming out through that. And there's like socialist papers 0:36:44.880 --> 0:36:47.000 in the area, and these are the first people to 0:36:47.080 --> 0:36:50.560 start reporting on this sickness sweeping through the camps. As 0:36:50.600 --> 0:36:52.799 one of these papers, this is like a very new 0:36:52.880 --> 0:36:57.680 deal supporting like left wing paper The State Sentinel warned, 0:36:57.760 --> 0:37:01.120 quote strange and weird tales are a concerning the number 0:37:01.120 --> 0:37:03.600 of fatalities. They are said to number four a week. 0:37:04.160 --> 0:37:04.440 Now. 0:37:04.920 --> 0:37:07.919 Radical papers kind of different in how radical they were. 0:37:07.960 --> 0:37:10.279 In the case of the State Sentinel, they do note 0:37:10.400 --> 0:37:13.200 later on that they were sure Union Carbide was in 0:37:13.239 --> 0:37:15.839 a sense of any wrongdoing because Ryan Harton Dennis had 0:37:15.840 --> 0:37:19.440 been contracted to handle the actual construction. It's worth noting 0:37:19.800 --> 0:37:23.359 people that's not necessarily them trying to protect Union Carbide 0:37:23.520 --> 0:37:27.080 at this stage. These random little papers you don't know 0:37:27.320 --> 0:37:31.080 necessarily the relationship between these two companies. It becomes obvious 0:37:31.160 --> 0:37:35.719 later that Union Carbide has engineers who are their employees 0:37:35.719 --> 0:37:38.399 on scene, they are directing rehin harton Dennis, they are 0:37:38.480 --> 0:37:41.600 in charge of the project, right, But that's not really 0:37:41.640 --> 0:37:43.759 known necessarily to all these papers at the time. So 0:37:43.760 --> 0:37:45.960 I don't think it's really anything against them. It's worth 0:37:46.040 --> 0:37:49.160 noting it is through these little radical presses that like, 0:37:49.239 --> 0:37:52.040 that's where this story gets out to start. It will 0:37:52.080 --> 0:37:55.320 eventually be picked up by kind of larger news organs. 0:37:56.080 --> 0:37:58.960 Lawsuits start to fly, and from mid to late nineteen 0:37:59.040 --> 0:38:02.120 thirty two. This is late in the construction process, more 0:38:02.160 --> 0:38:05.719 than eighty separate claims are filed from workers seeking compensation 0:38:05.840 --> 0:38:09.799 for silicosis. Cases start winding their way up rapidly to 0:38:09.920 --> 0:38:13.720 the state Supreme Court. There's a case there. They rule 0:38:13.800 --> 0:38:16.120 on it and it opens. The ruling that the Supreme 0:38:16.160 --> 0:38:19.839 Court gives basically is that you can sue rhine Hart 0:38:19.840 --> 0:38:22.920 and Dennis for your silicosis. Right. So after this, this 0:38:23.000 --> 0:38:25.560 kind of opens the floodgates and this ocean of new 0:38:25.600 --> 0:38:29.799 claims start to flood in several hundred, eventually totaling two 0:38:29.880 --> 0:38:33.080 point seven two five million dollars in damages is what 0:38:33.080 --> 0:38:36.480 they're requesting. That's a lot more money. Back then, rehin 0:38:36.560 --> 0:38:40.280 Hart and Dennis file injunction. After injunction, they're trying to delay, 0:38:40.600 --> 0:38:42.759 and this is they know they're going to have to 0:38:42.760 --> 0:38:45.120 make some sort of payout right. They know they can't 0:38:45.120 --> 0:38:47.520 avoid this. This was kind of always in their calculations, 0:38:47.800 --> 0:38:51.320 but injunctions delay sort of the start of that process, 0:38:51.640 --> 0:38:54.080 and it allows them to Again, the whole goal is 0:38:54.719 --> 0:38:58.960 as long as we finish ahead of schedule, we get 0:38:59.040 --> 0:39:02.040 enough extra money to make this worthwhile, right, So that's 0:39:02.080 --> 0:39:06.000 what they're doing. Union Carbide also starts hiring rein Hart 0:39:06.080 --> 0:39:09.879 and Davis executives away from the contractor, right, and these 0:39:09.920 --> 0:39:11.880 guys are still doing the job they were doing from 0:39:11.880 --> 0:39:14.640 rein Hart and Davis. They're just Union Carbide employees now. 0:39:14.680 --> 0:39:17.040 And the reason that Union Carbide is doing this is 0:39:17.040 --> 0:39:19.839 that when you have these guys in house, you have 0:39:19.960 --> 0:39:23.680 legal excuses to talk them through and direct their court 0:39:23.680 --> 0:39:27.560 because you shouldn't be directing their responses to their court case. 0:39:27.920 --> 0:39:29.600 But once you bring them on, you have all these 0:39:29.640 --> 0:39:31.279 sort of excuses to talk to them. You can have 0:39:31.320 --> 0:39:34.080 your lawyers represent them. It's just another way to kind 0:39:34.080 --> 0:39:36.840 of protect the bag, right, And it's more evidence of 0:39:36.880 --> 0:39:40.520 how closely tied these companies really are. So yeah, there's 0:39:40.520 --> 0:39:44.600 also significant evidence that they bribe government officials. Union Carbide 0:39:44.600 --> 0:39:48.120 does in order to try and delay the start of 0:39:48.160 --> 0:39:51.799 any kind of like accountability. After this first wave of 0:39:51.880 --> 0:39:54.880 lawsuits hits, the Department of Minds sins in an inspector, 0:39:54.960 --> 0:39:57.840 a guy named Robert Lamby to investigate conditions at the 0:39:57.840 --> 0:40:02.160 tunnel complex and particularly the death of black workers. Lamby 0:40:02.160 --> 0:40:05.319 carries out a full inspection and he's pretty critical of 0:40:05.360 --> 0:40:07.359 the mind There's like a lot of people see him. 0:40:07.360 --> 0:40:09.919 He's yelling at a company for men about how unacceptable 0:40:09.960 --> 0:40:12.600 this is. He's like, it seems for a little bit 0:40:12.680 --> 0:40:15.160 like oh, the government sent a man. He's seen how 0:40:15.200 --> 0:40:18.200 bad this is, and something's going to get done. And 0:40:18.360 --> 0:40:20.919 you know, he does act. Initially, he sends a letter 0:40:20.960 --> 0:40:23.359 to an executive at the New Kanawa Power Company, which 0:40:23.360 --> 0:40:26.840 is again remember that's Union Carbide, and he lays out 0:40:26.880 --> 0:40:28.920 like this is dangerous. All you need to do all 0:40:28.960 --> 0:40:30.800 this stuff to make it safer, you have to start 0:40:30.800 --> 0:40:33.759 issuing respirators to your men. He orders them. This is 0:40:33.760 --> 0:40:39.080 a government official ordering New Canawa to put respirators on workers, 0:40:39.400 --> 0:40:41.239 and New Canawa just says, now, we're not going to 0:40:41.280 --> 0:40:44.040 do that. They ignore it, and they continue sending unmasked 0:40:44.040 --> 0:40:47.960 workers into the tunnel. Now this should be pretty damning 0:40:48.160 --> 0:40:51.319 for what happens in court. But two years later, you know, 0:40:51.440 --> 0:40:54.480 after Lamby gets there, and after some five hundred lawsuits 0:40:54.480 --> 0:40:57.319 from survivors are kind of churning their way through the 0:40:57.400 --> 0:41:00.959 legal process, Lamby gets called into court and you would 0:41:00.960 --> 0:41:04.360 expect him to be a pretty devastating testimony on behalf 0:41:04.360 --> 0:41:07.440 of these miners. I told them to give respirators to 0:41:07.520 --> 0:41:10.280 these guys, and they did not write. But he behaves 0:41:10.520 --> 0:41:14.320 very differently once he's in a court room, as Cherniac writes. 0:41:15.719 --> 0:41:17.800 Testifying on behalf of Ryan Hart and Dennis for a 0:41:17.840 --> 0:41:20.640 whole day on tenth of April nineteen thirty three, he 0:41:20.719 --> 0:41:23.880 described exemplary conditions in the tunnel, where air was supplied 0:41:23.920 --> 0:41:26.080 at a face velocity of twenty seven miles per hour, 0:41:26.320 --> 0:41:29.080 visibility was to f from five to seven hundred feet, 0:41:29.239 --> 0:41:32.800 and water was constantly used to suppress dust. Vigorously cross 0:41:32.840 --> 0:41:36.120 examined about the extreme inconsistencies between this testimony and his 0:41:36.239 --> 0:41:39.439 earlier condemnatory letters, which had been read into the court 0:41:39.480 --> 0:41:42.000 record by the attorney for Raymond Johnson, that's the miner 0:41:42.040 --> 0:41:45.120 in this case two weeks earlier. Lamby blamed an accurate 0:41:45.160 --> 0:41:48.040 information supplied by his staff. Although he conceded that he 0:41:48.080 --> 0:41:50.120 had ordered respirators in writing, he said that he had 0:41:50.160 --> 0:41:54.080 later countermanded this order orally when he better appreciated the 0:41:54.120 --> 0:41:57.160 excellent working conditions and clearness of the air in the tunnel. 0:41:57.480 --> 0:42:00.480 Two of Lambie's staff inspectors, who had originally filed highly 0:42:00.480 --> 0:42:03.279 critical reports, now shared in their director's change of heart. 0:42:03.560 --> 0:42:06.480 Testifying on The following day, C. B. Bishop and D. R. 0:42:06.520 --> 0:42:09.880 Sullivan joined him in tribute to the admirable conditions at 0:42:09.880 --> 0:42:12.640 Hawk's Nest. They indicated that Ryan, Hart and Dennis had 0:42:12.719 --> 0:42:16.600 always cooperated fully and repeated Lamby's praise of the freedom 0:42:16.640 --> 0:42:19.759 from dust and wet drilling. They described the reports they 0:42:19.800 --> 0:42:22.520 had made in nineteen thirty one as purely precautionary and 0:42:22.640 --> 0:42:26.799 unrelated to actual conditions. Lamby's startling about face was never 0:42:26.840 --> 0:42:30.480 explained to everyone's satisfaction. Less than a week after his testimony, however, 0:42:30.680 --> 0:42:34.640 the Charleston Gazette reported a remarkable coincidence. The former director 0:42:34.640 --> 0:42:37.280 of the West Virginia Department of Mines had just opened 0:42:37.280 --> 0:42:40.319 his doors to the prestigious Canawa Valley Building in the 0:42:40.320 --> 0:42:43.160 capital city as a private consultant to the leading mining 0:42:43.200 --> 0:42:44.960 and industrial corporations of the state. 0:42:46.640 --> 0:42:50.640 Now, fortunately, that kind of revolving door is long in 0:42:50.719 --> 0:42:52.960 the past. Like that's the kind of thing that today 0:42:53.000 --> 0:42:54.800 would be outrageous to even. 0:42:55.560 --> 0:42:59.040 And you know, as an aside, don't look up people 0:42:59.280 --> 0:43:01.160 who have been a poor pointed in the last twenty 0:43:01.239 --> 0:43:04.800 years to had regulatory agencies and what they did after 0:43:04.800 --> 0:43:07.080 the period of time at which they headed those agencies. 0:43:07.400 --> 0:43:11.080 Don't go Google in that because there's nothing to find, right, 0:43:11.840 --> 0:43:12.440 that never. 0:43:12.280 --> 0:43:13.640 Occurring to your results. 0:43:13.800 --> 0:43:18.520 Yeah, serier results. So yeah, construction on the Hawk's Nest 0:43:18.520 --> 0:43:21.840 tunnel was completed by nineteen thirty two. This is about 0:43:21.880 --> 0:43:23.839 twice as fast, a little less than twice as fast 0:43:23.960 --> 0:43:26.120 as had been initially expected. So that's a lot of 0:43:26.120 --> 0:43:29.239 extra money for rehin harten Davis. By all accounts, it 0:43:29.280 --> 0:43:32.280 was a marvel of engineering and craftsmanship. It is still 0:43:32.320 --> 0:43:36.000 in works today. It's considered an exemplary I forgot how 0:43:36.000 --> 0:43:37.920 to pronounce a word I've known since I was a 0:43:37.960 --> 0:43:41.000 small child for just a second. There. It's considered to 0:43:41.040 --> 0:43:45.719 be an exemplary piece of construction, and Union Carbides shareholders 0:43:45.800 --> 0:43:49.360 make a fortune the equivalent of many billions of dollars 0:43:49.360 --> 0:43:52.160 in modern money from the subsequent projects that this enables. 0:43:52.760 --> 0:43:55.320 For the families of the men who die, though, money 0:43:55.400 --> 0:43:57.000 is a lot harder to find. And we're going to 0:43:57.040 --> 0:44:03.480 talk about that, but first maybe an ad product service 0:44:03.560 --> 0:44:11.400 or too, you know. Yeah, and we're back. So for 0:44:11.440 --> 0:44:14.080 the families of these guys who died, money is going 0:44:14.160 --> 0:44:16.239 to be a lot scarcer than it is for the 0:44:16.600 --> 0:44:18.880 executives who will spend the rest of their lives and 0:44:18.920 --> 0:44:22.520 their grandchildren's lives profiting off of this project. There are 0:44:22.520 --> 0:44:25.440 two massive state trials in nineteen thirty three and nineteen 0:44:25.480 --> 0:44:28.080 thirty four, but only a fraction of the requested damages 0:44:28.160 --> 0:44:31.280 or ever paid out in settlements, about two hundred thousand dollars. 0:44:31.760 --> 0:44:34.880 And I should note here the amount of money awarded 0:44:34.880 --> 0:44:38.040 to black laborers for the same ailments as white labors. 0:44:38.080 --> 0:44:41.560 It's about half. I think individual awards are anywhere from 0:44:41.640 --> 0:44:45.520 thirty dollars to sixteen hundred dollars, which is minimal, I 0:44:45.520 --> 0:44:49.200 would say. But Union Carbide executives still complained was ruinous 0:44:49.239 --> 0:44:52.560 to them. They described sick workers as mooches seeking to 0:44:52.560 --> 0:44:56.280 get rich out of frivolous lawsuits. The West Virginia Encyclopedia 0:44:56.320 --> 0:44:58.800 notes of this case, the largest trial ended with a 0:44:58.880 --> 0:45:03.040 hung jury, evidence of jury tampering, and generous compensation to 0:45:03.080 --> 0:45:07.399 the plaintiff's attorneys. It's you know, this is corrupt as hell. 0:45:07.520 --> 0:45:12.239 This whole thing is just pretty fucked. That said, the 0:45:12.320 --> 0:45:15.279 story does not go away, and over time, you know, 0:45:15.320 --> 0:45:18.759 it starts in these radical papers, but it starts to 0:45:18.760 --> 0:45:20.520 get coverage from like large from like the New York 0:45:20.560 --> 0:45:24.080 Times and shit, like their big journalists start to cover this, 0:45:24.239 --> 0:45:27.239 it becomes kind of a cause celeb among a lot 0:45:27.239 --> 0:45:28.840 of the left. For I think there's you know, a 0:45:28.840 --> 0:45:30.400 period of a couple of months or so where like 0:45:30.800 --> 0:45:32.680 this is sort of the big thing if you're like 0:45:32.680 --> 0:45:36.960 a Northeast liberal elite to be really angry about. And 0:45:37.080 --> 0:45:38.880 I'm not saying that to be like, you should be 0:45:38.920 --> 0:45:42.280 angry about this, and because of how angry people get 0:45:42.600 --> 0:45:45.600 about in nineteen thirty six, which is kind of five 0:45:45.680 --> 0:45:48.359 years after the first men start dying, and thirty five 0:45:48.440 --> 0:45:50.800 thirty six is really when sort of the media attention 0:45:50.920 --> 0:45:54.000 around this starts to starts to hit critical mass. The 0:45:54.040 --> 0:45:57.320 House of Representatives holds their first inquiry into the Hawk's 0:45:57.360 --> 0:46:02.000 Nest Tunnel disaster. NPR rights vote. Representatives from the tunnel 0:46:02.000 --> 0:46:04.719 companies declined to attend. One submitted a letter that called 0:46:04.719 --> 0:46:08.040 witness testimonies slanderous rumors and hearsay. We know of no 0:46:08.120 --> 0:46:11.320 case of silicosis contracted on this job, the letter concluded. 0:46:11.840 --> 0:46:14.560 The Congressional committee said the tunnel was completed with grave 0:46:14.920 --> 0:46:18.600 and inhuman disregard for all consideration for the health, lives 0:46:18.640 --> 0:46:22.840 and future of employees. Congress took no action against the companies, 0:46:22.840 --> 0:46:25.160 but that same year it passed a law requiring the 0:46:25.280 --> 0:46:29.080 use of respirators in dusty working conditions. So they don't 0:46:29.080 --> 0:46:32.800 penalize anyone. But this is where we get the legal requirement. 0:46:32.880 --> 0:46:35.719 It's no longer an option. You have to give respirators 0:46:35.719 --> 0:46:37.880 to your guys if they're working in the dust. So 0:46:40.040 --> 0:46:41.799 it took a lot of death, but we got a 0:46:41.840 --> 0:46:44.000 single regulation, hooray. 0:46:44.920 --> 0:46:48.480 And most regulations that we have in workplace protections. 0:46:48.520 --> 0:46:48.640 Yea. 0:46:49.200 --> 0:46:52.640 There is somewhere at the bottom of it are bones 0:46:53.040 --> 0:46:56.120 and ash and of dead people who died in order 0:46:56.160 --> 0:47:00.000 to It would be grotesque to say they sacrificed themselves 0:47:00.160 --> 0:47:02.640 so that we have these regulations, because they did not 0:47:02.719 --> 0:47:04.640 do that. They were trying to. 0:47:04.640 --> 0:47:06.440 Work so that they wanted to make rent. 0:47:06.600 --> 0:47:10.839 Yeah yeah, and and not to get rich either. They 0:47:10.880 --> 0:47:15.040 were taking the only work that was available. But you 0:47:15.080 --> 0:47:18.359 know that, and then that's one good thing. And then 0:47:18.360 --> 0:47:21.319 of course knowing that Union Carbide was surely ruined as 0:47:21.320 --> 0:47:23.719 a company and does not Yeah, it never did not 0:47:23.800 --> 0:47:27.120 exist after that because as they mentioned, these payouts, you know, 0:47:27.440 --> 0:47:30.319 of course they could not afford it financially. Must have 0:47:30.440 --> 0:47:32.960 crippled them permanently. They probably had to sell off all 0:47:33.000 --> 0:47:36.000 of their factories, all of their real estate, all their machines. 0:47:36.000 --> 0:47:37.759 Probably they had to sell them all just to pay 0:47:37.760 --> 0:47:41.160 off these ruinous thirty and forty dollars payouts. 0:47:41.880 --> 0:47:45.120 That's why the town of Bopaul, India has a reputation 0:47:45.320 --> 0:47:49.239 for being the least polluted town in India and the 0:47:49.280 --> 0:47:52.080 town motto twenty thousand of us didn't die and an 0:47:52.120 --> 0:47:56.160 industrial accident costs by union garbide great place to go 0:47:56.239 --> 0:48:00.799 visit check it out. So, speaking of death toll, which 0:48:00.800 --> 0:48:03.839 we're obviously talking around, it's kind of hard to determine. 0:48:04.120 --> 0:48:07.399 The Congressional Inquiry estimates a little short of five hundred, 0:48:07.520 --> 0:48:11.120 four hundred and sixty four deaths that they estimate cherny acts. 0:48:11.120 --> 0:48:13.000 So the two books I read for this are Murial 0:48:13.080 --> 0:48:15.440 Rakaiser's The Book of the Dead and then The Hawk's 0:48:15.480 --> 0:48:19.399 Nest Tunnel Disaster by this guy Cherniac, who is He's 0:48:19.400 --> 0:48:22.880 not just a journalist or a writer, he's actually an epidemiologist. 0:48:22.920 --> 0:48:25.080 So when he makes a death toll estimate, this is 0:48:25.120 --> 0:48:28.440 not just some like reporter interviewing people and kind of 0:48:28.440 --> 0:48:30.759 making a guest This is a guy whose professional job 0:48:30.840 --> 0:48:33.319 is to try to calculate this sort of thing. So 0:48:33.520 --> 0:48:35.600 I give, I lend a lot of credibility to cherny 0:48:35.640 --> 0:48:39.600 Act's estimate. He suspects somewhere north of seven hundred and 0:48:39.680 --> 0:48:42.680 fifty people died as a direct result of silicosis from 0:48:42.680 --> 0:48:46.279 this tunnel. There are some more modern estimates that will 0:48:46.320 --> 0:48:48.920 suggest an overall death toll. The highest I've seen is 0:48:48.920 --> 0:48:51.480 about two thousand, right, Because people take a long time 0:48:51.520 --> 0:48:53.759 to die, it can be kind of hard, especially as 0:48:53.800 --> 0:48:56.920 undocumented as a lot of these dudes are. But between 0:48:57.080 --> 0:48:59.560 seven hundred and fifty and two thousand dead is what 0:48:59.600 --> 0:49:01.880 we're looking looking at for the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, 0:49:03.440 --> 0:49:05.920 which is you know, again that's in access of the 0:49:06.000 --> 0:49:09.120 Chernobyle death toll. You know, that's a lot of fucking people. 0:49:09.760 --> 0:49:15.360 This was. Yeah, even with modern record keeping and computers 0:49:15.360 --> 0:49:19.320 and everything in databases, it's extremely difficult to for example, 0:49:19.320 --> 0:49:22.399 with the you know, the COVID pandemic and the death 0:49:22.520 --> 0:49:27.480 ranges worldwide are swinging wildly because you have a case 0:49:27.480 --> 0:49:29.799 where if someone got very sick and they got over 0:49:29.880 --> 0:49:33.520 and then two years later they got pneumonia, that killed 0:49:33.560 --> 0:49:36.800 them because there's weak their lungs had been so weakened 0:49:36.840 --> 0:49:38.759 by the COVID that they had recovered from. It's like, well, 0:49:38.800 --> 0:49:40.520 do you count that as a COVID death or not? 0:49:41.080 --> 0:49:42.440 And here I think it's kind of the same thing 0:49:42.440 --> 0:49:45.440 where if you had someone who's lung capacity was damaged 0:49:45.480 --> 0:49:49.200 by eighty percent due to the you know from this mind, 0:49:49.280 --> 0:49:53.040 and then three years later they got you know whatever 0:49:53.080 --> 0:49:56.839 pneumonia or something that that finally put them away, well 0:49:57.120 --> 0:50:00.680 there's no way that's going to get recorded as a death. 0:50:00.719 --> 0:50:05.040 But it absolutely was like this person, it doesn't die 0:50:05.280 --> 0:50:08.359 without the damage. It's just that if they didn't die 0:50:08.440 --> 0:50:10.839 on site and then have me buried nearby, if there's 0:50:10.840 --> 0:50:14.200 not a grave you can find. It's so hard to 0:50:14.280 --> 0:50:16.560 know because again, somebody could have went off and then 0:50:16.600 --> 0:50:20.160 died in nineteen thirty eight living in some rural part 0:50:20.160 --> 0:50:25.320 of Montana and to even their family would not necessarily realize. 0:50:25.320 --> 0:50:27.359 They just knew that they were very frail ever since 0:50:27.400 --> 0:50:31.120 they took that mining job. So yeah, the amount of 0:50:31.160 --> 0:50:33.879 investigative work it probably took just to arrive that number 0:50:34.000 --> 0:50:38.759 is probably extraordinary, just trying to track down just all 0:50:38.800 --> 0:50:41.360 of the old documents and the movement of these people 0:50:41.360 --> 0:50:43.920 and then trying to figure out where they eventually wound up. 0:50:44.600 --> 0:50:46.920 Yeah, I mean it's a cherniac puts in. I mean, 0:50:46.920 --> 0:50:50.680 his book is remarkable. It's both very readable and like 0:50:50.719 --> 0:50:55.120 a very kind of scientific forensic analysis. Whereas Rukeiser number one, 0:50:55.120 --> 0:50:56.719 it's kind of actually we're about to talk about her. 0:50:56.719 --> 0:50:59.920 It's a very direct source and a little more emotional. 0:51:00.280 --> 0:51:03.799 I think both together give you a pretty comprehensive understanding 0:51:03.800 --> 0:51:06.239 of what happened here. And I did think it's worth 0:51:06.320 --> 0:51:10.680 talking a little bit more about Muriel Rukaiser because there's 0:51:10.719 --> 0:51:13.240 a lot, there's a lot to say about our country 0:51:13.280 --> 0:51:16.200 and her specific story here. Muriel is one of the 0:51:16.200 --> 0:51:19.480 first people outside of the Galley Bridge area to learn 0:51:19.640 --> 0:51:22.560 what was going on. At twenty three, she was a 0:51:22.600 --> 0:51:26.480 budding author and journalist and an avid leftist. She learned 0:51:26.480 --> 0:51:29.120 about the disaster from radical publications at the time. In 0:51:29.200 --> 0:51:31.759 nineteen thirty five, when one of these magazines puts out 0:51:31.760 --> 0:51:34.879 an article about Hawk's Nest, it goes viral among kind 0:51:34.880 --> 0:51:37.960 of the New York intelligencia set and becomes this, as 0:51:38.000 --> 0:51:39.680 I said, this kind of big cause celeb for the 0:51:39.719 --> 0:51:42.120 while and for most people it's a thing, you know, 0:51:42.239 --> 0:51:44.000 maybe you'll do a little march or something on it, 0:51:44.040 --> 0:51:46.080 you'll try to raise some money, and then kind of 0:51:46.080 --> 0:51:47.879 it goes away and you move on to the next thing. 0:51:48.400 --> 0:51:53.480 Rukeaiser never does. And you know, she watches this congressional inquiry, 0:51:54.080 --> 0:51:56.880 and the Congressional inquiry when it ends, it's pretty it 0:51:56.960 --> 0:52:00.560 condemns Union Carbide, and it says we should have a 0:52:00.560 --> 0:52:04.040 full federal investigation. But they never do it. There's never 0:52:04.080 --> 0:52:08.640 any official, full federal investigation into this disaster. And Muriel 0:52:08.719 --> 0:52:11.480 is she's not just furious about that. She's the kind 0:52:11.480 --> 0:52:14.440 of person who is like, she's angry and she's gonna 0:52:14.480 --> 0:52:18.520 fucking do something about this. And so she drives down 0:52:18.600 --> 0:52:21.520 to gally Bridge with a friend to investigate on her own. 0:52:21.560 --> 0:52:24.000 She kind of takes this like road trip, one of 0:52:24.000 --> 0:52:26.640 our country's first great road trip stories. You could say. 0:52:27.080 --> 0:52:29.200 Now at this point, Muriel's not a nobody. She is 0:52:29.239 --> 0:52:32.720 already a celebrated poet for her first book, Theory of Flight, 0:52:33.120 --> 0:52:37.400 which had won a Yale Younger Poets Prize, and the 0:52:37.719 --> 0:52:40.040 Book of the Dead is kind of based on this 0:52:40.200 --> 0:52:43.600 road trip she takes through Fayette County and all of 0:52:43.640 --> 0:52:46.080 these people that she talks to. It's this very remarkable 0:52:46.640 --> 0:52:50.720 synthesis of gumshoe reporting and high art. It's worth noting 0:52:50.920 --> 0:52:53.160 that much of what we know about ru Keiser's life 0:52:53.239 --> 0:52:56.560 and why she did all this comes not from anything 0:52:56.680 --> 0:53:00.000 she wrote, but from the FBI. J ed Grew Hoover's 0:53:00.120 --> 0:53:03.239 civically gives orders for this woman to be followed and 0:53:03.280 --> 0:53:05.400 I'm going to quit from an article in the Oxford American. 0:53:05.480 --> 0:53:09.360 Here in nineteen forty three, j Edgar Hoover authorized his 0:53:09.400 --> 0:53:11.200 agency to spy on the poet as part of a 0:53:11.239 --> 0:53:16.080 probe to uncover Russian spies. Her communistic tendencies placed her 0:53:16.160 --> 0:53:19.720 under suspicion of being a concealed Communist. When the investigation began, 0:53:19.800 --> 0:53:22.840 she was noted as thirty dark, heavy with gray eyes. 0:53:23.120 --> 0:53:25.440 In nineteen thirty three, the report reads, she and some 0:53:25.480 --> 0:53:27.840 friends drove from New York to Alabama to witness the 0:53:27.880 --> 0:53:30.959 Scottsborough trial. When local police found them talking to black 0:53:31.000 --> 0:53:34.200 reporters and holding flyers for a Negro student conference. The 0:53:34.200 --> 0:53:38.200 police accused the group of inciting the Negroes to insurrections. Then, 0:53:38.320 --> 0:53:40.479 in the summer of nineteen thirty six, after her trip 0:53:40.520 --> 0:53:43.360 to Galli Bridge. Rukaiser traveled to Spain to report on 0:53:43.440 --> 0:53:47.600 Barcelona's anti fascist People's Olympiad. In the process, she observed 0:53:47.640 --> 0:53:49.520 the first days of the Spanish Civil War from a 0:53:49.560 --> 0:53:52.840 train before evacuating by ship. Her suspicious activities in the 0:53:52.880 --> 0:53:55.920 nineteen fifties included her appeal for world peace and her 0:53:55.920 --> 0:53:58.560 civil rights zeal. The FBI mentions The Book of the 0:53:58.600 --> 0:54:00.960 Dead only once, in passing as a work that dealt 0:54:01.000 --> 0:54:03.839 with the industrial disintegration of the peoples in a West 0:54:03.880 --> 0:54:08.960 Virginia village riddled with silicosis. I find a lot interesting there. 0:54:10.640 --> 0:54:13.400 And it's hard to overstate the degree to which anti 0:54:13.480 --> 0:54:17.880 communist stuff was really just anti labor stuff, because if 0:54:17.880 --> 0:54:19.520 you were any kind of like, you didn't have to 0:54:19.560 --> 0:54:22.160 be that much of a radical to be frank, before 0:54:22.239 --> 0:54:24.480 they would start looking at you as like, well, you've 0:54:24.480 --> 0:54:27.600 got communist ties, you got socialist ties. You sat in 0:54:27.680 --> 0:54:30.960 on this meeting, and in this meeting were some communists, 0:54:30.960 --> 0:54:35.200 and it's like, well, yeah, because there's overlapping. There's overlap 0:54:35.200 --> 0:54:37.920 between activistsho are trying to, you know, pushing for better 0:54:38.440 --> 0:54:42.279 labor rights and everything else and people who wanted to 0:54:42.640 --> 0:54:45.000 take it Further so, a lot of the persecution of 0:54:45.080 --> 0:54:47.880 communists was really just people that had spoke out on 0:54:47.920 --> 0:54:51.759 behalf of labor. It became a very convenient thing for 0:54:51.800 --> 0:54:52.400 people to do. 0:54:52.840 --> 0:54:55.000 And I also find one of the other things I 0:54:55.000 --> 0:54:58.440 find interesting here is like just kind of the disinterest 0:54:59.239 --> 0:55:02.200 with which her report sums up the Book of the 0:55:02.239 --> 0:55:05.520 Dead and the disaster that it's reporting on, right, because 0:55:05.520 --> 0:55:08.120 I think that's obviously the FBI is concerned in other 0:55:08.239 --> 0:55:10.600 stuff here, But like, I do think that kind of 0:55:10.680 --> 0:55:15.200 disinterest you see there is emblematic of the overall attitude 0:55:15.320 --> 0:55:18.080 the federal government has to what happened here, right, And 0:55:18.239 --> 0:55:21.920 it's worth noting like there are not like all of 0:55:21.960 --> 0:55:26.160 the people killed by anarchist bombers or whatever in this period, 0:55:26.160 --> 0:55:28.520 and fuck throw in bank robbers there too, right, which 0:55:28.560 --> 0:55:30.920 is another thing the FBI deals with, do not equal 0:55:30.920 --> 0:55:33.240 the death toll of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster. 0:55:33.840 --> 0:55:34.040 Right. 0:55:34.719 --> 0:55:37.920 This is a much bigger danger to American citizens by 0:55:38.000 --> 0:55:40.600 any rate than like, I don't know, the fucking gangster 0:55:41.280 --> 0:55:43.160 robbing banks and shit in this period. 0:55:43.880 --> 0:55:47.320 Well, nobils to do the math during Prohibition, the total 0:55:47.400 --> 0:55:50.759 number of people killed by say al Capone's gain it 0:55:50.920 --> 0:55:52.440 wasn't a thousand. 0:55:52.560 --> 0:55:56.000 Yeah, of course, No, you can't make a business doing 0:55:56.040 --> 0:55:58.759 that like I guess the cartels do. But it's a 0:55:58.760 --> 0:55:59.319 different era. 0:55:59.440 --> 0:56:02.960 Yeah, the way we treat different types of crime and 0:56:03.000 --> 0:56:05.839 the way one thing is like a crisis that we 0:56:05.920 --> 0:56:10.680 need to completely overturn the entire system to address, versus this, 0:56:10.880 --> 0:56:15.400 where the amount of disinterest is kind of shocking, like 0:56:15.480 --> 0:56:19.759 even to this day, like the memorials for this, it's 0:56:19.960 --> 0:56:24.480 just such an afterthought. The combination between the suffering that 0:56:24.560 --> 0:56:26.520 was caused the number of people to suffer versus the 0:56:26.600 --> 0:56:29.319 reaction to it is just so out of whack. It's 0:56:29.360 --> 0:56:34.359 so crazy the things that we choose to be frightened of. 0:56:37.000 --> 0:56:40.400 Yeah, it really is so. One of the articles that 0:56:40.440 --> 0:56:44.520 I came across in my research was a twenty eighteen 0:56:44.600 --> 0:56:48.640 in PR Frontline investigation. This was not about the Hawk's 0:56:48.680 --> 0:56:53.960 Nest Tunnel disaster, but was analyzing decades of regulatory data 0:56:54.000 --> 0:56:57.600 from dust collection monitors in coal mines modern coal mines 0:56:57.680 --> 0:57:02.080 operating today, and they found evidence that government regulators have 0:57:02.200 --> 0:57:05.359 had half for the last fifty years. Basically, there has 0:57:05.400 --> 0:57:09.160 been hard evidence that silica exposure in about fifteen percent 0:57:09.239 --> 0:57:13.719 of US minds vastly exceeded safe levels. This means that 0:57:13.760 --> 0:57:16.880 regulators had evidence that a significant number of workers were 0:57:16.920 --> 0:57:20.160 in unsafe conditions where they would get sick and die, 0:57:20.480 --> 0:57:23.680 and that our regulators failed to step in and demand 0:57:23.800 --> 0:57:28.560 direct steps be taken to mitigate this danger. Celeste Montfornton 0:57:29.640 --> 0:57:32.680 weird last name Celest Montfornton, who is a former MIND 0:57:32.720 --> 0:57:36.960 safety regulator under Clinton, said this, we failed. Had we 0:57:37.000 --> 0:57:39.280 taken action at this time, I really believe we would 0:57:39.280 --> 0:57:41.160 not be seeing the disease we're saying now. And what 0:57:41.200 --> 0:57:44.720 he's talking about is what the National Institute for Occupational 0:57:44.720 --> 0:57:48.160 Health and Safety has described as an epidemic of silicosis 0:57:48.240 --> 0:57:51.520 among miners today. This is happening right now as we 0:57:51.760 --> 0:57:54.439 as we say this, unless you're listening hundreds of years 0:57:54.440 --> 0:57:59.919 in the future, it's yeah. One of these epidemiologist Scott 0:58:00.080 --> 0:58:03.520 Lany is quoted as saying, we're counting thousands of cases, 0:58:03.640 --> 0:58:06.760 thousands and thousands and thousands of black lung cases, thousands 0:58:06.760 --> 0:58:08.800 of cases of the most severe form of black lung, 0:58:08.880 --> 0:58:12.720 and we're not done counting yet. One culprit of all this, 0:58:12.840 --> 0:58:14.840 one reason this is happening, is that the best and 0:58:14.880 --> 0:58:17.920 biggest coal seams were all mined out generations ago, so 0:58:18.000 --> 0:58:21.400 modern coal miners are often drilling thinner seams that are 0:58:21.440 --> 0:58:24.720 laced with sandstone, and sandstone has a high and elevated 0:58:24.760 --> 0:58:27.040 silica content. Not as high as what they were removing 0:58:27.080 --> 0:58:29.600 from the Hawk's nest tunnel, but elevated, and that means 0:58:29.640 --> 0:58:34.480 people get sicker faster, NPR writes quote. The NPR Frontline 0:58:34.520 --> 0:58:37.840 investigation found thousands of instances in which miners were exposed 0:58:37.920 --> 0:58:39.840 not just to col dust, but to dangerous levels of 0:58:39.840 --> 0:58:43.520 toxic silica dust. The Federal Mind Safety and Health Administrations 0:58:43.520 --> 0:58:47.800 own data chronicles twenty one thousand instances of excessive exposure 0:58:47.800 --> 0:58:50.880 to silica since nineteen eighty six. At the same time, 0:58:51.040 --> 0:58:54.680 NPR identified black lung diagnoses involving miners in their thirties 0:58:54.680 --> 0:58:58.560 who also experienced rapid progression to the advanced stage. Smith 0:58:58.560 --> 0:59:02.600 says he was diagnosed at nine. NIOSHA has confirm this 0:59:02.680 --> 0:59:05.120 trend in its studies. I don't have an exact death 0:59:05.120 --> 0:59:07.320 toll for you. Now. Obviously there are more things to 0:59:07.400 --> 0:59:10.439 keep people alive, you know. Now, as Jason keeps saying, 0:59:10.480 --> 0:59:13.160 there's a lot more these people are. This is a 0:59:13.200 --> 0:59:16.680 bad situation. It's terrifying, but they do have like much 0:59:16.840 --> 0:59:19.120 more in the way of support than the folks suffering 0:59:19.120 --> 0:59:22.560 a hawk's nest. But we are talking thousands and thousands 0:59:22.560 --> 0:59:25.000 and thousands of cases of people dealing with black lung 0:59:25.080 --> 0:59:28.120 right now that they didn't need to be dealing with that. 0:59:28.400 --> 0:59:32.520 The technology existed warning the situation was unsafe, and they 0:59:32.520 --> 0:59:36.760 were not given the proper equipment. Air circulation systems were 0:59:36.800 --> 0:59:40.240 not installed, mitigation efforts weren't taken because it would have 0:59:40.320 --> 0:59:42.560 cut down on the profits of the mining company. You know, 0:59:42.680 --> 0:59:45.760 that is still happening today. I will say one thing 0:59:45.760 --> 0:59:50.439 that's good is that there have been some lawsuits, particularly 0:59:50.520 --> 0:59:52.720 against One of the issues here is that like a 0:59:52.720 --> 0:59:55.400 lot of dust masks issued to miners were found not 0:59:55.480 --> 0:59:58.480 to work the company's figure. I think what happened is 0:59:58.520 --> 1:00:02.160 that some of the masks suppliers just assumed, well, our 1:00:02.760 --> 1:00:06.520 air circulation shit, the mitigation stuff is so good, nobody's 1:00:06.520 --> 1:00:08.560 going to know if we kind of cheap out making 1:00:08.600 --> 1:00:12.320 these masks, these safety masks. And a huge number of 1:00:12.320 --> 1:00:17.800 miners have actually sued several masks suppliers, filing product liability lawsuits, 1:00:17.960 --> 1:00:20.720 and there have been a like multi billion dollar verdicts 1:00:20.760 --> 1:00:22.600 in this. So one of the good things is that 1:00:23.160 --> 1:00:27.440 there is much more of a protective apparatus. I shouldn't 1:00:27.440 --> 1:00:29.840 say protective, because it didn't protect these guys they got sick. 1:00:30.240 --> 1:00:32.680 But there's more of a I guess, apparatus of vengeance 1:00:32.800 --> 1:00:35.000 to where this is not. You know, when you're talking 1:00:35.080 --> 1:00:38.040 a multi billion dollar lawsuit, you are talking about something 1:00:38.080 --> 1:00:41.000 that significantly more of an issue for these companies to 1:00:41.000 --> 1:00:43.640 deal with than the kind of money that Union Carbide 1:00:43.680 --> 1:00:46.760 had to pay out. So I'm not gonna say you 1:00:46.800 --> 1:00:50.560 should take too much be too happy about that, because 1:00:50.640 --> 1:00:53.480 again it's still fucking happened. But I don't know. 1:00:53.960 --> 1:00:54.440 There you go. 1:00:54.520 --> 1:00:55.800 That's what I have to say. 1:00:56.560 --> 1:01:00.919 One thing that is very that has not change since 1:01:01.000 --> 1:01:03.320 those days, has not changed the last couple hundred years. 1:01:04.240 --> 1:01:10.439 Our entire civilization exists because of mining. Everything you have 1:01:10.720 --> 1:01:14.520 change from a mine. Everything runs on mines. Everything in 1:01:14.560 --> 1:01:16.920 your phone came from a mine, everything in your PC, 1:01:17.080 --> 1:01:19.880 everything in this microphone. I'm talking into everything in this chair, 1:01:19.960 --> 1:01:23.560 I'm sitting on all of the metals, all of the steel, everything, 1:01:23.640 --> 1:01:27.320 all of the silica. Everything came from a mine. And 1:01:27.560 --> 1:01:30.840 I don't think on it today. Basis we appreciate this 1:01:31.040 --> 1:01:34.400 that if the miners went away, all of this stops 1:01:34.600 --> 1:01:37.840 all of it, because you can't you can't walk two 1:01:37.840 --> 1:01:41.520 feet without walking on something that came out of a mine. 1:01:42.000 --> 1:01:44.800 The green energy revolution that we all want with the 1:01:44.840 --> 1:01:48.680 solar panels and whatever nuclear power plants or fusion plants, 1:01:48.760 --> 1:01:51.960 or when all of that stuff, the windmills, all of 1:01:52.000 --> 1:01:56.400 that stuff came out of a mine. 1:01:56.680 --> 1:02:00.960 Yeah. And the degree to which these are yeah, just 1:02:02.000 --> 1:02:05.560 disposable people still, I think that's kind of important to 1:02:05.640 --> 1:02:09.280 note that, like the disposability of the folks who make 1:02:10.160 --> 1:02:14.360 every aspect of society possible is uh. I mean, I 1:02:14.400 --> 1:02:17.760 would say it hasn't changed, but it's they're not not 1:02:18.040 --> 1:02:21.160 disposable still. And by the way, I should also highlight 1:02:21.200 --> 1:02:23.560 here we're talking about the miner when we say miners 1:02:23.680 --> 1:02:25.760 are what makes the world possible. When it comes to 1:02:25.800 --> 1:02:28.200 like the shit mind in your computers, that's not some 1:02:28.400 --> 1:02:31.960 like hard work and you know man with the fucking 1:02:32.120 --> 1:02:34.600 creases on his face and whatnot and a big old 1:02:34.640 --> 1:02:37.280 helmet and the light working in like West Virginia, that's 1:02:37.320 --> 1:02:40.880 like an eleven year old in Central Africa. Mining mirror 1:02:41.320 --> 1:02:43.880 rare earth minerals to a significant extent. Right, This is 1:02:43.880 --> 1:02:46.800 one of the problems with the production of smartphones and 1:02:47.080 --> 1:02:50.560 computers and stuff is that, like it, there's basically inevitable 1:02:50.760 --> 1:02:53.720 that there will be human trafficking at some stage of 1:02:53.720 --> 1:02:57.840 that because some of the critical environment, like ingredients to 1:02:57.880 --> 1:03:03.120 these machines are only mined through means that are illegal internationally. Right, 1:03:03.400 --> 1:03:05.520 It's just one of those things where there's so many 1:03:05.600 --> 1:03:08.640 layers of separation and shit that like you can get 1:03:08.640 --> 1:03:11.680 away kind of with Nobody wants to talk about where 1:03:11.720 --> 1:03:13.800 the cobalt comes from or whatever the fuck, Like this 1:03:14.360 --> 1:03:16.720 is just the way it is, and that. 1:03:16.680 --> 1:03:20.080 Will always be dirty work. It will always be dangerous work, 1:03:20.480 --> 1:03:23.480 and we are so disconnected from it, especially people like me, 1:03:24.160 --> 1:03:26.760 even people who are very progressive. But we work office 1:03:26.800 --> 1:03:29.200 jobs and we send our emails and we sit at 1:03:29.200 --> 1:03:32.560 our laptops and really do not think of where that 1:03:32.680 --> 1:03:36.360 stuff inside the microprocesses came from, because at the end 1:03:36.440 --> 1:03:40.040 of it is a very dirty mine in a very 1:03:40.120 --> 1:03:43.400 dark place and someone working very hard, probably in pain. 1:03:44.480 --> 1:03:47.160 Like you can technology until you have a mind that's 1:03:47.240 --> 1:03:50.760 entirely run by robots, but even then, the stuff that 1:03:50.800 --> 1:03:52.760 the robots are made of will have come from a 1:03:52.880 --> 1:03:56.880 mind like at the base of everything we do, no 1:03:56.880 --> 1:04:00.920 matter how high minded and sophisticated. When we land a 1:04:01.160 --> 1:04:04.880 robot on Mars, that robot is made out of materials 1:04:04.920 --> 1:04:08.040 that came from a mine. Like there's somebody in whatever 1:04:08.160 --> 1:04:12.680 West Virginia or Africa or somewhere that dug it up 1:04:12.800 --> 1:04:14.920 out of the ground and put it at a cart 1:04:15.320 --> 1:04:18.600 and shipped it across the world. Yep. 1:04:20.280 --> 1:04:23.000 And I guess that's a good place to end, Jason, 1:04:23.000 --> 1:04:24.040 you want to plug your book. 1:04:24.560 --> 1:04:28.000 Well, just one final there's one kind of post mortem. 1:04:28.640 --> 1:04:32.280 The Union Carbide Company. Of course, now as of I 1:04:32.360 --> 1:04:33.920 try to look them up and see when they went 1:04:33.960 --> 1:04:37.120 out of business. It turns out that in twenty nineteen 1:04:37.240 --> 1:04:41.840 they had four point four billion dollars in revenue. Great, 1:04:43.360 --> 1:04:46.520 but they have now been they've now been swallowed up 1:04:46.520 --> 1:04:49.560 by the Dal Chemical Company, a small company, a family 1:04:49.560 --> 1:04:52.640 owned operation that it has a market cap of thirty 1:04:52.680 --> 1:04:55.680 six billion dollars I believe, yeah. 1:04:55.320 --> 1:04:58.800 And is not involved in anything horrifying in history. Don't 1:04:58.800 --> 1:05:02.200 look at don't google down chemical Vietnam right like, there's 1:05:02.200 --> 1:05:04.520 no reason to do that whatsoever. 1:05:05.920 --> 1:05:10.200 We are a very forgiving society. Don't you see when 1:05:10.280 --> 1:05:13.800 people reform themselves as long as you are a gigantic corporation, 1:05:15.200 --> 1:05:19.040 it's all about second chances in America. Yeah, we're willing 1:05:19.080 --> 1:05:24.480 to let you turn your life around. Yeah, anyway, yes, 1:05:24.800 --> 1:05:29.320 thank you. If you want to find me on TikTok, 1:05:29.400 --> 1:05:32.840 I am Jason K. Pargan. We have repeatedly made jokes 1:05:32.880 --> 1:05:36.960 about me being reduced to a TikTok person. I have 1:05:37.200 --> 1:05:41.920 three hundred and thirty thousand followers on there. I'm primarily 1:05:42.000 --> 1:05:45.520 a TikToker. The author stuff is now just a trivial 1:05:45.560 --> 1:05:49.920 footnote in my biography. My gravestone will say he was 1:05:49.960 --> 1:05:51.440 a beloved tich talker and. 1:05:51.480 --> 1:05:54.640 Prominent talker, prominent TikToker. 1:05:55.320 --> 1:05:58.360 I'm Jason K. Pargan on TikTok. Also that same thing 1:05:58.440 --> 1:06:01.960 on Twitter, SAH. Also the same thing on Blue Guy 1:06:02.320 --> 1:06:08.520 and threads and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and some 1:06:08.600 --> 1:06:10.680 others that I don't remember to update because there's too 1:06:10.720 --> 1:06:14.560 many substack, all of them, all of them. Jason K. 1:06:14.720 --> 1:06:17.280 Pargin P A R G. I N thank you. You know. 1:06:17.400 --> 1:06:18.880 I do. 1:06:18.920 --> 1:06:22.640 We shit talk TikTok a lot us olds, but I 1:06:22.680 --> 1:06:25.040 will say it's actually kind of helpful that that's how 1:06:25.120 --> 1:06:28.280 you initially learned. It's kind of hopeful that that is 1:06:28.320 --> 1:06:31.200 how you found out about this because this is like 1:06:31.640 --> 1:06:35.560 so important, right, this is like critical history. It's critical 1:06:35.600 --> 1:06:39.320 for understanding a lot of things about this country today. 1:06:39.440 --> 1:06:41.360 And it's just critical because you need to know about 1:06:41.360 --> 1:06:44.720 what happened to these people. And the fact that this 1:06:44.880 --> 1:06:48.720 story spread widely on TikTok, I think is pretty rad actually, 1:06:48.880 --> 1:06:51.040 so that's good, that's. 1:06:51.040 --> 1:06:53.800 Nice, and to be that serious. There's a lot of 1:06:53.920 --> 1:06:57.720 really cool stuff on TikTok, and it's it's not fifteen 1:06:57.760 --> 1:07:01.439 second long clips of like teenage girls asy and people 1:07:01.440 --> 1:07:03.440 will hear that I'm on TikTok. They think, oh, so 1:07:03.440 --> 1:07:07.760 you're on there with the fifteen year old girls, that's 1:07:07.800 --> 1:07:11.240 your thing. It's like, no, TikTok. Now, there's long form 1:07:11.280 --> 1:07:13.680 stuff on there. Let's say long form, I mean seven, eight, 1:07:13.760 --> 1:07:17.200 nine minutes long for TikTok getting into subjects like this. 1:07:17.240 --> 1:07:19.480 Because this video had a lot of views on it, 1:07:19.520 --> 1:07:22.560 that's how I saw it. That's what cued me into this. 1:07:22.600 --> 1:07:24.080 And then when I went to look it up found 1:07:24.080 --> 1:07:28.040 out that there's barely anything on Wikipedia because it's kind 1:07:28.040 --> 1:07:32.560 of flew under the radar, and so that inspired me 1:07:32.640 --> 1:07:34.360 to see if we want to do an episode about this, 1:07:34.400 --> 1:07:36.960 because I suspected that there was a lot to unearth. 1:07:37.320 --> 1:07:41.120 It was worse than I thought, as it always is 1:07:41.240 --> 1:07:44.680 every time I come on here. The details are always 1:07:44.680 --> 1:07:47.960 worse than what you've heard. But this is the kind 1:07:48.000 --> 1:07:51.680 of story. For whatever reason, we love to make movies 1:07:51.720 --> 1:07:55.800 about serial killers that killed five people, but a corporation 1:07:55.880 --> 1:08:01.040 that kills a thousand through being exactly as cruel and whatever. 1:08:01.480 --> 1:08:03.720 We kind of just like, well, yeah, but their job creators, 1:08:03.800 --> 1:08:06.240 and they made that tunnel, Like, don't they get credit 1:08:06.280 --> 1:08:06.880 for making that. 1:08:06.840 --> 1:08:08.360 Tunnel solid tunnel? 1:08:08.440 --> 1:08:11.960 Yeah, it's like they didn't make. A whole bunch of 1:08:12.000 --> 1:08:14.640 people whose names you'll never know made that tunnel. Yeah, 1:08:14.680 --> 1:08:16.640 and they broke their bodies to make it. 1:08:17.080 --> 1:08:21.280 Yeah, So I don't know, go off into the world. 1:08:21.720 --> 1:08:29.080 Buy Jason's book, Remain Angry at Union Carbide. Definitely do that. Okay, 1:08:29.520 --> 1:08:34.439 that's the episode, Go away now, everybody. Hey everyone, Robert 1:08:34.479 --> 1:08:37.360 Evans here. As we mentioned in the first episode, Jason 1:08:37.800 --> 1:08:40.360 asked for this as the result of a TikTok that 1:08:40.400 --> 1:08:42.680 they'd seen. I'm not waunch of a TikTok guy. So 1:08:42.800 --> 1:08:45.160 I just kind of went on and did my research. 1:08:45.320 --> 1:08:48.280 But I've been informed that the person who put together 1:08:48.320 --> 1:08:51.560 this TikTok, which is an account called Schoolhouse Clock like 1:08:51.840 --> 1:08:56.920 like the buildings supply c a ulk. Schoolhouse Clock, who's 1:08:57.240 --> 1:09:00.200 creator is a fellow named Michael, put out a video 1:09:00.280 --> 1:09:03.519 specifically talking to us. He wanted to let us know. 1:09:03.680 --> 1:09:07.960 There's a website hawksnest names dot org that was created 1:09:08.040 --> 1:09:10.719 quite a while ago to try and put together an actual, 1:09:10.840 --> 1:09:14.160 definitive list of the men who died as a result 1:09:14.200 --> 1:09:18.080 of this. They've got both a list of death certificates, 1:09:18.120 --> 1:09:21.840 worker names, some reports on you andion carbide, and some 1:09:21.880 --> 1:09:23.960 other information. Really good info if you're interested in this, 1:09:24.000 --> 1:09:26.160 and you can also if you're someone who may have 1:09:26.240 --> 1:09:28.840 lost a family member obviously a long time ago in 1:09:28.920 --> 1:09:31.000 this disaster, there's a way for you to kind of 1:09:31.040 --> 1:09:32.800 reach out to them and try to add that name. 1:09:33.960 --> 1:09:37.960 That website was offline for a while, but then Michael, 1:09:38.040 --> 1:09:40.439 the fellow with the TikTok apparently was able to raise 1:09:40.439 --> 1:09:44.320 some money through his viewers or listeners whatever you call 1:09:44.360 --> 1:09:47.519 them on TikTok to put it back up, which is great, 1:09:48.080 --> 1:09:50.120 and so they he asked that we put in a 1:09:50.200 --> 1:09:53.080 shout out, which I am doing now. So please check 1:09:53.120 --> 1:09:57.400 out hawksnest names dot org for more information on this disaster. 1:09:57.760 --> 1:10:03.960 Thanks everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool 1:10:04.040 --> 1:10:06.880 Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our 1:10:06.920 --> 1:10:10.640 website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the 1:10:10.680 --> 1:10:14.200 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.