Picture by Brian M. Powell, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4463586
On this day in 1930 work began to construct a 3 mile tunnel beneath Gauley Mountain in West Virginia. The reason for the tunnel was to divert the waters of the New River in such a way as to maximize its potential for power generation.
This tunnel, known as the Hawks Nest Tunnel, took five years to complete, mainly due to the fact that when the tunnel began to be dug, silica was found. It turns out that silica was valuable in processing steel, so workers were diverted to mine that mineral for the company they worked for, Union Carbide.
In the process of mining silica, which they did without masks or breathing equipment issued to them, many of the workers developed silicosis, a deadly lung disease, which killed many of them. There are 109 deaths attributed to the mining of silica at Hawks Nest by the company, although a Congressional hearing set the death toll at 476. As many as three quarters of the workers affected were African-Americans who had come to work at the tunnel during the darkest days of the Depression, desperate for a job of any kind.
