 Charleston Gazette, August 1, 2009 |
| Novel offers personal look at Hawks Nest Disaster |
| By Paul J. Nyden Staff writer |
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Orville Orr and Delbert "Bullhead" McCloud became close buddies in France, fighting in the U.S. Army against Germans during World War I. A dozen years later, they ended up together again, working as guards and "shack rousters" for Union Carbide. The chemical company began excavating three miles of solid rock to create the Hawks Nest Tunnel near Gauley Bridge. The rock in Hawks Nest Tunnel was rich in silica, whose dust created deadly lung disease. Dwight Harshbarger is releasing his new novel on Saturday, called Witness at Hawks Nest. The novel's characters offer engaging personal perspectives into the lives and thoughts of tunnel workers, their girlfriends and wives, local restaurant and business owners, project bosses, Carbide executives and West Virginia state safety inspectors. The new tunnel, and its accompanying dam, were created to divert the New River's rapidly-flowing waters to generate electricity for a nearby metal-processing plant in Alloy, long operated by Elkem Metals. Built between March 1930 and December 1931, the 21-month tunnel construction project became the worst industrial disaster in American history. |
| Orv's Tasks |
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When Bullhead, then a sheriff, recruited Orv to work as his deputy and assistant, Orv was excited. He quickly moved to Gauley Bridge from Kettle, his hometown outside Huntington. Sadly, Orv soon saw his relationship with his wife fall apart, but he was still happy to have a good-paying job. As a shack rouster, Orv woke up tunnel workers every morning, making sure they got to work on time. As months passed, Orv saw more and more tunnel workers getting sick and dying. His mood began to change. Orv noticed company bosses turned on fans and water sprays to control dust underground only when state inspectors showed up. On normal workdays, bosses made no effort to protect their workers from silica dust inside the tunnel. When a worker became short of breath, a local company doctor simply prescribed little black pills for supposed relief. Bullhead blamed the emerging sicknesses on bad nighttime partying habits of workers, especially black workers. Black workers, who were about two-thirds of all tunnel workers, were paid lower wages, relegated to shoddy living quarters and often beaten with clubs if they failed to get to work quickly. One day, Orv met Holbert Yancy, a salesman who came to town trying to sell facemasks to protect workers' lungs. Company bosses showed no interest. "It's not a tunnel anymore," Holbert told Orville. "It's a silica mine." Over the months, Bullhead began assigning Orv a new job with increasing frequency. Orv got paid extra to drive the bodies of tunnel workers who died across the mountain to a Summersville funeral director who buried them in two cornfield cemeteries, one for blacks and one for whites. "In France, enemy machine guns had cut men down," Orv said. "In digging the Hawks Nest Tunnel, tunnel men had been killed by the people they trusted." |
| America's worst industrial disaster |
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Back in 1986, Yale University Prof. Martin Cherniak published The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster. Cherniak's definitive research focused on the 1,213 men who worked inside the tunnel for at least two months, which he believed was the minimum exposure needed to contract silicosis. Of those 1,213 workers, at least 764, or 63 percent of them, died within five years of the tunnel's completion. Cherniak's statistical assumptions were conservative, so the actual death rate was probably higher. At the time, Union Carbide maintained only 109 tunnel workers died between 1930 and 1935. "I have known about the tunnel since I was a child," Harshbarger said during an interview with the Sunday Gazette-Mail. "Back in the 1970s, when I was teaching at West Virginia University, I really began to become aware of what happened. "In the late 1970s, I was director of community mental health center in Beckley. That brought me into direct contact with people who knew about the tunnel. I was so moved at what happened there and I still am." Harshbarger praised Cherniak's book and Hubert Skidmore's Hawk's Nest: A Novel of America's Disinherited, published by Doubleday in 1941. Under pressure from Carbide, Doubleday withdrew all copies of that novel for sale shortly after its publication. "This is such a powerful story. I wanted to give it another voice. Cherniak's book is very academic. And Skidmore's book was out of print for decades." Harshbarger is a psychologist, who has spent 30 years dealing with workplace safety as a consultant for business and industry. "What happened at Hawk's Nest Tunnel is a violation of everything I stand for related to ethics and company management. It just makes me very angry. "I think people ought to bear responsibility, right up to the top in companies like Union Carbide." Today, Harshbarger is an adjunct professor at the WVU's medical school. "I still do some work with the Cambridge Center [in Boston] and some industrial consulting. I also do a lot of writing." On Saturday, Harshbarger will launch publication of Witness at Hawks Nest at St. John's Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston beginning at 4 p.m. The program will include a power-point slide show of historic photographs, many from inside the tunnel. "Finding photos of people was difficult," Harshbarger said. "There are all kinds of photos of machinery, but few photos of workers. Even more rare are photographs of black workers." Harshbarger will read briefly from his book, talk about what happened nearly 80 years ago, then answer questions. Harshbarger will then visit Taylor Books, at 226 Capitol St. in Charleston, between 7:30 and 9 p.m. Ron Sole, a local musician with Mountain Stage who wrote a song about Hawk's Nest, will also be there. Reach Paul J. Nyden at 304-348-5164 |
