How America’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster Was Almost Erased

One of the worst industrial disasters in our nation’s history occurred in West Virginia in the 1930s. Not in a coal mine – but in a tunnel chiseled out of a mountain for a hydroelectric power plant. Hundreds of workers, most of them poor and Black, quietly died from breathing in silica dust. For decades, the true scale of the devastation was buried by the companies behind the project.

Featured in this episode:

Catherine Venable Moore

Dr. Martin Cherniack

Sources:

Dr. Martin Cherniack’s book The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster 

Catherine Venable Moore’s “The Book of the Dead” in Oxford American:

https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-94-fall-2016/the-book-of-the-dead

Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead

George Robinson’s Congressional Testimony

NPR’s reporting on the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-killed-hundreds

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