Gauley Mountain, where the tunnel was built, was 99 percent pure sandstone, a valuable commodity in 1930. Drilling through sandstone kicks up silica dust. One worker later said the dust was so thick, he could practically chew it.
"There was a nickname at the time for Gauley Bridge: the town of the living dead," says local writer Catherine Venable Moore, "because there were so many sick workers, and also because they had this kind of ghostly presence when they were coming out of the tunnel being covered in this white silica dust."
One of those workers was Dewey Flack, a 17- or 18-year-old African-American man. Flack's age is unclear because — like many other black tunnel workers — only a few traces of his life and death remain.
Most likely, Watts says, Flack left his home in North Carolina with a one-way train ticket to
West Virginia and the promise to send money
to his parents and five younger siblings. He would never see them again.
"Young, healthy people breaking down"
Soon after construction began, men were already getting sick and dying at the tunnel.
"Each and every day I worked in that tunnel, I helped carry off 10 to 14 men who was overcome by the dust," a Hawks Nest worker recalled in a 1936 newsreel. Photos taken during construction show ghostly images of workers shrouded in clouds of white dust.
According to Union Carbide documents, 80 percent of the workers became ill, died or walked off the job after six months.
The Union Carbide and Carbon Corp. began constructing the 3-mile tunnel in the spring of 1930. The company wanted to divert water from the New River to a plant downstream to generate power for iron smelting.
Nearly 3,000 workers labored in shifts of 10 or 15 hours. The tunnel, projected to be completed in four years, wrapped in 18 months. Workers drilled holes and then stacked dynamite to blast through sandstone.
An African-American man poses with others in the photo above while working on the Hawks Nest Tunnel in 1932. Thousands of black men came to West Virginia to work on the project, making up the vast majority of the workforce.
Courtesy of Union Carbide Collection, West Virginia State Archives
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