Gauley Bridge, West Virginia: America's Deadliest Industrial Cover-Up
Episode Summary
In 1931, seventeen-year-old Dewey Flack stepped off a train in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, carrying a one-way ticket and a promise to send money home to his family. Two weeks later, he was dead—his lungs filled with crystalline silica dust so pure it turned them to stone. His death certificate said pneumonia. It was a lie.
Dewey was one of approximately 764 workers who died during construction of the Hawks Nest Tunnel, a three-mile hydroelectric project that has been called America's worst industrial disaster. The project, managed by Union Carbide subsidiary New Kanawha Power Company and contracted to Rinehart & Dennis, attracted roughly 3,000 workers during the depths of the Great Depression. Three-quarters of them were Black migrants fleeing unemployment in the segregated South, drawn by the promise of paying work when jobs had vanished across America.
What they found instead was a death sentence. The tunnel cut through rock that was 99 percent pure silica, and the contractors used dry drilling methods to save time and extract the valuable mineral. Workers testified that the dust was so thick they couldn't see an electric light ten feet away—one survivor said you could "practically chew the dust." Medical science had documented silicosis since 1910. The companies knew exactly what they were doing.
When workers began dying—sometimes dozens in a single week—the company fired them. Those too sick to leave were buried in mass graves under cover of darkness, their death certificates falsified to read "pneumonia" or "tuberculosis." Families back home waited for letters that never came, believing their sons and fathers had abandoned them. Dewey Flack's family spent eighty-eight years thinking he had run away—until NPR finally located his niece in 2019 and told her the truth.
Timeline of Events
The Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster unfolded over eighteen months that changed American labor history. What began as a Depression-era promise of employment became a systematic cover-up that would take nearly a century to fully expose.
January 7, 1927 — Union Carbide creates New Kanawha Power Company to build hydroelectric project at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia.
March 31, 1930 — Construction begins on three-mile Hawks Nest Tunnel through Gauley Mountain. Rinehart & Dennis employs approximately 3,000 workers, most of them Black migrants from the South.
February 1931 — Local newspaper reports 37 deaths among tunnel workers in just two weeks. A local judge issues a gag order. The story disappears.
May 1931 — Dr. Leonidas H. Harless examines dozens of workers at Gauley Bridge hospital and identifies silicosis. He writes to Union Carbide warning of catastrophic death rates. The company ignores him.
September 1931 — Tunnel construction is completed. Workers continue dying for years afterward as silicosis claims its victims.
January 1936 — House Committee on Labor begins Congressional investigation, led in part by New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio. The subcommittee documents 476 official silicosis deaths and condemns conditions as "hardly conceivable in a democratic government."
September 7, 2012 — Historical marker finally dedicated at Hawks Nest, acknowledging the disaster.
Historical Significance
The Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster stands as a devastating example of how corporate profit was placed above human life during America's industrial age. The Congressional investigation of 1936 exposed not just the immediate tragedy, but a system designed to exploit the most vulnerable workers while evading any accountability.
What makes Hawks Nest particularly significant is how thoroughly the disaster was buried. Unlike other industrial tragedies that sparked immediate reform, Hawks Nest was actively covered up. The companies falsified death certificates, buried workers in unmarked mass graves, and fired anyone who got sick before they could seek treatment. Families were never notified. Records were destroyed. For decades, the full scope of what happened remained hidden.
The racial dimension cannot be ignored. Three-quarters of the workforce was Black, and these workers were assigned the dirtiest, most dangerous tasks. They were paid in company scrip while white workers received cash. They were housed twelve to a room in boxcars while white workers got better accommodations. When they died, they were buried in segregated trenches because they weren't allowed in "white" cemeteries. The Congressional report noted that conditions were "hardly conceivable in a democratic government in the present century."
While Hawks Nest helped establish silicosis as a recognized occupational disease with compensation protections, the tunnel workers themselves were never protected by these laws. Union Carbide paid less than $1,000 per death on average in legal settlements. No executives ever went to prison. The disaster that killed more Americans than any other industrial incident in history resulted in no criminal charges whatsoever.
Today, Hawks Nest serves as a reminder that the stories of marginalized workers can be erased for generations—and why preserving these histories matters.
Sources & Further Reading
The Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster has been documented through Congressional testimony, investigative journalism, and academic research spanning nearly nine decades. These sources provide the foundation for understanding what happened in Gauley Bridge and why it was hidden for so long.
- NPR Investigation (2019) — "Before Black Lung, The Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster Killed Hundreds" — Comprehensive reporting that located Dewey Flack's family and brought renewed attention to the disaster: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-killed-hundreds
- Martin Cherniack, "The Hawks' Nest Incident" (1986) — Award-winning epidemiological study establishing the 764-death estimate now recognized on the memorial.
- Patricia Spangler, "The Hawks Nest Tunnel: An Unabridged History" (2008) — Comprehensive historical account by West Virginia researcher.
- West Virginia State Archives — Congressional hearing transcripts and primary documents: https://archive.wvculture.org/history/disasters/hawksnesttunnel04.html
- Muriel Rukeyser, "The Book of the Dead" (1938, republished 2018) — Poetry collection documenting interactions with Hawks Nest survivors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's 1931.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Do we fly at 17 years old when he steps off the train in Gauly Bridge, West Virginia?
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[SPEAKER_00]: He came from North Carolina, one way ticket in hand, a promise, send home money.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His parents and five younger siblings are counting on him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's the worst year of the great depression.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Tunnel Project in West Virginia, it's paying work, it's hope.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two weeks later, Dui is dead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His lungs filled with white silica dust, so pure it turned them to stone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The death certificate says pneumonia, it's a lie.
00:58.042 --> 01:02.488
[SPEAKER_00]: They buried his body in a mass grave under cover of darkness.
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[SPEAKER_00]: want about at least 169 workers dumped into trenches like cordwood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His family back in North Carolina thinks he ran away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For 88 years, they believed do we abandon them?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then NPR finally locates his knees.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sheila Flack Jones in 2019, she weaps.
01:29.093 --> 01:35.745
[SPEAKER_00]: She says, I'm heartbroken that my family died, thinking that he ran away, and they never knew the real truth.
01:38.650 --> 01:41.055
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back friend to hometown history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Doeie was one of the approximately 764 workers who died at Hawks Nest, most of them were black migrants fleeing unemployment in the segregated south.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A congressional investigation called the conditions hardly conceivable in a democratic government in the present century.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It would be more representative of the Middle Ages.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The company Paymaster had said it plainly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I knew they was going to kill them within five years, but I didn't know they was going to kill them so quick.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster, America's worst industrial catastrophe deliberately buried for generations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we're bringing it back to light.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Golly Bridge is in Fayette County, West Virginia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The town sits where the Golly River meets the Conno-Wall River.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Population in 1927, fewer than 1,000 people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That year, Union Carbide, one of America's largest chemical companies, creates a subsidiary called New Conno-Wall Power Company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: their plan, drill a three-mile tunnel through Golly Mountain to divert the river and generate hydroelectric power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But here's what makes this project different.
03:13.348 --> 03:22.762
[SPEAKER_00]: Core samples show the sandstone is 99% pure silica, a valuable commodity for union carbides manufacturing process.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They're not just building a power plant.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They're mining a fortune in silica, while the tunnel gets dug.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Two projects for the price of one.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Union carbide, hires, rine heart, and Dennis company, a contractor from Charlottesville, Virginia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Official groundbreaking happens March 31, 1930, just six months after the stock market crash.
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[SPEAKER_00]: To understand what happens next, you need to know what the Great Depression did to America.
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[SPEAKER_00]: block unemployment in the south is double or triple white rates.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In northern cities it hits 50 to 60 percent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The congressional report later captures it perfectly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Workers were driven by despair in the stark fear of hunger to work for a mere existence wage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When ride heart and dentist, send recruiters through Virginia, North Carolina, and the Deep South, promising work on a tonal project, men come, 3,000 workers make the journey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Three quarters of them are black.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They come with one way train tickets and letters to send money home.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They come because their families are hungry.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Any parent would understand that desperation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What they find in Golly Bridge isn't hope.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's hell with a paycheck.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The company houses workers and segregate a camps in nearby Veneta.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Black workers sleep 12 to a room and 8 by 10 foot box cars.
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[SPEAKER_00]: White workers get 4 to a room and better housing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: pay starts at 40 cents an hour, then it drops to 25 cents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Black workers are paid in company's grip, only redeemable at company stores, white workers get cash, picture yourself in one of these box cars, 12 men, 8 by 10 feet, that's smaller than most bathrooms.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You're sleeping in shifts because there's no room for everyone to lie down at once.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The walls wet, condensation, the air is thick with body odor and carousene fumes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is home.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The men work 10 to 15 hour shifts, six days a week.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They need to advance 250 to 300 feet per week.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's brutal pace, but they're steady work, and that's more than most of America has in 1931.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then the drilling starts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tunnel cuts through 99% pure silica.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The contractors use dry drilling methods, no water to keep down the dust.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine being inside that tunnel, you're drilling through the crystalline quartz, and every strike releases microscopic particles of silica into the air.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The dust is so thick, workers later testify.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They could not see an electric light 10 feet away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One survivor says you could practically chew the dust.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Medical journals, documented cellicosis by 1910.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The federal Bureau of Minds had issued warnings.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's no mystery here.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The companies know exactly what they're doing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But by early 1931, just months after work begins, dozens of men are dying.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Workers emerge from the tunnel covered in white dust, ghostly pale, stumbling, gauly bridge earns a nickname, the town of the living dead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In February 1931, the local Fayette Tribune reports a great deal of comment regarding the unusually large number of deaths among the collared laborers, deaths totaled around 37 in the past two weeks, a local judge issues a gag order, the story disappears, but the dying doesn't stop.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The silica particles are crystallizing in their lungs, every breath is drowning in sand.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tissue hardens, the lungs turn to stone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Death comes slowly, over weeks or months, suffocating, exhausted, unable to breathe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Men are literally drowning in their own hardened lungs.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When workers start collapsing in the tunnel, Ryan Hart and Dennis fires them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No severance, no medical care.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Men too sick to work are simply dismissed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Many die before they can leave town.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some make it home and die there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Be wildered families watch strong men, waste away and weeks.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The company hires a local undertaker named FM Faulkner.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He's paid $55 per body, but not to provide proper burials.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His job is disposal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He buries workers and mass graves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Three pits, crude trenches, body stacked like cordwood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, in wooden crates, often just wrapped in cloth or burlap, most graves are unmarked.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At night, under cover of darkness, they bury the bodies, 169 workers that we know of, end up in these mass graves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The actual number is almost certainly higher.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Many men simply disappeared into the Appalachian soil without record.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The death certificates lie, pneumonia, tuberculosis, acute bronchitis, anything but silicosis, anything to avoid questions, anything to keep the project moving forward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: back home, families wait for letters that never come.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They wait for money that never arrives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They don't know their sons, fathers, brothers, or dead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They think they've been abandoned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In May 1931, barely a year into construction, a doctor named Leonidas Harlus,
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[SPEAKER_00]: He recognizes Cylicosis immediately.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The death rate is catastrophic.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He writes to Union Carbides' main office detailing the conditions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Union Carbide ignores him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Harlus writes to the State Health Department, he contacts the contractor, he tries everything he can within the system to stop the deaths.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one listens, the tunnel keeps drilling, men keep dying.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tunnel is completed September 1931, 18 months of construction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Three miles long, hundreds of millions of dollars of silica extracted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Approximately 764 men dead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Union Carbide and Ryan Harden Dennis walk away with their profits.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The dying continues for years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Silicosis has a long tail.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Men who worked in that tunnel keep dying through the 1930s and into the 1940s.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, families start asking questions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the mid-1930s, hundreds of lawsuits begin appearing in the West Virginia courts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Survivors and families file claims against Union Carbide and Ride Hard and Dennis.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The numbers are staggering, 476 official death certificates for Silicosis.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the companies fight every case.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They drag proceedings out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They wear families down.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They settle when they settle it all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For pitens is $130,000.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Total distributed across hundreds of claims.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Most families get nothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But one case goes to trial.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A Conno-Walk County jury hears the evidence, the dry drilling, the deaths, the mass graves, the falsified death certificates, and 1936 they were turning verdict, 344,000 dollars.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's the largest silicosis verdict in American history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For one brief moment, it looks like accountability might happen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then the West Virginia Supreme Court throws it out, statute of limitations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The companies had deliberately delayed the trial until they could use time against the plaintiffs.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the verdict disappears.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That kills the momentum.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Most other cases settle for almost nothing or get dismissed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The company's pay less than $1,000 per death on average.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For men who died, building their fortune.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While lawmakers debate, a freshman congressman from East Harlem gets involved.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Vito Markentonio, he's young, progressive, known for taking on corporate power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He hears about Hock's Nest and demands a congressional investigation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: January 1936, the House Committee on Labor begins hearings
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[SPEAKER_00]: survivors testify, doctors testify, families testify, the undertaker testifies about the mass graves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Documentary evidence piles up, the dry drilling methods, the death certificates, the company
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[SPEAKER_00]: The committee's report is devastating.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They call the conditions hardly conceivable in a democratic government in the present century.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It would be more representative of the Middle Ages.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They document 476 deaths officially attributed to Selyosis, and acknowledge the real number is almost certainly higher.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The congressional investigation exposes everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The truth is finally in the official record.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For the first time, the full scope of the disaster is documented at the federal level.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing changes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No criminal charges are filed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: no executives go to prison.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Union Carbide continues operating.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Rineheart and Dennis continues taking contracts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The federal government passes no new workplace safety laws specific to silica exposure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The congressional report becomes a historical document.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The deaths remain unpunished.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the mass graves are main unmarked.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Families believed they're missing men, abandoned them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The disaster fades from public consciousness.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then in the early 2000s, historians began excavating the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: West Virginia researcher Patricia Spangler, locate survivors and family members,
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[SPEAKER_00]: genealogists, trace descendants.
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[SPEAKER_00]: NPR produces investigations in 2019 that finally reached Dewey Flax family.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When Sheila Flax Jones, Dewey's niece, learns the truth 88 years later, she says that she's heartbroken that her family died thinking he ran away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And they never knew the truth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She wanted to make sure people knew his name and knew what happened to him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: September 7, 2012, a historical marker is finally dedicated at Hawks Nest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It reads, this tunnel was built to produce hydroelectric power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The work was done in dangerous conditions that caused acute sillyosis and the death of many workers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 2015, the West Virginia Division of Culture and History begins formally documenting the mass burial sites, researchers work to identify victims and notify families.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not justice, 764 men died building a tunnel for profit and their deaths were deliberately hidden.
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[SPEAKER_00]: no one was ever held accountable in any meaningful way, but at least now, we remember them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Do we flagged with 17 years old?
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[SPEAKER_00]: He came from North Carolina with a one-way ticket in hand.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A promise to send money home.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five younger siblings counting on him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He died two weeks after arriving in Gauly Bridge.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His family thought he abandoned them for 88 years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 764 men died and hawks nest tunnel.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Most were black immigrants fleeing depression era unemployment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They came because their families were hungry.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They died because companies valued profit over human life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were buried in mass graves, their deaths falsified.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is America's deadliest industrial disaster.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It happened in Gauly Bridge, West Virginia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For generations, no one remembered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we do.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Every hometown has a story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight it's when American workers died for profit and the truth was buried with them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you found this story important, share it with someone who should know it happened.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Good night friend.
