Tomgram: The New Eco-Devastation in Rural America!u

When workers drilling tunnels at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, began to die, Union Carbide had the answer. It hadn't been taking adequate precautions against the inhalation of silica dust, a known danger to workers since the days of ancient Greece. Instead, in many cases, a company doctor would simply tell the families of the workers that they had died of "tunnelitis," and a local undertaker would be paid $50 to dispose of each corpse. A few years later, in 1935, a congressional subcommittee discovered that approximately 700 workers had perished while drilling through Hawk's Nest Mountain, many of them buried in unmarked graves at the side of the road just outside the tunnel. The subcommittee concluded that Union Carbide's project had been accomplished through a "grave and inhuman disregard of all considerations for the health, lives and future of employees." Despite the "Hawk's Nest Incident" and thousands of Depression-era lawsuits against foundries, mines, and construction companies, silicosis never disappeared. In the decades since, as TomDispatch authors David Rosner and Jerry Markowitz have repeatedly demonstrated, industry worked tirelessly to label silicosis a "disease of the past," even while ensuring that it would continue to be a disease of the present. By the late 1990s, the Columbia University researchers found that from New York to California, from Texas all the way back to West Virginia, millions of workers in foundries, shipyards, mines, and oil refineries, among other industries, were endangered by silica dust. Today, there is a new silicosis scare on the horizon, and a new eco-nightmare brewing in the far corners of rural America.