How America’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster Was Almost Erased
Lawless Planet · Audible
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Show Notes
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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