Question

events/tragedies that changed the safety movement over the last Century

Answer 1

It’s been called America’s worst industrial disaster. The construction of a three-mile-long tunnel to carry the New River through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia cost as many as 2,000 workers their lives.At least 764 of the 1,213 men who worked underground at Hawk's Nest for at least two months died within five years of the tunnel's completion, having contracted silicosis as the result of drilling through miles of rock to build a hydro-electric plant for Union Carbide, which owned the tunnel.Some 5,000 men worked on the project from March 1930 to December 1931, earning 25 cents an hour and working 60 hours a week. Many of the workers were African-American, and came to West Virginia to work on the project. As they began getting sick with what company doctors called “tunnelitis,” they were unable to return to their homes and those who didn’t die in their beds in the company-owned worker camps were driven out of town to die in nearby towns or were put on trains and sent home.The mountain rock contained extremely high levels of silica, wet drilling techniques were not used to keep dust levels down and the workers were given no masks or respirators. These factors all contributed to worker deaths, some of which occurred after as little as two months’ exposure in the tunnel.The bodies in that makeshift cemetery were moved several miles away to unconsecrated ground in 1972, when the state of West Virginia decided to widen U.S. 19. The new burial site in Summersville became a dumping ground for old appliances and highway crews disposing of road kill until local residents Charlotte and Charles Neilan made it their mission to find the graveyard, which they did with the help of West Virginia State University Professor Richard Hartman.The Hawk's Nest Tragedy, Asbestos Menace, and Bhopal Disaster are examples of such tragedies. Organized labor has played a crucial role in the development of the safety movement in the United States. Particularly important was the work of unions to overturn antilabor laws inhibiting safety in the workplace.