West Virginia Coal Mining Disaster - Town of the Living Dead
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West Virginia Coal Mining Disaster - Town of the Living Dead

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Debbie and I traveled to Summersville, West Virginia to pay our respects and to try to make contact with any of the deceased coal miners willing to speak with us. We visited the memorial dedicated to these miners.
In 1930, construction began on a three-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain located between Ansted and Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. When finished, the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel would divert water from the New River to a hydroelectric plant downstream. The water would be used to produce electricity for Union Carbide’s metals plant at Alloy, West Virginia. In order to build the tunnel through solid rock, hundreds of unemployed men were recruited for construction jobs on the project. At least two-thirds of these workers were African Americans.
As the men drilled and blasted a 32-36 foot tunnel through the mountain, they drilled through rock that contained high levels of silica. The dry drilling technique that was used released large amounts of silica dust into the air. This made working in the tunnel very dangerous. Black diggers emerged from the hole in the mountain covered with layers of white dust. The interior of the tunnel was a white cloud of silica, impairing vision and clogging the lungs of workers.
Because the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel was licensed as a civil engineering project, even the most modest forms of safety were not applied. Workers labored in confined spaces with poor ventilation, a lack of dust control, and limited use of personal breathing protection. Within months, workers became sick from breathing silica dust. They showed signs of a lung disease called silicosis but were treated for a new disease called “tunnelitis”. Silicosis is a disease that infects the lungs leading to a shortness of breath and eventually death. Silicosis cannot be cured.
With the death of so many black workers, the problem of where to bury them became an issue. There was no burial sites nearby for black workers. To solve the issue, a funeral parlor in Summersville, West Virginia located an open field on Martha White’s farm. This field became the burial grounds for many of the African Americans who died working on the tunnel project.
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