Montana labor news., 1934-06-14
Victims Sue Contractors
Widows of Silicosis


for the unsuSpecting West Nirginian
miners who contracted to drill a three
mile tunnel under the mountains OF
Fayette County. They dug that bore,
those miners, but they dug their own
graves at the same time. That deadly
tunnel probably will be known as the
major industrial tragedy Of all times.
Two hunderd and thirty of those min
ers who carved the great man-made
slot through the mountain are dead or
dying. How many others may have
been marked by death is not yet known
The doomed mel, we're stricken by
one OF the strangest OF occupational
diseases, a rare affliction called sill
COSTS, an affliction caused by the in
halation Of quartz dust.
Readers of the American Weekly
will recall stories in these pages in the
past of the unfortunate young m
who painted luminous dials on watch
faces and paid for their jobs with their
lives. These women, some forty OF
them, worked for a firm in Orange,
New Jersey. Their task was to dip
brushes into the radioactive paint used
to make watch dials readable in the
dark, and then to apply that paint to
the numbers on the dials. None of
them realized, as they placed the paint
im%pregnated brushes into their mouths,
to point them, as artists do, that they
were inviting death. None Of them
realized that until the deadly radium
in the paint began to react upon them.
Once started, that radium could not
be stopped. 1t bit into teeth, and
bones, and eventually, it killed. Some
OF the young women victims Of that
radium paint lived for several years
after they had swallowed death in
small morsels through their habit OF
pointing their brushes in their mouths.
They lived an apparently normal life,
only to be cut down by the deadly
force of the radium they had taken
into their systems.
That was tragedy. But there were
only forty of those women, and there
are two hundred and thirty of these
West Virginian miners already attack
ed by silicosis. And s~ilicosis is just
as deadly as radium poisoning. Once
started it can't be stopped by any med
ical treatment known to a
In the mountain these miners sought
to pierce were great blocks OF quartz.
This quartz, a hard, crystalline sort Of
rock, blocked the proposed path OF the
tunnel through the mountainside. There
was only way to cleave a path
through it, and that was by blasting.
The miners drilled holes into the
CLASSY rock, inserted dynamite sticks,
hoked these sticks up to an electric
%detonator, and then withdrew while
the dynamite was discharged. The
powerful exploive tore deep gashes in
to the quartz. Huge quartz dust clouds
filled the bore after the explosion, and
miners went back into the tunnel in
time to breath this deadly dust. They
were swallowing death with every
breath, but they didn't know that.
No one, it seemed, knew it, until 167
lawsuits were filed, either by disabled
workmen, or workmen's widows, aga
inst the Rinehart and Dennis com
pany, Of Charlottesville, Virginia, con-
tractors to whom had been allotted the
task of drilling the tunnel. Each OF
those suits charged that a man wa
either dead or dying, because Of hav-
ing worked in the tunnel. After that
first 167, more workmen and their wild
ows brought suit. Each asked $4,000
damages. All told there were 230 suits,
seeking a total Of $5,750,000 from Rine-
hart and Dennis.
The plaintiffs charged they had con-
tracted silicosis, most malignant Of all
diseases of the lungs, while employed
on the tunnel project. The plaintiffs
also charged that the contractors who
undertook to build the tunnel, knew
in advance that they we're sending their
employees to death. They charged that
Rinehart and Dennis, prior to the start
of the tunnel, had contracted with a
West Virginia undertaken named White
to bury the bodies Of such victims as
the tunnel might claim, at a price OF
SIS per body. This price, the claim
ants pointed out, was lower than the
ordinary cost of burial. The plaintiffs
claimed that the low cost was agreed
upon because both the contractors and
the undertaken knew that the death
toll would be high.
The plaintiffs further charged that
the contractors bought a burial plot,
in anticipation Of the deaths Of their
workmen.
The first 167 suits we're compromised
upon payment of a total Of S13O,OOO to
the plaintiffs. The rest Of the suits
will come to trial sometime during 1884.
Construction of the tunnel, court re-
cords revealed, was started during 1929.
The long bore was to divert water
from a West Virginia river to a power
house in connection with a $1OO,OOO,OOO
water power project in the Southern
State.
Almost as soon as the tunnel was
started, the suits charged, death took a
hand in the proceedings. Workmen
who breathed in the deadly quartz dust
were attacked by silicosis.
DR.. Raymond R. Hayhurst, Of Col
umbus, Ohio, an authority on pulmon-
airy diseases, testified during the trials
of those first l67 suits, that silicosis,
once started, could not be stopped.
Medical men might, he said, arrest the
disease in its earlier stages, but even