'Hawk's Nest' by Hubert Skidmore

Tunnel builder's deaths during Depression was state's dirty secret for decades

Sunday, September 19, 2004

By Tom Birdsong, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The sickness started slowly, subtly.

First, a red ring around the eyes. Then a cough, followed by shortness of breath.

'HAWK'S NEST'

By Hubert Skidmore

University of Tennesee Press


Quickly, though, the cough became wracking and a man would nearly choke trying to catch his wind. Then he died, all in less than a year's time.

Hubert Skidmore's novel lays out hundreds of such deaths in a read that is shocking and depressing.

Based on true events that occurred in the early 1930s in south-central West Virginia, where thousands of Depression-starved men headed from across the country when they learned of work in a huge tunnel being drilled where the New and Gauley rivers joined to form the Kanawha River.

The state of West Virginia billed it as a massive project to divert river water into a 3-mile hole to spin a turbine and create electricity for the public.

But in reality, the $4 million project was a sweetheart deal with the Union Carbide Corp., which needed the juice for a smelting plant it planned to build below the tunnel on the Kanawha.

West Virginians didn't know that, just as the 5,000 men who would eventually work in the tunnel weren't told another nasty secret:"


Hawk's Nest