• U.S.

Medicine: Silicosis

3 minute read
TIME

The question of silicosis last week caused a wrangle in San Francisco, where doctors, lawyers, miners, mineowners, insurance men, legislators, public health agents and fuss-budgets met to argue the pros & cons of a disease which has lately taken the public spotlight as the subject of bitter industrial controversy.

Silicosis is due to inhalation of fine, sharp particles of sand, sandstone or quartz, all of which contain silica, by miners’, sandblasters, quarrymen, tunnel borers. The silica particles erode the delicate lining of the lungs, make them vulnerable to the germs of pneumonia and tuberculosis. If those diseases do not kill, the silica victim usually wastes away to death because his clogged lungs transmit insufficient oxygen to his blood.

Because silicosis may terminate fatally as long as 40 years after silica inhalations, the California Supreme Court last year declared that there is no time limit to bar a silicotic employe from bringing a damage suit against an employer. Industrial insurance companies immediately wanted to increase their rates. Operators of deep California gold mines, which are difficult to ventilate, would be obliged to pay $22.25 instead of the current $11 premium for every $100 they pay their men. Some mines of low-profit margin have already shut down. Others threaten to do so. Mineowners and miners, who face loss of employment, were last week beseeching California’s insurance commissioner to forbid any such rate upping on account of silicosis hazards.

Last March the West Virginia Legislature passed a silicosis compensation law as the result of an unholy industrial condition from which the U. S. radical press last week was belatedly trying to distill national bitterness.

In 1929 a waterpower tunnel was begun at Gauley Bridge along the forest-fringed New River in southern West Virginia, with cheap transient labor, black and white, from mountain districts as far away as Georgia. The tunnel went through white sandstone and quartz which were 99% pure silica. Every blast of dynamite puffed deadly silica dust down the throats of sappers who wore no protective masks over their mouths & noses. Rapidly men began to die of silicosis, pneumonia and tuberculosis. When workmen refused to go into the tunnel heads, foremen, according to subsequent court testimony, often clubbed them on. But the foremen dutifully followed their gangs into the dust, and many of them died too. According to the People’s Press, Rinehart & Dennis, tunnel builders for New-Kanawha Power Co. contracted with a distant undertaker to bury casualties at $50 per head. When he had buried 169 of them on his mothers farm at Summersville, W. Va. she planted the cemetery to corn.

Digging of the Gauley Bridge tunnel ended in 1932. By that time about 500 silicosis deaths had spread terror throughout the territory. A smart Kentucky lawyer went over the mountains, instigated damage suits against Rinehart & Dennis. Some relicts won. Some derelicts won. Many lost or sued too late to accomplish anything for themselves. But as a result West Virginia passed its silicosis compensation law, which in turn prompted the radical press to dig up the Gauley Bridge skeleton, rattle its bones.

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