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> During construction of the Hudson River Tunnel in 1889, 25% of the workers died from decompression sickness. Less interesting but of far greater value to hum

> During construction of the Hudson River Tunnel in 1889, 25% of the workers died from decompression sickness. Less interesting but of far greater value to humanity has been the innovation in heath and safety regulations. According to this article [1] one worker died per foot of the Hudson River Tunnel. > In 1906, attitudes toward the sandhogs changed after a series of accidents beneath the East River. Blown-out tunnels put the dangers of the profession on display in a way few New Yorkers could ignore, and the Progressive-Era press worked to publicize them. Suddenly, sandhogs were big news, and people started to complain about their high death rates. [1] https://daily.jstor.org/the-sandhogs-who-built-the-new-york-subway/ https://daily.jstor.org/the-sandhogs-who-built-the-new-york-...

Aeolun 3y ago
You’d think that they’d stop working if they saw 1/4th of their compatriots just drop dead.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  It was a well-paid job for the time. Most of dangerous or otherwise physically taxing construction jobs still are well-paid, and for good reason.
  - culi 3y ago
    They were paid $2.50 a day. Which is around $91 in today dollars. On top of that wage theft was all too common. And that's a wage that they had to fight to unionize to get up to
    - Retric 3y ago
      Assuming I am reading this right in 1905 1/4 of male workers over 16 made 8$/week or less. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu56779232&seq=14 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu56779232&seq=1... For unskilled labor 6 days a week at 2.50/day = 15$/week which would have been quite tempting especially if the risks where unclear. It’s worth remembering when doing inflation calculations just how poor people used to be. Take the average person’s budget today and remove their car, gadgets, AC, subscriptions, most of the pricy food options, etc. Healthcare was cheap and largely ineffective, collage was rare and minimalist by todays standards. Most of what people spend money on today simply didn’t exist so not having it was normal.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        > It’s worth remembering when doing inflation calculations just how poor people used to be. And also, how much of the wealth created by the employees ended up in their pockets vs. the pockets of the owners, and how the standards of living were. Basically, back then with such a job you could afford a place to live, to have kids, a wife to take care of housework and, post 1930-ish, a car. Today? Most of my generation struggles to make rent because we're being bled dry.
        kiba 3y ago
        Lifestyle inflation, urban planning, and choices makes living a quality life more difficult than it should be. You're able to afford a larger house and a car or two, but you're also spending more money than necessary on transportation and housing. Buying a car is expensive and so is the road built for cars. Trains are more expensive than a car, but its cost can be amortized across many riders. Housing is a problem of both government and market dysfunction and is directly tied to our transportation woes. People are tied to the idea of real estate as an investment which means they often opposed development. Planners continued to zone only SFH, and made middle housing illegal. They also don't do mixed zoning which improve efficient utilization of land. I supposed if income goes to workers more, they would just push the housing price higher. It can't be fixed unless we build sufficient housing.
        Retric 3y ago
        Lifestyle inflation is why people don’t feel so much wealthier than their grandparents, but housing isn’t the economic drain it seems like because so much of its value doesn’t require resources to create. It’s mostly redistribution of income from workers to other people and as such it gets into politics. Well that and the giant ball of suck associated with long commutes, but I am kind of hoping there’s going to be more pushback on that due to people working from home during COVID. Even those who still needed to go in had vastly less traffic.
        kiba 3y ago
cyberax 3y ago
This was not so much health and safety regulation-related, but simple ignorance. The dangers of rapid decompression were not recognized until early 20-th century when underwater construction became more common. That's why "decompression sickness" is called "caisson sickness" in several languages.
- teruakohatu 3y ago
  They did know migrant workers were dying, they thought it was a sickness caught being below ground so they kept them in dorms away from everyone else. When you are hiring new people each day, to replace the ones who died, knowing that a quarter will lose their life, ignorance around exactly how they died is no excuse. Today in my country at least a single workers death is not acceptable. Accidents happen but prosecution happens if everything was not done by the book.
  - j-a-a-p 3y ago
    > Today in my country at least a single workers death is not acceptable Tolerance for workers death is highly related to location and time. We used to have large families for a reason! N=10, but nevertheless a comparison on the difference in location at exactly the same time was the Channel [0], of the 10 deaths, 8 were in Britain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel#:~:text=At%20the%20peak%20of%20construction,first%20few%20months%20of%20boring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel#:~:text=At%20th....
- runarberg 3y ago
  I don’t buy it. 25% of workers is a lot of workers for a megaproject of this scale. This would either have to be a single devastating week, in which case they would learn about it really quickly and would probably still be the collective memory, or O'Rourke Engineering Construction Company willfully allowed their workers to die out of mysterious causes and opted not to investigate. The latter is actually more likely but not really. There is no way the tunnel would have been finished if a quarter of the workforce was dying and the company just allowed it to continue happening. Compare this to the Panama Canal which started construction under US supervision the same year as the Hudson North River tunnel. They didn’t know much about the spread of tropical deceases but they knew enough to supply their workers with mosquito nets etc. The French effort to build the canal totally failed, primarily because of the high death toll among workers. When the US took over preventing the spread of deceases was a primary concern. And this project now lives in our collective memory as one that costed so many lives. Now there is no doubt in my mind that working condition for the Hudson North River tunnel were horrendous, and that far too many unnecessary deaths resulted from total disregard of worker safety by the construction company. That this number was 25% and that it was because they didn’t know about decompression sickness... That I don’t buy, dozens of workers dying from the construction company cutting corners, overworking their workers, setting harsh deadlines, not providing safety gears, and (yes) not treating sick workers, that is far more plausible.
karaterobot 3y ago
That 25% statistic is unreferenced (or else I'd have to read all the sources to find where he got that from). It's sort of difficult to imagine it being true. Because you'd also have to factor in all the people who got decompression sickness but didn't die of it, but who couldn't work anymore—you'd think that would be even higher. I have to believe that it's to be interpreted as "of the many workers who died during this project, 25% died from decompression". Maybe I'm too skeptical, but that makes more sense to me.
- j-a-a-p 3y ago
  My grandfather was for a short time in the railroad construction business under Japanese leadership about 50 years after the Hudson project. I have never met him, but I can imagine he would be delighted if the death rate would just be 25%. IIRC for the Indonesian, voluntary workers the death rate was 80%. For the prisoners like my grandfather the rate was lower, simply because they started working later (and perhaps some racism from the leadership).
legitster 3y ago
I mean, I don't think we really invented safety regulations. I am not sure if a regulation existed that could have allowed the HRT to be built safely with the technology of the time. I think technology is inherently linked with standard of living which is inherently linked to the value of a life.

Aeolun 3y ago

You’d think that they’d stop working if they saw 1/4th of their compatriots just drop dead.

mschuster91 3y ago
It was a well-paid job for the time. Most of dangerous or otherwise physically taxing construction jobs still are well-paid, and for good reason.
- culi 3y ago
  They were paid $2.50 a day. Which is around $91 in today dollars. On top of that wage theft was all too common. And that's a wage that they had to fight to unionize to get up to
  - Retric 3y ago
    Assuming I am reading this right in 1905 1/4 of male workers over 16 made 8$/week or less. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu56779232&seq=14 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu56779232&seq=1... For unskilled labor 6 days a week at 2.50/day = 15$/week which would have been quite tempting especially if the risks where unclear. It’s worth remembering when doing inflation calculations just how poor people used to be. Take the average person’s budget today and remove their car, gadgets, AC, subscriptions, most of the pricy food options, etc. Healthcare was cheap and largely ineffective, collage was rare and minimalist by todays standards. Most of what people spend money on today simply didn’t exist so not having it was normal.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > It’s worth remembering when doing inflation calculations just how poor people used to be. And also, how much of the wealth created by the employees ended up in their pockets vs. the pockets of the owners, and how the standards of living were. Basically, back then with such a job you could afford a place to live, to have kids, a wife to take care of housework and, post 1930-ish, a car. Today? Most of my generation struggles to make rent because we're being bled dry.
      - kiba 3y ago
        Lifestyle inflation, urban planning, and choices makes living a quality life more difficult than it should be. You're able to afford a larger house and a car or two, but you're also spending more money than necessary on transportation and housing. Buying a car is expensive and so is the road built for cars. Trains are more expensive than a car, but its cost can be amortized across many riders. Housing is a problem of both government and market dysfunction and is directly tied to our transportation woes. People are tied to the idea of real estate as an investment which means they often opposed development. Planners continued to zone only SFH, and made middle housing illegal. They also don't do mixed zoning which improve efficient utilization of land. I supposed if income goes to workers more, they would just push the housing price higher. It can't be fixed unless we build sufficient housing.
        Retric 3y ago
        Lifestyle inflation is why people don’t feel so much wealthier than their grandparents, but housing isn’t the economic drain it seems like because so much of its value doesn’t require resources to create. It’s mostly redistribution of income from workers to other people and as such it gets into politics. Well that and the giant ball of suck associated with long commutes, but I am kind of hoping there’s going to be more pushback on that due to people working from home during COVID. Even those who still needed to go in had vastly less traffic.
        kiba 3y ago

cyberax 3y ago

This was not so much health and safety regulation-related, but simple ignorance. The dangers of rapid decompression were not recognized until early 20-th century when underwater construction became more common. That's why "decompression sickness" is called "caisson sickness" in several languages.

teruakohatu 3y ago
They did know migrant workers were dying, they thought it was a sickness caught being below ground so they kept them in dorms away from everyone else. When you are hiring new people each day, to replace the ones who died, knowing that a quarter will lose their life, ignorance around exactly how they died is no excuse. Today in my country at least a single workers death is not acceptable. Accidents happen but prosecution happens if everything was not done by the book.
- j-a-a-p 3y ago
  > Today in my country at least a single workers death is not acceptable Tolerance for workers death is highly related to location and time. We used to have large families for a reason! N=10, but nevertheless a comparison on the difference in location at exactly the same time was the Channel [0], of the 10 deaths, 8 were in Britain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel#:~:text=At%20the%20peak%20of%20construction,first%20few%20months%20of%20boring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel#:~:text=At%20th....
runarberg 3y ago
I don’t buy it. 25% of workers is a lot of workers for a megaproject of this scale. This would either have to be a single devastating week, in which case they would learn about it really quickly and would probably still be the collective memory, or O'Rourke Engineering Construction Company willfully allowed their workers to die out of mysterious causes and opted not to investigate. The latter is actually more likely but not really. There is no way the tunnel would have been finished if a quarter of the workforce was dying and the company just allowed it to continue happening. Compare this to the Panama Canal which started construction under US supervision the same year as the Hudson North River tunnel. They didn’t know much about the spread of tropical deceases but they knew enough to supply their workers with mosquito nets etc. The French effort to build the canal totally failed, primarily because of the high death toll among workers. When the US took over preventing the spread of deceases was a primary concern. And this project now lives in our collective memory as one that costed so many lives. Now there is no doubt in my mind that working condition for the Hudson North River tunnel were horrendous, and that far too many unnecessary deaths resulted from total disregard of worker safety by the construction company. That this number was 25% and that it was because they didn’t know about decompression sickness... That I don’t buy, dozens of workers dying from the construction company cutting corners, overworking their workers, setting harsh deadlines, not providing safety gears, and (yes) not treating sick workers, that is far more plausible.

karaterobot 3y ago

That 25% statistic is unreferenced (or else I'd have to read all the sources to find where he got that from). It's sort of difficult to imagine it being true. Because you'd also have to factor in all the people who got decompression sickness but didn't die of it, but who couldn't work anymore—you'd think that would be even higher. I have to believe that it's to be interpreted as "of the many workers who died during this project, 25% died from decompression". Maybe I'm too skeptical, but that makes more sense to me.

j-a-a-p 3y ago
My grandfather was for a short time in the railroad construction business under Japanese leadership about 50 years after the Hudson project. I have never met him, but I can imagine he would be delighted if the death rate would just be 25%. IIRC for the Indonesian, voluntary workers the death rate was 80%. For the prisoners like my grandfather the rate was lower, simply because they started working later (and perhaps some racism from the leadership).

legitster 3y ago

I mean, I don't think we really invented safety regulations. I am not sure if a regulation existed that could have allowed the HRT to be built safely with the technology of the time. I think technology is inherently linked with standard of living which is inherently linked to the value of a life.