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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 w

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.

teruakohatu 3y ago
I can believe it, and I can believe it is still in the collective memory of the relevant unions since it is apparently partly the reason for their existence. From NY Time Archive: [1] > In 1890, 68 sandhogs died as they bored a gas tunnel under Welfare Island, now Roosevelt Island. A Manhattan coroner estimated that at least 50 sandhogs died in the first five months of 1906 in the construction of Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels. Thirteen sandhogs died building the Holland Tunnel between 1921 and 1924. So they lost 10 per month building the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels. The 25% probably refers to the underground workers, not everyone employed on the project. Either there was greater automation, or by the 1920s the numbers lost decreased substantially. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/28/nyregion/tunneling-into-world-danger-fatal-accident-puts-spotlight-sandhogs-perilous-job.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/28/nyregion/tunneling-into-w...
- runarberg 3y ago
  25% of underground workers is a far more reasonable number, and I can actually believe that. Don’t get me wrong, companies during the guilded age had no respect for their workers, and if they had to choose between worker’s lives or company profit, they choose profit 100% of the time. I just think that even during this horrible time period, you still couldn’t get away with loosing 25% of your workers while still getting the job done.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
It seems plausible to me and the Panama canal is a good comparison. 30,000 workers dies building the canal, which was 40% of the workforce. It is a lot easier to replace a few dozen men digging tunnels in New York, than find 30,000 replacements in a swamp and jungle. Life was simply cheap. If you go back 75 years further, you had pretty similar documented death rates for sailors - especially in the slave trade where a 25-50% death rate during Atlantic slave crossings was pretty common.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Deaths during construction of the Panama Canal were overwhelmingly from tropical diseases, notably yellow fever and malaria: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_construction_of_the_Panama_Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_con...> The transmission of yellow fever by mosquitos was established by Maj. Walter Reed, US Army, the physician for whom Walter Reed Hospital is named: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reed> The shear lethality of tropical diseases to Europeans prior to the 20th century really cannot be overstated. I'd run across a statistic that the life expectancy of a British soldier stationed to Africa was on the order of six months: In 1824 half the 600 soldiers garrisoned in the Gold Coast died within a few months, and the House of Commons was told in 1826, that of 1,567 troops sent out in the previous two years, 905 had died. Europeans died mainly from malaria and yellow fever - or from the “cures” which were nearly as dangerous as the ailments. Blood-letting was common. Leeches were standard colonial surgical equipment, being placed on the patients shaved head to “suck out” the fever. Great blisters were raised with steaming cloths or mustard packs and then broken to drain away the fever. On the same principle, salivating was induced by calomel, often at the expense of the victim’s teeth, or by quicksilver and mercury, an even more drastic “treatment” that inflamed the mouth and sometimes caused the sick man to suffocate on his own swollen tongue. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070106173014/myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenanderson/histemp/whitemansgrave.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070106173014/myweb.tiscali.co....> Drawing a distinction between death by disease and by accident may be somewhat arbitrary, but still seems a distinction worth noting.
  - 3y ago

teruakohatu 3y ago

I can believe it, and I can believe it is still in the collective memory of the relevant unions since it is apparently partly the reason for their existence. From NY Time Archive: [1] > In 1890, 68 sandhogs died as they bored a gas tunnel under Welfare Island, now Roosevelt Island. A Manhattan coroner estimated that at least 50 sandhogs died in the first five months of 1906 in the construction of Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels. Thirteen sandhogs died building the Holland Tunnel between 1921 and 1924. So they lost 10 per month building the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels. The 25% probably refers to the underground workers, not everyone employed on the project. Either there was greater automation, or by the 1920s the numbers lost decreased substantially. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/28/nyregion/tunneling-into-world-danger-fatal-accident-puts-spotlight-sandhogs-perilous-job.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/28/nyregion/tunneling-into-w...

runarberg 3y ago
25% of underground workers is a far more reasonable number, and I can actually believe that. Don’t get me wrong, companies during the guilded age had no respect for their workers, and if they had to choose between worker’s lives or company profit, they choose profit 100% of the time. I just think that even during this horrible time period, you still couldn’t get away with loosing 25% of your workers while still getting the job done.

s1artibartfast 3y ago

It seems plausible to me and the Panama canal is a good comparison. 30,000 workers dies building the canal, which was 40% of the workforce. It is a lot easier to replace a few dozen men digging tunnels in New York, than find 30,000 replacements in a swamp and jungle. Life was simply cheap. If you go back 75 years further, you had pretty similar documented death rates for sailors - especially in the slave trade where a 25-50% death rate during Atlantic slave crossings was pretty common.

dredmorbius 3y ago
Deaths during construction of the Panama Canal were overwhelmingly from tropical diseases, notably yellow fever and malaria: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_construction_of_the_Panama_Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_con...> The transmission of yellow fever by mosquitos was established by Maj. Walter Reed, US Army, the physician for whom Walter Reed Hospital is named: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reed> The shear lethality of tropical diseases to Europeans prior to the 20th century really cannot be overstated. I'd run across a statistic that the life expectancy of a British soldier stationed to Africa was on the order of six months: In 1824 half the 600 soldiers garrisoned in the Gold Coast died within a few months, and the House of Commons was told in 1826, that of 1,567 troops sent out in the previous two years, 905 had died. Europeans died mainly from malaria and yellow fever - or from the “cures” which were nearly as dangerous as the ailments. Blood-letting was common. Leeches were standard colonial surgical equipment, being placed on the patients shaved head to “suck out” the fever. Great blisters were raised with steaming cloths or mustard packs and then broken to drain away the fever. On the same principle, salivating was induced by calomel, often at the expense of the victim’s teeth, or by quicksilver and mercury, an even more drastic “treatment” that inflamed the mouth and sometimes caused the sick man to suffocate on his own swollen tongue. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070106173014/myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenanderson/histemp/whitemansgrave.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070106173014/myweb.tiscali.co....> Drawing a distinction between death by disease and by accident may be somewhat arbitrary, but still seems a distinction worth noting.
- 3y ago