At Hawk’s Nest, hundreds of sickened workers died, then were hidden and forgotten; it wasn’t an accident - Pittsburgh Union Progress

At Hawk’s Nest, hundreds of sickened workers died, then were hidden and forgotten; it wasn’t an accident - Pittsburgh Union Progress

Sam Ward spent the first few minutes of Wednesday, Feb. 15, 1933, trying to suck enough air into his lungs to keep himself alive. Most likely he was lying on a bed in a crudely built shack near a small West Virginia town called Gauley Bridge. The constant effort to breathe exhausted him. This had been going on for months. Records show Ward first saw a physician about his health problems in August 1932. In these moments, did he think of his young…