Building the caissons to support what is now called the Witt Penn Bridge, over a dozen ‘sandhogs’ are buried after an explosion on May 29, 1929. The particulars of their loss are told as is that of the incredibly difficult and dangerous work of building the innumerable tunnels that service Greater New York, as the many hundreds killed creating them are testimony.

‘Sandhogs Die Under Mud of Hackensack River’ from The Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 72. May 31, 1929.

WORKERS DEMAND FULL COMPENSATION, INVESTIGATION BY COMMITTEE OF THE LABORERS, IN JERSEY CAISSON DEATHS

Insist Hereafter Investigator Representing the “Sandhogs” Shall Be Allowed to Inspect Apparatus on Which Men’s Lives Depend

The Daily Worker demands that all dependents of the workers killed by the Hackensack River caisson explosion and all killed in caisson accidents in the future be supported for life by the state or the employers, or both, these funds to be under the direction of the workers.

The Daily Worker demands that the alibi of the Foundation Company of New York, the employers, be not accepted. They shall not be whitewashed by a report that the accident’s cause is “unknown.” There must be an investigation into the blowing out of the air valve that caused these deaths, an investigation by the caisson workers’ union and the Central Labor Council with full participation of a committee from the Metropolitan Trade Union Unity Center.

The Daily Worker demands that there be inspection of all apparatus used in caisson work by a representative of the workers on the job, before every shift, and that the work day be cut in half, to preserve the lives of the workers from caisson disease, (the “bends”) as well as leave them sufficiently vigorous to look after themselves when accidents occur.

The Daily Worker demands that these workers especially, enduring fearful risk and hardship, shall be given sickness and unemployment insurance paid for by the employers and the state, and administered through the union. The Daily Worker demands wage increases for all caisson workers, and other bridge and workers.

***

JERSEY CITY, N.J.  May 30. Two more workers are near death as a result of their being buried with the six who are now dead in the Hackensack River caisson horror. Frank Warner, 49, of Jersey City, and James Breslin, 28, of Bayonne, both have their legs broken and their lungs full of mud from the river bottom and are not expected to live.

Meanwhile, the first casual inspection of the disaster scene has brought out the fact that the company’s speed-up policy is directly responsible for the accident. A makeshift flange had been welded on the airlock to hold the valve which blew off under only 24 pounds pressure, in violation of all safety rules and at the orders of the Foundation Company of America. Joseph Wilson, business agent for Compressed Air Workers Local, No. 67, stated that hereafter union men would refuse to work unless such flanges were bolted or riveted.

JERSEY CITY, May 30. The smothering to death of six workers in the mud of the river bottom because of the blowing out of an air valve on one of the compression locks of the Hackensack River Caisson has aroused the “sandhogs” up and down the Hudson River territory.

These workers are demanding full support for life of the dependents of the six men killed through company negligence. They demand that there shall be adequate inspection of the air compression apparatus and all lines and locks, on which caisson workers depend for their very lives, by union inspectors, for the company and state inspection yield to the profit hunger of the company, and overlook any indications of necessary repairs if such repairs would check the work. The men demand that the workers themselves work shorter shifts. At present the men labor under 35 pounds pressure to the square inch (normal air pressure is 15 pounds), for an hour and a half at a time before coming up for de-compression. Half of this time is all a man should be forced to stand, as, besides probable injury from the “bends” or caisson disease due to air pressure, this long shift leaves the crew so staggered and exhausted that the men cannot watch out for their own safety.

***

JERSEY CITY, N.J., May 30. The death list in the Hackensack River Caisson explosion was rechecked today and stood at six. The six workers were the victims of the contractors’ greed for profits.

John Byrne, 28, of 36 West 52^nd Street, Manhattan, hitherto listed as missing was one of the workers whose lives were snuffed or crushed out last night as the “sandhogs” worked in their compressed air chamber beneath the river bed.

Garvey Escapes Death.

Another of the men of the Caisson job, originally listed as missing—James Garvey, of Jersey City—reported to the foreman.

Two bodies were brought out of the execution department today, D. Mulloy of Newark, and John Gallagher of Brooklyn, and the latter was so crushed and mangled that only his brass check, No. 645 told rescuers who he was.

The Air Line Explodes.

The men were the victims of an exploded air pressure line. It was only the air pressure which had held the massive steel box up giving them an eight-foot clearance to work in.

Only the pressure had kept the ooze and muck from sucking in from the bottom. When the pressure failed, they were caught in a brutal vice. At midnight, the weight of the caisson had carried the dead men, engineers reckoned, twenty feet further down through solid mud.

The list of dead and injured workers follows:

The Dead.

BYRNE, John, 36 East Fifty-sixth Street, Bayonne.

HADLEY. Jack, 116 Tonnelle Ave., Jersey City.

MULLOY, D., 55 Bridge Street, Newark.

GALLAGHER, JOHN, 50 Berkley Place, Brooklyn.

GALLAGHER, PATRICK E., 934 Third Avenue, New York.

One more, unidentified.

The Missing.

TRACY, W., 74 West Eighty-ninth Street, New York.

HART, JAMES, 409 Communipaw Avenue, Jersey City. In Jersey City Hospital.

JONES, PATRICK, foreman, 371 East 204th Street, shock.

BRESLIN, JOHN, 36 West Fifty-second Street, Bayonne, severe bruises and internal injuries.

DOHERTY, PATRICK, 310 East Ninety-sixth Street, New York, fracture of the right leg, internal injuries and possible fracture of the skull.

WARNER, FRANK, C33 Ocean Ave., Jersey City, fracture of right leg and internal injuries.

MORLEY, DAN, 18 Pearson Place, Long Island City, Queens, fracture of bones of right foot.

GARVEY, JAMES, 647 Pavonia Avenue, Jersey City; internal injuries and fractured leg.

MULCAHY, JOHN, 443 East 138^th Street, the Bronx; shock and bruises.

Three more men later were removed and the four were taken to the Jersey City Hospital. Jersey City police declared that the rest of the men had drowned.

The negligence of the contractors stood out as the blame for the deaths of these workers. In the hurry to complete the job in quick time, precautions were simply ignored, the “sandhogs” said, and the air pressure line exploded as a result.

A “sandhog” on the Hackensack River job, in a letter to the Daily Worker last week pointed out the danger of death for these underground “sandhogs,” as workers who work in compressed air, in building tunnels are called. The dangers of this work were exposed in this letter, yet despite the fact that the letter was written over a week ago, conditions remained the same, up to the very time of the disaster which killed the six workers.

The letter of the “sandhog” follows in part:

“The ‘sandhogs’ work at building tunnels, and in all underground and underwater construction. It is very risky work, as you will soon see.

“To begin with—let me tell what happened the other day to a couple of ‘sandhogs’ over in Jersey. Two men employed as ‘sandhogs’ by the McMullen Construction Co., at work at Newark Ave. and the Hackensack River were stricken with the terrible ‘bends’ last week. One was William Lovelace, of Brooklyn, and the other, a Negro ‘sandhog,’ Richard Jones. I will tell of this disease.

“Let me describe the work, for instance that we did on the new subway tunnel under the East River, between Fulton St., Manhattan, and Cranberry St., Brooklyn, a job we finished last Wednesday.

Going Under.

“Each morning, when we come to work, we are lowered in a hoist to a level 76 feet below the surface of the river. In front of us, in the face of the tube that stretches out under the river, is a huge steel door, like that of a vault. We pull it open, and enter a small room where there are several wooden benches and a table. The door is shut, and a lever is pulled to put us under a pressure of 8 pounds to a square inch: the air is shut off. While this is done, there is a roaring and screaming—your nerves have to be pretty hard to stand the noise. Our noses bleed badly while the air is being lowered to the 8 pound pressure. Then the valve is again opened, and we are put under a pressure of 15 pounds, then a door is opened in the opposite wall, and we have to step out into the tunnel.

Cave-Ins.

“On the floor of the tunnel carloads of sand are being drawn on tracks to the surface. Cave-ins often are possible, another risk for the sandhogs.

Under 35-Lb. Pressure.

“Then comes another bulkhead, another hot, stifling room in which we are locked. More air, more awful noise. Then we are put under a pressure of 35 pounds to the square inch, gradually working up from 20 pounds. Then we step out to dig away at the sand.

“Our ears are ringing. Your own voice sounds like the voice of someone far, far away.

Danger All Around.

“For an hour and a half we dig at the wall of sand. Danger is all around us. If something happens to the air compressors and the pressure fails, good-bye—we’ll be drowned like rats before we can get back to the airlocks. Hundreds of ‘sandhogs’ lie at the bottom of the Hudson River.

“Then there is the danger of explosion—if a joint gives way under pressure. When this happens, the company blames the workers, we ‘didn’t do our work well,’ they say.

“We can work only for an hour and a half at a stretch—no human being can work longer under compressed air. We have to go thru the same sort of process before we can get out into the normal air, as we went thru before going in—five minutes in each airlock.

The “Bends.”

“Then comes the danger of the ‘bends’—the disease that gets us all sooner or later.

“The pressure has filled our blood with bubbles of oxygen which must be thrown off before we re-enter normal air pressure. Doing this we are liable to be seized with the ‘bends,’ cramps and convulsions which double a man up with pain and convulsions. After a rest we go back again to the work in the tunnel. For this dangerous work, we get paid $11.50 a day, and are liable to be drowned like rats any time. That’s the ‘sandhogs’ work.”

***

Six “Sandhogs” Smothered in Mud.

Editorial.

“SANDHOGS” is the name applied to workers who go down into the silt and mud of river beds to tunnel for subways or excavate for huge piers. The use of this cynical expression itself grows out of the utter indifference with which the profit-taking capitalist social order looks upon the lives of workers condemned to the most dangerous kind of toil.

The callousness with which workers are murdered outright on their jobs was revealed again Wednesday in the killing of six “sandhogs”, toiling 80 feet below the bed of the Hackensack river under twenty-five pound air pressure, excavating for the third pier of the joint Pennsylvania railroad and state highway bridge, in Jersey City. Worker correspondents on this job had already written in to the Daily Worker and described in detail the dangers and the agonies of their toil. This showed that the “sandhogs” themselves were keenly alive to the dangers threatening them. But they were powerless to remedy this condition. The Compressed Air Workers’ Union, like other trade unions of its kind, is a mere job trust and does not wage a class fight for real protection for the lives of its members. The Tammany Hall-controlled Central Labor Union is just as immune to any such effort.

The explanations advanced for the disaster show the carelessness Exercised in protecting the workers. These are as follows:

First:—That the bucket into which the “sandhogs” shovel muck to be hoisted to the surface might have caught on the air valve and broken it. Why was the air valve so exposed?

Second:—That a mixture of oakum and mud had been used in some instances to stop air leaks instead of a special rubber cement generally used on such jobs. A few pennies were thus saved by substituting mud for rubber cement, but at the cost of murdering and maiming more than a dozen workers.

Third:—Another opinion was that the severe electrical storm which hit Jersey City at the time had caused the air “to blow”.

Surely, modern science could even overcome this,—if true, otherwise work should cease during a thunder storm until everything was found again to be in order.

The indifference revealed by these futile efforts to offer an acceptable excuse for the death of these workers, shows what the caisson in which they toiled was but an executioner’s chamber that awaited only the fatal hour when death would rush in to snuff out the lives of the condemned. Capitalism itself is the executioner that numbers its victims in industry by the hundreds of thousands. The employers’ demands for increasing profits, for the speed-up, resulting in the worsening of the conditions of labor and the standard of living, is the driving cause of evils inflicted on labor, including the death sentence invoked against the six workers whose remains now lie buried in 25 feet of mud in the Hackensack river. Labor must struggle against this murder by wholesale through developing the broadest demand for all forms of protection against accident, death, unemployment, occupational diseases, industry to bear the entire expense. This latest disaster should create tremendous support for these all too meager demands.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1929/1929-ny/v06-n072-NY-may-31-1929-DW-LOC.pdf