Construction is a deadly industry. Falls, electrocution, blunt force trauma and mishaps with heavy machinery are just a few of the hazards workers face on project sites around the world, whether they’re building a small house or a massive dam. Historically, it hasn’t just been the nature of the work that makes this job so dangerous, but also attempts to cut costs and boost productivity at the expense of worker safety. Though tighter regulations have made mass worker deaths less common, they still happen, and the numbers can still be shocking.

When we calculate the costs for major infrastructure projects, we rarely include human lives in the figures. How do we do that math, anyway? Bridges, canals, tunnels, dams, railways and highways have made a lot of human “progress” possible over the last two centuries, but it’s worthwhile to consider their true toll – and remember that many of the dead were migrant workers, colonized people and prisoners.

Death and the Dam

Even putting aside the environmental cost of dams – which have the greatest negative impact on rivers of all human activities – these behemoth structures are wildly expensive, and thousands of lives have been sacrificed to build them. The Hoover Dam, a 1,244-foot-long, 726-foot tall monstrosity on the Colorado River that holds back so much water it actually deformed the Earth’s crust, famously involved over 100 deaths throughout its construction between 1922 and 1935. The first was J.G. Tierney, a surveyor who drowned while looking for an ideal spot, and the last, strangely enough, was Tierney’s own son Patrick, an electrician’s assistant who fell from an intake tower.

In between were at least 100 “industrial fatalities” and dozens of deaths officially attributed to pneumonia but possibly linked to carbon monoxide poisoning. Workers often found themselves using gasoline-powered equipment in poorly ventilated spaces that reached temperatures as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Though legend has it that some of the men are buried in the Hoover Dam, it’s unclear whether there’s any truth to it – unlike a similar situation at Montana’s Fort Peck Dam. When a 1938 structural failure caused 34 workers to become trapped by debris, eight died, and only two bodies were recovered. The other six remain entombed somewhere beneath all that shale, bentonite and concrete.

In Washington State, the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam not only damaged crucial salmon runs and flooded the traditional fishing sites, burial grounds and sacred cultural gathering places of the Spokane Tribe without adequate compensation, it resulted in the death of 77 workers between 1933 and 1941 and another four during construction of the Third Powerhouse between 1967 and 1975. As of 2018, there’s no monument or placard honoring any of the lives lost. Other dams along the Columbia, including the Bonneville, The Dalles, the John Day and the McNary, displaced the Native American tribes who lived along the shores of the Columbia River for millennia, leading to generational poverty that makes the true death toll of the dams a lot higher than the official numbers from the time of their construction.

The single deadliest dam remains the Aswan on the Nile River in Egypt, which took over 30,000 workers a decade to complete and resulted in 550 deaths. This didn’t happen at the turn of the 20th century, but rather 1960-70. Though it’s credited with boosting the Egyptian economy, at least 100,000 people had to be relocated, and many priceless archaeological sites were flooded.

Tragic Tunnel Disasters

One of the worst industrial disasters in United States history, the Hawks Nest Tunnel began as a diversion project for the New River in West Virginia. When workers discovered valuable silica in the rock, they were asked to mine it as a byproduct of construction – without any protective gear. All the dust they inhaled led to a disease known as silicosis, a lung disease marked by inflammation and scarring. The official death count is 109, but due to the number of workers who quit in the midst of the project, the number could be as high as 1,000.

New York City’s Third Water Tunnel has been under construction since 1970, and it’s still not complete. The largest capital construction project in New York City history, the tunnel is located more than 500 feet below street level and will ultimately stretch more than 60 miles once the third and fourth sections are finally built. Twenty-four deaths are attributed to the project, mostly consisting of workers, but also including a twelve-year-old boy who fell into an uncapped water pipe in the Bronx.

And, in Switzerland, 19 people died while working on the ten-mile St. Gotthard Road Tunnel, which connects central Switzerland to Milan, Italy through the Alps, with an additional 8 perishing during the construction of the separate 35.5-mile Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world’s longest railway and deepest traffic tunnel.

Treacherous Highways & Railways

Connecting Pakistan and western China through the Himalaya Mountains, the Karakoram Highway is the highest paved road on Earth and passes through the 15,397-foot Khunjerab Pass, the world’s highest border crossing. It’s full of hairpin curves and deadly drop-offs and often gives drivers altitude sickness, making it dangerous to navigate. It was also unsurprisingly arduous to build. 810 Pakistani workers and 82 Chinese workers died due to landslides and falls throughout its 27 years of construction between 1959 and 1986.

Constructing railways is even more treacherous. The First Transcontinental Railroad, a 1,912-mile continuous rail line built between 1863 and 1869 from the eastern U.S. rail network at Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco made California and the rest of the West Coast of the United States accessible during a time of westward expansion. Americans were free to travel from coast to coast with unprecedented ease, and the railroad enabled the shipment of millions of dollars worth of freight every year. It also had a massive impact on the Native Americans through whose lands the railroad passed, resulting in cultural, economic and human destruction that’s hard to quantify, including the loss of the bison many tribes relied on for survival. The tribes who did attempt to fight back, like the Paiute, were dismissed as saboteurs.

Meanwhile, the manual labor required to produce the railroad was almost entirely carried out by thousands of emigrant workers from China, who received less pay than white workers for difficult and dangerous tasks. The Central Pacific didn’t keep records of worker deaths, but it’s estimated that some 1,200 died. They were temporarily buried along the rail line by fellow workers, the bones collected and shipped back to China at a later date according to Chinese practice.

The Burma-Siam Railway is nicknamed “The Railway of Death” for a reason. Built by the Empire of Japan in 1943 to support its forces in the Burma campaign of World War II, the railroad was completed using the forced labor of up to 250,000 Southeast Asian civilians and 61,000 Allied prisoners of war. Conditions in the jungle were so brutal, with guards beating and torturing workers and not enough food and medicine to go around, that an astonishing 90,000 laborers and 16,000 Allied prisoners died.

The High Cost of Huge Canal Projects

Hailed as one of the greatest infrastructure projects the world has ever seen, the 48-mile Panama Canal required the removal of more than 3.5 billion cubic feet of dirt to connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean through the Isthmus of Panama, diverting the Chagres River and creating the artificial Gatun Lake. France began the project in 1991, but engineering challenges and a high worker mortality rate brought their efforts to a stop, and the United States took over in 1904. Ten years later, it was open for business.

The Panama Canal is often considered one of the wonders of the modern world, and its annual traffic is estimated to be over 15,000 vessels. A grandiose display of American exceptionalism that helped make the U.S. a major world power, the project forever changed Panama’s culture. But it came at the cost of at least 5,609 lives (likely far more than that, by many historians’ calculations), most of whom were contract workers from the Caribbean.

In 1931, the Soviet Union put 126,000 gulag inmates to work on the White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal, a ship canal running through Russia from the White Sea in the Arctic Ocean to the Baltic Sea in St. Petersburg. The 141-mile route was hailed as a success for its quick construction, completed four months ahead of schedule using almost entirely manual labor, though it ultimately wasn’t as deep as originally planned due to cost issues. Though prison labor projects weren’t usually publicized, the White Sea project was an exception, with the Soviet Union boasting about how the “class enemies” (political prisoners) rehabilitated themselves in the process. Prisoners who were able to complete their work the fastest were rewarded with food. Needless to say, conditions were rough, and though it’s unclear exactly how many died, estimates generally run around 25,000.

Clearly, well-built infrastructure is a crucial component of the modern world. But if we can learn anything from the mistakes humans have made throughout history, perhaps we should keep in mind just how much we’ve sacrificed to reach this point and how much thought we should put into the impact of each and every project, from design to demolition and beyond.

A formerly abandoned 1970s highway in South Korea’s capital city now hosts 24,000 plants as the Seoullo Skygarden, an elevated public park open to all citizens 24 hours a day. That’s a big deal in a city where so much architecture and infrastructure tends to be corporate-sponsored, with special perks for paying customers of companies like Hyundai. Mayor Park Won-soon, a former human rights and anti-corruption activist, wanted to balance all those logos with public spaces that are more accessible to all.

Dutch architecture firm MVRDV was tasked with designing the park back in 2015, and in just two years, they’ve created a successful public space revitalizing and connecting public spaces near the main railway station that were previously fragmented by roads and rail tracks. Its base, a 1970 motorway flyover, sat empty for a long time after being deemed unsafe for its original purpose.

The Skygarden is packed with 645 potted trees and around 228 species and sub-species of plants, adding a significant amount of greenery to a highly paved area of the city – not to mention encouraging foot traffic, recreation, interaction and physical activity. The route is set up to create a network of hotels, shops, gardens and other attractions, enlivening the center of the city. It’s not just a walkway – it’s an educational experience.

“The linear park was designed as a collection of small gardens, each one with its very own composition, perfume, color and identity,” says MVRDV. “The landscape will change according to the seasons: the bright colors of leaves in autumn of the Aceraceae family (maples), the blossom of cherry trees and rhododendron in spring, the evergreen conifer trees ink inter and shrubs and trees bearing fruit in summer.”

“In the future, the overpass will evolve with new plants and new activators so as to become an ‘urban nursery,’ rearing trees for the surrounding districts. Additional structures of stairs, lifts and escalators as well as new ‘satellite’ gardens can connect to the Skygarden, sprouting like branches from the existing structural piers. These extensions can inspire further additions to the area’s greenery and public spaces, and will connect the Skygarden to its surroundings both physicallyl and visually through plant species related to each of the neighborhoods.”

Once vital threads in the fabric of Americana, these abandoned fruit & produce stands no longer entice hungry travelers into making roadside pit stops.

An urban farm in a state whose rivers have been known to catch on fire? It’s more likely than you think: the six-acre Ohio City Farm in Cleveland operates between June and November though the Farm Stand only opens on weekends.

Etsy member GregMurrayPhoto and Flickr users MMW Horticulture Group and LAND studio, respectively, snapped the photos above. Gotta love that eggplant-purple, zombie-proof corrugated facade – all that’s missing is a herd of vegetarian walkers milling about in front. BROOOCCCOLIIII…

An Apple Less

North of the border, a similar unsavory situation is unfolding as Canada builds more major highways and country farms lose access to vehicular travelers – and vice-versa. The abandoned apple stand above was snapped along Highway 11 near Coulson’s Hill in northern Ontario

Michaux Lonely

Speaking of TWD, the abandoned Michaux Produce stand (and matching flatbed truck) in Goochland County, VA might have served as an alternate filming location had Georgia’s governor not vetoed a certain bill. They could call it “Michonne’s Produce”, harvested with a samurai sword while-u-wait! Kudos to Flickr user Aes D for getting up close and personal with the pleasant yet eerie scene in September of 2015.

Sign of the Times

No sign remains of this Florida roadside produce stand – er, the stand seems to be gone but the sign remains, though not for much longer by the looks of it. Flickr user Dan Optimus Prime (dvn225) captured the sorry signboard standing – barely – just outside Daytona Beach in March of 2013.

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Fruitless 10 Abandoned Roadside Fruit Produce Stands

These artistic acoustic highway noise barriers combine form with function, neatly blocking the sound of road traffic while looking darned good in the process.

This proposal for an environmentally-friendly acoustic barrier (“Forest Corridor”) in Hong Kong was designed by Bread Studio to meet three strict conditions: masking the sight of the highway from nearby residential buildings, improving the view of the highway’s underside for people in the park below, and relieving drivers from any claustrophobic impressions as they cruise through the de facto tunnel.

Leapin’ Lizards!

Stretching for six miles along both sides of the Pima Freeway’s sound barrier wall in Scottsdale, AZ, “The Path Most Traveled” by artist Carolyn Braaksma evokes the essential nature of the region’s desert ecosystem.

Interspersed among a mix of abstract and Native American-style motifs are prickly pear cacti standing up to 40 feet tall and enormous lizards almost 70 feet long.

Clearly Beautiful

Melbourne’s freeway network is the largest of any Australian city, and without sound barriers the aural impact on residential neighborhoods would be substantial. Cheap and unimaginative acoustic walls would also have a detrimental effect on drivers so a pleasing compromise was achieved that satisfied both.

Tinted acrylic plastic panels set into sound walls along the EastLink Freeway maintain audio insulation while adding visual interest at a reasonable cost. Want to see the world through rose-colored sound barriers? Get your eyes to Australia!

“Sixty Seconds of Architecture”

Louwman Exclusive Cars is a high-end exotic automobile dealer located in Utrecht, the Netherlands, just off the A2 highway between Amsterdam and Maastricht. Instead of making do with a bland and boring sound wall, the dealership opted instead for an acoustic barrier “designed from the perspective of a flow of cars passing by with the speed of 120 km/h.” Fast company indeed.

Stretching 1.5 kilometers in length, the 5,500,000-euro barrier designed by Kas Oosterhuis widens to a 30m “cockpit” that accommodates the auto dealer’s showroom and service bays. No doubt it’s quite quiet inside as well.

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Mufflers 10 Artistic Acoustic Highway Noise Barriers

Rest stops and welcome centers are to highway travel what oases are to desert caravans, with one exception: when an oasis dries up, the camels unload anyway.

European? NOT HERE!

(image via: Neoamaru)

Making a run for the border? Not so fast… this abandoned rest stop on the border between France and Belgium no longer offers a welcome break for weary travelers; one imagines the Wehrmacht was rather put out. Kudos to Flickr user Neomaru for capturing this curious relic of modern architecture in its currently colorful yet sadly forlorn state.

No Rest For The Wicked

(images via: Midwest Roads)

We don’t make a habit of ignoring road signs (and neither should you) but in this case we’ll make an exception: the rest stop at milepost 104 on US 41 southbound, about 3 miles north of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, hasn’t existed since some time in the mid-1990s. So then, does the sign advise the next rest stop is 21 miles further down the road or that this is (was) the last rest stop FOR 21 miles? Why not both?

(images via: Midwest Roads)

Scott Kuznicki visited the location of this late and unlamented rest stop on October 5, 2002… we don’t know why, but he’s got the photos to prove he (and the rest stop) was/were there. Maybe he just needed an alibi. Anyway, as you can see there’s not much evidence for the rest stop’s existence besides fencing and faded stripes on the road.

The CHiPs Are Down

(images via: Wikimapia)

Rest stops in California are funded and maintained by the state’s Department of Transportation, known as CalTrans. While many rest stops in remote areas were closed relatively recently due to California’s never-ending fiscal crisis, the rest stop whose remnants linger on Highway 99 bit the dust in the early 1980s. It did have one claim to fame while still standing, though: an episode of the popular TV crime drama CHiPs centered around an accidentally abandoned baby left at a rest stop… THIS rest stop.

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Go Somewhere Else 8 Abandoned Roadside Rest Stops