March 19, 2025, An Interesting And Informative Day In Prestonsburg, Kentucky

On March 19, 2025, my wife Candice and I took a trip to Prestonsburg, Kentucky, to complete a variety of intended actions including a minor amount of shopping, eating out for lunch, and a hike for me at Jenny Wiley State Park where I often hike when we are in Floyd County. Our first stop was at Wal Mart to do a minor amount of shopping, and then off to Jenny Wiley State Park where one of my favorite hiking trails starts near the lodge and has about 4 miles of linked trails around the mountain, over and along the ridge, and a connecting trail which can take you off the mountain to the site of the former Jenny Wiley Amphitheater which still exists as a building but is, sadly, no longer in use due to the demise of the Jenny Wiley Summer Music Theater which functioned there for several decades. When we got to the park, I left Candice reading in the van as I often do and headed out to hike toward the trailhead near the lodge. As I approached the trailhead, I could see yellow construction barrier tape across the start of the trail with a printed message taped to a post. The message stated that this portion of the trail was closed due to a mudslide, and that the remaining portions of the trail could be accessed at the amphitheater spur. I started back in that direction, stopped for a few minutes to read the names and text on a monument to the children and bus driver who died in the 1958 Floyd County School Bus Wreck, and then headed on toward the amphitheater which is situated near the convention center which is used for a variety of purposes including state employee training sessions, weddings, banquets, and other public events. I have even once seen a rained out performance of the Roger Miller written musical "Big River" in the convention center. As I approached the convention center parking lot, I realized that several vehicles including a group of travel trailers, several cars from various othet states, and one or two vehicles actually marked with signs for the American Red Cross were in the parking lot. I realized the convention center must be in use as the stationary site for the Red Cross Disaster Response to the recent flooding in Eastern Kentucky which had devestated larger portions of Eastern Kentucky and Floyd County in particular. I also remembered that the Jenny Wiley State Park Lodge was once again in use as emergency housing for flood victims as it has been used on at least one other occasion under the incredibly effective and compassionate leadership of Governor Andy Beshear. I had to walk past the rear entrance of the convention center to get to the trail and when I turned that corner I saw two people sitting at a table outside the rear entrance. I suspected they were Red Cross volunteers and stopped to verify that and thank them for their work. We introduced ourselves and my hike turned into a long conversation with these two people and a third who showed up a bit later. They were from three different locations in the country, all long term Red Cross workers, one with ten years of service, one with sixteen years of service, and the third with an amazing forty-one years of work with the American Red Cross and on their third deployment to Eastern Kentucky in disasters. Our conversation quickly turned political and they opened up to me about their fears for the future of FEMA and the likelihood that TRAITOR Trump will destroy that agency and further worsen the disaster response to upcoming hurricanes, floods, forest fires, and other disasters. I expressed my own identical opinions and they reassured me that the Red Cross will always continue to provide disaster services since it is a private non-profit agency. But we all agreed that the future response from the federal government to disasters in the next four years, if TRAITOR Trump is not removed from the White House, will be slipshod at best with any federal funding likely to come to the states in block grants which will be pillaged on two or three levels before any of it actually reaches victims themselves. One of these Red Cross workers had actually been part of the response to the most recent Puerto Rican hurricane disaster when TRAITOR Trump was living in White House the first time and sent almost nothing to the people of Puerto Rico for a variety of reasons including his racism, ignorance, TREASON, and total lack of compassion and empathy. It was very refreshing to have this conversation with people who have traveled the world doing good works for the betterment of the human race, who understand the dire straits our country has been in since January 20 2025, and who can speak as openly as I do about the danger which is presented to the country by TRAITOR Trump and his Criminal Syndicate. I never finished my hike due to the length of that conversation but I have put in about a half hour between my parking location at the parking lot of the old golf course, the lodge, the closed trailhead, and the convention center. I also got a second half hour afterward at the Big Sandy Community and Technical College walking track and campus. As I walked across the campus, I encountered the sign at the top of this blog post, realized immediately that it would be considered a violation of TRAITOR Trump's malicious executive order against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and decided to document these signs for my readers before the Right Wing Radical Repugnican head of the state community college system in Kentucky can force these signs to be removed from the campus, and order that racism, sexism, and mysogny be practiced in the community college system across the commonwealth. Below is the seond sign which was available on the BSCTC campus and all the other community colleges in Kentucky.

Some Thoughts About The Buffalo Creek Flood, February 26, 1972

Today, February 26, 2020, is the 48th anniversary of the Buffalo Creek Flood on Buffalo Creek in Logan County West Virginia which killed 125 people due to the criminal negligence of Pittston Coal Company.  At the time of the flood, I had never been on Buffalo Creek or even in Logan County.  I did not know anyone on Buffalo Creek at the time of the incident.  But like many other key moments in the history of the country, Buffalo Creek and that flood were seared into my memory.  Just two years later, I was enrolled in the Southern Appalachian Circuit of Antioch College in Beckley, West Virginia, and became much better educated about the crimes which caused the Buffalo Creek Flood.  I made my first trip up Buffalo Creek sometime in 1984 as a door to door salesman but that first trip up the creek is seared into my memory just as the day it happened was seared.  I will always remember that as I drove up Buffalo Creek past the coal camps of Saunders, Pardee, Lorado, Craneco, Lundale, Stowe, Crites, Latrobe, Robinette, Amherstdale, Becco, Fanco, Braeholm, Accoville, Crown and Kistler, I could actually still see many signs of the flood.  I had grown up near Wayland, Kentucky, and if you have ever known one coal camp town in Central and Southern Appalachia, you have known all of them in some key ways.  The streets were nearly all laid out along a common pattern.  Nearly all the houses for common miners were built along one or two similar patterns, often in duplexes intended for two families.  As I drove up the creek, one of the first things I noticed was that there was actually a visible high water line along the sides of the hills up the valley where the age of the trees above and below that line were clearly different.  That forty foot high wall of water had ripped down the valley and literally torn the trees and vegetation out of the ground up to the limits of its reach.  You could also see a line, depending on the type of ground a particular coal camp had been built, where there were no houses or only severely damaged houses below it and intact houses and blocks of houses above it.  You could see a few intact stretches of the old, crooked, two lane highway which had survived the flood and long stretches where there was only the much straighter and wider new road which had been built after the disaster.  

But, if you met and talked to many of the surviving residents as I did, you would hear stories if the people trusted you about how and why they had survived the flood, some due purely to blind luck, others who had left the creek because it was apparent for several days that the two sludge dams in the head of the creek would fail in the heavy rains that came that week.  You would also hear heart rending stories of the dead who had died purely because state and federal regulators in West Virginia had ignored many warning signs before the flood, had refused to force Pittston to properly repair and reinforce the aging and overloaded dams.  You would hear stories from local residents who had survived the flood and spent days without basic services as they helped search for the missing and dead.  You would hear mothers and fathers grieving for dead children, surviving children mourning parents who would never see those children grown or see their grandchildren, you could meet the undertaker who buried many of the dead and refused to discuss the disaster, and you could also meet the people who had been forever damaged in heart and soul by the flood and its multiple aftermaths and could not and would not ever discuss it because they had no words to tell their losses and grief.  

Every year, when this day comes, I remember Buffalo Creek where I have spent many days, met many survivors, and learned a great deal about just how corrupt American corporations and politicians had shirked their moral, ethical, and legal responsibilities on Buffalo Creek.  I remember that many good, decent, hard working men and women, numerous potentially successful children, and a lot of older citizens were cheated out of a decent end to decent lives because Pittston was not held responsible for their crimes on Buffalo Creek both before and after the flood.  May all the dead rest in peace!