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!
No comments:
Post a Comment