This article originally provided by The Charleston Gazette

February 27, 2007

Buffalo Creek remembered

Survivor recalls horrifying moments, haunting memories

By Ken Ward Jr.
Staff writer

Thirty-five years to the day after he narrowly escaped death at Buffalo Creek, memories of the disaster still haunt Arley Johnson.

Johnson, his mother and eight brothers and sisters scrambled up a hillside just minutes before a wall of water and coal waste hit their Amherstdale home.

“I had time to get a pair of pants on, a blanket and a pair of boots,” Johnson, who was 12 at the time, recalled Monday afternoon.

A lot of Johnson’s neighbors weren’t so fortunate.

Shortly before 8 a.m. on Feb. 26, 1972, a Pittston Coal slurry dam far up Buffalo Creek collapsed. More than 132 million gallons of water and coal waste rushed down the hollow from Saunders to Man.

By the time the flood was over, 125 people had died. Another 1,100 were injured and about 4,000 were left homeless.

On Monday afternoon, about 75 people gathered at the state Capitol to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Buffalo Creek disaster.

The Rev. Dennis Sparks, executive director of the West Virginia Council of Churches, said the event was held “lest we forget the agony that was brought on so many people” by the disaster.

In a low-key event just outside the House chamber, organizers showed several videos with footage of the disaster’s aftermath. A handful of environmental and labor lobbyists stopped by, and only a few lawmakers attended.

Johnson, a former delegate, gave the keynote address, calling Buffalo Creek “a great watershed event” for himself and for West Virginia.

Five years after Buffalo Creek, lawmakers repeatedly cited the disaster when they passed the landmark Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 to force federal regulation of strip mining.

For example, one committee report noted Buffalo Creek in explaining why state and federal inspectors needed authority to shut down mining operations that posed imminent danger to public safety or the environment.

“To provide otherwise would be to perpetrate the possibility of tragedies such as the Buffalo Creek flood, which can be at least partially attributed to the sad fact that government regulation of the collapsed mine waste banks fell between the cracks of the not quite meshed functions of state and federal agencies,” said the House committee report from April 1977.

Johnson recalled that Pittston Coal officials knew that the dam was reaching the breaking point, and that government officials all the way up to then-Gov. Arch Moore had been warned of the danger.

“My government failed me, and failed my classmates and failed my siblings,” Johnson said.

Johnson recalled going to a makeshift morgue in a local school, seeing the body of a child his age, and trying to wipe the mud off her face.

“She was a classmate of mine,” Johnson said. “We were square dance partners.

“The water was very black,” he said. “It was nasty. It was sludge.

“That day, every victim was the same color — they were all black,” Johnson said. “They were black in their hair. It was grimy. It was slimy. It was nasty.”

Today, hundreds of coal-waste dams still dot the Appalachian coalfields.

Regulators and the coal industry say these dams are much different from the one that failed at Buffalo Creek. Modern coal dams are designed and built to detailed engineering specifications, they say. Dams are regularly inspected, they say, and enforcement is tough.

But in October 2000, the floor fell out of Massey Energy’s Big Branch Impoundment in Martin County, Ky. More than 300 million gallons of slurry — 28 times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill — poured into an adjacent underground mine. From there, the slurry flowed out into two local streams and into the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, along the West Virginia-Kentucky border.

Lawns were buried up to 7 feet deep, and all of the fish were killed in two streams. Drinking water supplies were fouled along more than 60 miles of the Big Sandy.

After Martin County, the National Academy of Sciences said in an October 2001 report that tougher regulation of slurry dams was needed. But neither the federal Office of Surface Mining nor the Mine Safety and Health Administration has issued new impoundment rules.

And concern over coal slurry disposal continues.

At Monday’s event, some Raleigh County residents said they still worry about a Massey Energy impoundment just upstream from Marsh Fork Elementary School. Six years before Buffalo Creek, a dam collapsed near the mining village of Aberfan in South Wales, killing 144 people, including 116 children at a school below the impoundment.

Also, residents of Mingo County are concerned that a nearby impoundment, along with the injection of slurry underground — touted by the National Academy as a possible alternative to dams — is polluting their drinking water.

Johnson, who now works for the governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, said he tried to work to address such concerns when he was in the Legislature.

“How is it that we can live in a state that is so wealthy in resources, in water and natural gas and coal, and our people still be so poor?” Johnson said.

To contact staff writer Ken Ward Jr., use e-mail or call 348-1702.