The Corps Checked the Dams Next to Buffalo Creek. All Would Fail.

R001 '''[[:Category:Slag heaps in the United States|SLAG HEAP]]''' ABOVE HOUSING ON BUFFALO CREEK NEAR LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA. SLAG HEAPS ARE ONE OF THE ITEMS WHICH MAKE MINING FAMILIES MAD. THEY CAN BE IGNITED BY SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, LIGHTNING, FIRE OR VARIETY OF OTHER THINGS, AND BURN INDEFINITELY
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

Everything on the left of this photograph is coal waste. Everything on the right is a town.

On a Saturday morning in February 1972, a pile like this one let go above Buffalo Creek, West Virginia.

It killed a hundred and eighteen people.

The company that owned it told the United States Senate the failure was not reasonably foreseeable.

Four months later the Army Corps of Engineers went and looked at four more coal-waste dams in the same county, still standing. It reported that all of them would fail too.

Both were printed by the same Senate subcommittee, in the same summer, about the same valley. This is what happens when you read them next to each other.

R003 AERIAL OF A TYPICAL COMPANY TOWN NEAR LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA WITH THE SCHOOL AT ONE END AND THE COMPANY STORE AT THE OTHER COMPANY TOWNS ARE BECOMING A THING OF THE PAST. BECAUSE THEY NOW HAVE THEIR OWN TRANSPORTATION, THE MINERS CHOOSE TO LIVE AWAY FROM THE MINES IN WHICH THEY WORK AND COMMUTE AS MUCH AS 25 MILES ONE WAY TO WORK. BEFORE MINERS HAD THEIR OWN CARS THEY CLUSTERED IN COMPANY TOWNS AND WALKED TO WORK
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

Buffalo Creek runs seventeen miles down through Logan County, in the southern West Virginia coalfield.

R005 HOUSES PERCHED ON A HILLSIDE IN LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA. MANY HOMES ARE BUILT ON HILLY GROUND BECAUSE FLAT LAND IN THE VALLEYS IS AT A PREMIUM. MANY OF THE YOUNGER MINING FAMILIES ARE BUYING MOBILE HOMES BECAUSE THEY ARE CHEAPER THAN CONVENTIONAL HOUSING AND TAKE UP LESS SPACE
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

Small communities were strung along it in the valleys, supported by the mines.

R010 VIEW OF THE MAIN HIGHWAY THROUGH HOLDEN, WEST VIRGINIA NEAR LOGAN, SHOWING HOMES OF MINING SUPERVISORS FRAMED BY PINK DOGWOOD. THE TOWN HAS SIDEWALKS, A FEATURE NOT EVIDENT IN MANY OF THE MINING COMMUNITIES. THESE TWO STORY HOUSES WITH FOUR ROOMS ON EACH FLOOR CONTRAST WITH THE TYPICAL MINER HOME OF ONE STORY AND FOUR ROOMS NEXT TO THE RAILROAD TRACKS. THE SEPARATION BETWEEN THE TWO TYPES WAS SYMBOLIC OF A CASTE SYSTEM THAT IS BECOMING A THING OF THE PAST
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

There is no flat ground. The creek takes the bottom, the road takes what is left, and the houses go up the hillside.

R004 MAIN STREET OF LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA, SHOWING A NARROW STREET WITH PARKING ON ONLY ONE SIDE WHICH IS TYPICAL IN MANY OF THE SMALL TOWNS IN SOUTHERN WEST VIRGINIA
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

This is Logan, the county seat, photographed two years after the flood.

R007 MAIN STREET OF DEHUE, WEST VIRGINIA, A YOUNGSTOWN STEEL CORPORATION COMPANY TOWN NEAR LOGAN
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

These are the company towns around it. Dehue belonged to Youngstown Steel.

R008 REAR VIEW OF SUPERVISORS' HOUSING IN DEHUE, WEST VIRGINIA, A YOUNGSTOWN STEEL CORPORATION COMPANY TOWN NEAR LOGAN. IN THE OLDER HOUSING THE SUPERVISORS WERE GIVEN TWO STORY HOMES WITH FOUR ROOMS ON EACH FLOOR WHILE THE WORKERS RECEIVED ONE STORY FOUR ROOM DWELLINGS. THE HOUSES ALSO WERE SEPARATED, SYMBOLIC OF A CASTE SYSTEM THAT IS NOW BECOMING A THING OF THE PAST
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

In the older camps the supervisors were given two-storey houses with four rooms on each floor. The miners got one storey and four rooms, next to the railroad tracks.

R006 TYPICAL SHOT OF MINERS' HOMES BY THE RAILROAD TRACKS WHILE THE SUPERVISOR'S HOUSE IS UP THE HILL. THIS PICTURE WAS TAKEN IN CLOTHIER, WEST VIRGINIA, NEAR MADISON. IT IS SYMBOLIC OF THE RIGID CASTE SYSTEM WHICH PREVAILED BETWEEN LABOR AND MANAGEMENT IN THE MINES, BUT WHICH IS NOW BECOMING A THING OF THE PAST
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

The photographer wrote that down in his caption. He was working for the Environmental Protection Agency, and the pictures are federal property.

R002 TYPICAL SCENE OF A MEDIUM-SIZED COAL MINE AT THE BASE OF A FORESTED VALLEY NEAR LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

Behind the towns, the mines put out something nobody sells. Coal comes out mixed with rock and slate, and the plant that cleans it has to put the refuse somewhere.

R019 OLD SLAG HEAP NEAR PIGSKIN, WEST VIRGINIA, AND BECKLEY SHOWS THE FIRST SIGNS OF NATURAL RECOVERY. IT IS A LONG, SLOW PROCESS AND BEGINS ONLY IF THE PILES ARE NOT SO STEEP THAT THEY ERODE INTO THE STREAMS. SLAG HEAPS ALSO CAN CATCH FIRE AND BURN INDEFINITELY FROM A NUMBER OF CAUSES. THIS IS ONE OF THE TOPICS OF CONVERSATION THAT MAKE MINERS MAD
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

So it goes in a pile across the valley. In this county the piles were often burning, lit by spontaneous combustion, and they burned for years.

The pile on the Middle Fork of Buffalo Creek was doing a second job. Pittston's president explained it to the Senate.

Construction of the embankment that gave way, he said, started about 1968 — at the request of a state inspector, to comply with West Virginia's Water Pollution Control Act.

The thing that failed had been built to satisfy a clean-water law. It was there to keep the black water out of the creek.

Nobody designed it to hold back a lake. It became one anyway.

Pittston acquired the stock of Buffalo Mining Company in June 1970. Before that, it said, it had no connection with the operation at all.

The men who lived under the pile knew what was up there. One of them worked for the company.

Denny Gibson was an employee of Buffalo Mining and a former resident of Saunders, nearest the dams. Asked how long he had been there: I was born and raised there.

Sam Lusk worked the evening shift. On the Thursday night before the flood he stayed past it and worked under the dam.

A drain pipe crossing the road had washed out and the water was over it. He went around and put red dog across, so the miners could get back and forth.

Two days before, his father was talking to the company about that washed-out pipe — about hauling car bodies in to hold the water back until they could get the tile across.

And in that conversation, under oath, this is what Sam Lusk said his father told a Pittston vice president.

That one of these days, you are going to wash away Buffalo Creek Hollow.

The answer, in the record, is that the vice president told him to hush. He did not want to scare people like that.

The chairman noted another witness had already described fear, for years, that this dam might break. He asked Lusk if he had felt it. Lusk said: yes, sir.

The committee's own summary of that morning says the survivors would describe how they attempted to do something about these dams before they failed.

Saturday, February 26th, 1972. A little before eight in the morning.

Sam Lusk's parents lived further up, at Saunders. His mother was cooking breakfast. His father was getting ready to go to the bakery.

The power went off. She ran to the front door.

She said it was nothing but just black. You could see nothing. That was the only warning they got.

Lower down, Mrs. Lusk was still in bed when her sister-in-law screamed.

She leapt out of bed and ran through the hallway, and the water was too close on them. In her words: we could not run, we just had to go down with it.

The house caved in with them inside. They stayed trapped in it, found the top, and rode the roof down to Glendale — about a mile and a half from where they lived.

She told the Senate it tore her house into splinters. There was one board left.

The Corps put the release at between a hundred and fifty and two hundred million gallons of sludge-filled water, and thousands of cubic feet of refuse, into a seventeen-mile valley.

A hundred and eighteen people were killed. When the hearings opened three months later, seven were still missing.

Five hundred and twenty-three were injured. More than five hundred homes were destroyed outright, and more than five hundred more damaged. Over a thousand automobiles were gone.

The highway and the railroad through the valley were useless. All power and telephone service was destroyed.

The chairman said that to appreciate the force of it, one only had to see the railroad rails, twisted and bent like pretzels.

P03 '''[[:Category:Slag heaps in the United States|SLAG HEAP]]''' ABOVE HOUSING ON BUFFALO CREEK NEAR LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA. SLAG HEAPS ARE ONE OF THE ITEMS WHICH MAKE MINING FAMILIES MAD. THEY CAN BE IGNITED BY SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, LIGHTNING, FIRE OR VARIETY OF OTHER THINGS, AND BURN INDEFINITELY
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

And then he said the thing this episode is about.

The widespread devastation, destruction and killing was first labelled by some as an act of God — a statement that, all too frequently these days, is the first judgment about these disasters.

He had reason to be sharp about it. His committee had already investigated Farmington, West Virginia, and Hyden, Kentucky, and found both of those disasters were man-made.

On the afternoon of the first day, the president of the Pittston Company was sworn.

He began by assuring the Lusk family and the Mullins family that the human needs of the situation were being recognised, and that the losses sustained would not go uncompensated.

Then: the failure of the impoundment, I am convinced, was not foreseen. And I believe that it was not reasonably foreseeable.

If there had been any thought that this impoundment was unsafe, he said, it would never have been built.

He told the committee no notice or order had ever been received alerting Buffalo Mining that the impoundment was dangerous — and that the Bureau of Mines and the state apparently held the same view.

Two things in his statement deserve to be said plainly, because they are true and they cut his way.

Most of Buffalo Mining's records were destroyed in the flood. And the preparation plant engineer — whose job included supervising the water impoundments — was one of the casualties.

Those who built the pile and inspected it, he said, lived on Buffalo Creek, or had relatives and friends who did. That is also true.

But the centre of his defence was not any of that. It was an argument about the neighbours.

The embankment, he said, had been built by experienced coal-mining men, in the way such impoundments had been built throughout the West Virginia area and elsewhere.

And then: that the impoundment was regarded as safe is attested to by the fact that other and similar impoundments — constructed in precisely the same manner, at almost precisely the same location —

had served the same purpose for which they were constructed, in a safe and proper way.

R001 '''[[:Category:Slag heaps in the United States|SLAG HEAP]]''' ABOVE HOUSING ON BUFFALO CREEK NEAR LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA. SLAG HEAPS ARE ONE OF THE ITEMS WHICH MAKE MINING FAMILIES MAD. THEY CAN BE IGNITED BY SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, LIGHTNING, FIRE OR VARIETY OF OTHER THINGS, AND BURN INDEFINITELY
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

That is a real argument. It says: look at the others. They are the same, and they are standing.

The chairman had already asked the Corps of Engineers to do exactly that.

But before the Corps, there was a man with a notebook, five years earlier.

In March 1967 the United States Geological Survey published a report called Stability of Coal Waste Banks. It is printed in the hearing record.

It is not a warning in general terms. It goes bank by bank, hollow by hollow, and says what each one would do.

Of one bank at Haymond, in Kentucky: there is no spillway for this pond, and on the northeast the bank is only four feet above pond level.

A cloudburst could cause overtopping and breaching of the bank. The debris washed from such a break would probably reach five or six houses.

That was written in 1967. Nobody had to imagine it in 1972.

In July of 1967 a congressman named Ken Hechler toured slide areas in Logan County with state officials. The local paper carried it.

They called the situation deplorable, and a threat to the safety of residents.

A month after the flood, a senator asked the Bureau of Mines about a figure that had appeared in the Washington Star.

The director wrote back on the twenty-second of March, 1972, and confirmed it. About seventy-five inadequate banks are located in eastern Kentucky and southeastern West Virginia.

The report it came from, he said, was the Geological Survey's — the result of a study conducted in 1966. Six years before Buffalo Creek.

He added that a joint task force was, at that moment, investigating the same banks again.

So: to the Corps of Engineers, and the four dams still standing.

They flew the area twice by helicopter and drove it once, and chose four sites still in use, with pools of water behind them.

Amherst Coal, on Dick Branch of Buffalo Creek. Youngstown Mines, on Rum Creek. Island Creek Coal, on a branch of Spruce Fork.

And the Powellton Company, on Rockhouse Creek, about two miles above the town of Man.

The Amherst pile, the report notes in passing, sits across Buffalo Creek from the small, partially destroyed village of Franco.

And about Powellton, the Corps wrote down exactly why it picked that one.

This impoundment was selected as being the most similar in size, construction and use, of those observed, to that of the Middle Fork, Buffalo Creek.

R017 ROAD LEADING THROUGH RED JACKET, WEST VIRGINIA, NEAR LOGAN MUCH OF THE TOWN ORIGINALLY WAS OWNED BY THE ISLAND CREEK COAL COMPANY, BUT IS IN THE PROCESS OF BEING SOLD TO PRIVATE OWNERSHIP THE OLD IMAGE OF THE COAL COMPANY TOWN IS GIVING WAY AS ATTITUDES CHANGE. THE TOWN IS NEAR THE BUFFALO CREEK AREA WHERE 104 PEOPLE WERE KILLED IN THE EARLY 1970'S WHEN AN EARTHEN DAM GAVE WAY DURING A RAINSTORM
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

They went looking for the closest thing to the dam that killed a hundred and eighteen people. They found it two miles above another town.

Here is what the survey concluded about all four.

All of the active dams covered in this survey, in their present operating conditions, are not safe as regards sliding stability. They are subject to eventual failure due to uncontrolled seepage.

And, as could be determined, every one of them had already had some form of failure in the past.

Potentially all of them lacked adequate spillways and were subject to overtopping. And potentially all of them, in the report's words, will fail by sliding with catastrophic consequences.

The summary was flatter still. The dams are, in general, only barely stable under present conditions. The study indicates that all will fail under reasonably high pool conditions.

None of the dams observed are considered safe structures. They were not designed and constructed to withstand the natural destructive action to which they can be exposed.

Most of the dams in the area, it added, are burning. This could lead to failure of the dams.

And then the Corps of Engineers wrote a sentence you do not often find in a government report.

Contemplation of the appalling possible results, in the area, of a deluge normally associated with a hurricane of major proportions —

or of a moderately severe earthquake in the early spring, when the embankments would be more nearly saturated than at other seasons —

is stupefying. In that the recent Buffalo Creek disaster could be multiplied manyfold.

If the dams studied are accepted as representative of those in coal mining areas, the report said, major changes are necessary for the entire industry.

Its recommendations were blunt. If owners decline to make the dams safe, the dams should be breached. Inactive dams in the area should be breached.

And one more, which is its own indictment: existing statutes as to safety of dams overlap, and their technical adequacy in some cases is questionable.

This should be corrected, and one agency made clearly responsible.

Nobody was in charge of it. That is why the questionnaire each company was handed had to ask the most basic questions there are.

Has the pile been on fire. Is it burning now. Has any effort been made to zone the pile.

Set the two documents side by side and the shape is plain.

The company said the impoundment must have been safe because the others like it were standing. The Corps went and looked at the others like it, and said they were not safe either.

The defence and the finding are the same sentence, read twice.

R009 VIEW OF MINE SUPERVISORS' HOUSING IN A COAL COMPANY TOWN NEAR LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA. THEY ARE ACROSS THE ROAD FROM THE MINERS' HOMES WHICH ARE NEXT TO THE RAILROAD TRACKS. THE SUPERVISOR HOMES ARE TWO STORY STRUCTURES WITH FOUR ROOMS ON EACH FLOOR, COMPARED TO THE MINER HOMES WITH FOUR ROOMS. THE PHYSICAL SEPARATION BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT SIZE HOUSES WAS SYMBOLIC OF A CASTE SYSTEM OF THE PAST THAT NOW IS CHANGING. SEE PICTURE #13982 FOR MINER HOUSING
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

If every comparable dam in the county was unsafe, then Buffalo Creek was not an exception to how the valley was built. It was the rule.

The inescapable conclusion, the Corps wrote of the older dams, is that when no spillway exists and the proper amount and intensity of rainfall takes place, these dams will fail — with considerable damage in loss of life.

R015 ROW OF MOBILE HOMES NEAR MADISON, WEST VIRGINIA, WITH TRASH THROWN ALONG THE EDGE OF THE CREEK IS A TYPICAL SCENE IN THE MINING VALLEYS THAT DOT THE AREA. THE TRAILERS ARE APPEALING TO THE YOUNG MINERS BECAUSE THEY CAN BE BROUGHT FOR LESS THAN CONVENTIONAL HOUSING AND TAKE LESS SPACE. LEVEL LAND IS AT A PREMIUM IN THE VALLEYS
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

Two years later the photographer came back through Logan County for the Environmental Protection Agency.

R001 '''[[:Category:Slag heaps in the United States|SLAG HEAP]]''' ABOVE HOUSING ON BUFFALO CREEK NEAR LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA. SLAG HEAPS ARE ONE OF THE ITEMS WHICH MAKE MINING FAMILIES MAD. THEY CAN BE IGNITED BY SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, LIGHTNING, FIRE OR VARIETY OF OTHER THINGS, AND BURN INDEFINITELY
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

He photographed the slag heaps still standing above the housing on Buffalo Creek, and wrote that they can be ignited by lightning or spontaneous combustion, and burn indefinitely.

R018 AERIAL VIEW OF MOBILE HOMES USED BY FAMILIES WHOSE HOUSING WAS WIPED OUT IN THE EARLY 1970'S WHEN AN EARTHEN DAM GAVE WAY DURING A RAINSTORM ON BUFFALO CREEK AND CREATED A TIDAL WAVE THAT KILLED 104 PEOPLE NEAR MAN AND LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA. THIS IS NOT THE MAIN VALLEY, BUT A HOLLOW OFF TO ONE SIDE
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

He photographed rows of mobile homes in a side hollow — used, he wrote, by families whose housing was wiped out when the earthen dam gave way.

P01 AERIAL VIEW OF MOBILE HOMES USED BY FAMILIES WHOSE HOUSING WAS WIPED OUT IN THE EARLY 1970'S WHEN AN EARTHEN DAM GAVE WAY DURING A RAINSTORM ON BUFFALO CREEK AND CREATED A TIDAL WAVE THAT KILLED 104 PEOPLE NEAR MAN AND LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA. THIS IS NOT THE MAIN VALLEY, BUT A HOLLOW OFF TO ONE SIDE
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

His caption puts the dead at a hundred and four. The Senate record puts it at a hundred and eighteen, with seven still missing. Even the file gets it wrong.

Five months after the flood, on the eighth of August 1972, Congress passed an act to authorise the Secretary of the Army to undertake a national program of inspection of dams.

He was to do it through the Chief of Engineers — the same Corps that had just been sent to look at four piles in Logan County.

All dams in the United States shall be inspected by the Secretary, for the purpose of protecting human life and property.

R005 HOUSES PERCHED ON A HILLSIDE IN LOGAN, WEST VIRGINIA. MANY HOMES ARE BUILT ON HILLY GROUND BECAUSE FLAT LAND IN THE VALLEYS IS AT A PREMIUM. MANY OF THE YOUNGER MINING FAMILIES ARE BUYING MOBILE HOMES BECAUSE THEY ARE CHEAPER THAN CONVENTIONAL HOUSING AND TAKE UP LESS SPACE
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

What did not change is in the photographs. The waste is still on the hill and the houses are still under it, because there is nowhere else in a hollow for either to be.

Everything in this video is a federal document or a federal photograph, and you can read all of it yourself.

The hearings are Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, Disaster, 1972, before the Subcommittee on Labor. The act-of-God line is on page one.

Pittston's president begins at page two ninety. The Geological Survey report is at page eight fifty-one.

The engineering survey is a Senate committee print from June 1972. The general conclusions are on page one seventy.

R019 OLD SLAG HEAP NEAR PIGSKIN, WEST VIRGINIA, AND BECKLEY SHOWS THE FIRST SIGNS OF NATURAL RECOVERY. IT IS A LONG, SLOW PROCESS AND BEGINS ONLY IF THE PILES ARE NOT SO STEEP THAT THEY ERODE INTO THE STREAMS. SLAG HEAPS ALSO CAN CATCH FIRE AND BURN INDEFINITELY FROM A NUMBER OF CAUSES. THIS IS ONE OF THE TOPICS OF CONVERSATION THAT MAKE MINERS MAD
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

The photographs are the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA file, in the National Archives, and they are free. Every identifier is in the description.

P02 OLD SLAG HEAP NEAR PIGSKIN, WEST VIRGINIA, AND BECKLEY SHOWS THE FIRST SIGNS OF NATURAL RECOVERY. IT IS A LONG, SLOW PROCESS AND BEGINS ONLY IF THE PILES ARE NOT SO STEEP THAT THEY ERODE INTO THE STREAMS. SLAG HEAPS ALSO CAN CATCH FIRE AND BURN INDEFINITELY FROM A NUMBER OF CAUSES. THIS IS ONE OF THE TOPICS OF CONVERSATION THAT MAKE MINERS MAD
Jack Corn · Apr. 1974 · National Archives, RG 412 · DOCUMERICA. View the original.

Nothing here is colorized. That is what April looked like in the southern West Virginia coalfield in 1974.