Moore was attending the February 25 screening here of The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man (1975) and Buffalo Creek Revisited (1984). Mimi Pickering of Appalshop, a film, media, and art collective in Kentucky, produced both documentaries.

The town of Man sits at the mouth of the hollow that was flooded when a dam holding 130 million gallons of waste from Pittston Coal Company’s mining operations burst after two days of heavy rains. The flood killed 125 people, left 1,121 injured, and made 4,000 people homeless.

Many of the 120 people who filled the local high school auditorium to view the films had lived through the disaster.

“Before it happened I remember some of the children on my school bus,” Moore said. “The little Dylan girl, Darla, who got on the bus one day after her parents had done some house cleaning and brought me a bouquet of plastic flowers. And David Adkins Jr., who was too young to go to school and would sit on warm days and watch the bus go by like he was saying ‘I’m going to ride that bus next year’…. All of them were lost.”

According the March 2006 issue of National Geographic, some 500 coal waste impoundments, also called slurry ponds, dot Appalachia, more than half in West Virginia and Kentucky.

In a practice called “mountaintop removal,” coal companies have created massive surface mines over the last three decades by removing the top of mountains to expose the seams of coal. The rock and soil the coal barons remove in the process are dumped into nearby river valleys, while creating vast ponds to place the waste from washing coal. These ponds are often many times larger than the one that collapsed at Buffalo Creek.

One impoundment, owned by Massey Energy, the largest coal producer in the region, has a capacity for 2.8 billion gallons of coal waste—nearly 22 times larger than the one that burst at Buffalo Creek. It sits right above the Marsh Fork Elementary School, with an enrollment of 240 children.

In October 2000, the bottom of a slurry pond built by Massey in Kentucky collapsed into an abandoned underground mine, pouring 250 million gallons of coal slurry below. The waste filled the mine tunnels and burst out of the mine entrances into two creeks that flowed into the Tug Fork river. The spill destroyed 20 miles of stream valley.

According to Jack Spadaro, a former official with the Mine Safety and Health Administration who investigated the Buffalo Creek disaster, there are 225 of these waste ponds built above abandoned underground mines. The spill in Kentucky, Spadaro told the Williamson Daily News, contaminated the drinking water of 27,000 people.

In July 2002, another Massey slurry pond overflowed and destroyed more than a dozen homes in Logan County. “Massey jumped in there and told them, honey, you just pick out any brand new double-wide trailer you want to replace the one you lost,” Gertie Moore said. “They hoped to keep things quiet by acting quickly.”

“We just want to get the word out about the company negligence,” said Moore, who has worked with others to document the history of the flood and Pittston’s culpability in it. “We want to stop another thing like this from happening.”
 
 
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