Word: creeks
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...TAKES A LOT of water to operate a coal tipple, and the one out on Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia was no exception. The tipple, owned by the Pittston Company through its Buffalo Mining subsidiary, used almost 500,000 gallons every day, two shifts a day and six days a week, pumping between 400 and 500 gallons of waste-filled water every minute. The waste was refuse from the coal mine, about 500 tons every day. Nobody knew what to do with...
...because the federal government decided that the Buffalo Mining Company couldn't dump this refuse-filled water into Buffalo Creek anymore (where it killed all the fish), the company began to build the first of three dams that would create ponds where it could dump the water. And the company could also kill two birds with one stone: it would build the dams out of the gob pile that just lay smoldering beside the mine--unhealthy situation that. You couldn't really call it a dam--no engineering, no overflow, no drains, just back some trucks up to the hollow...
...there was 500 tons of waste and slate and crap going into the ponds behind the dams every day, and so they silted up pretty quick. By February, 1972, the largest one over on Middle Fork, a tributary of Buffalo Creek, had been built: 100 feet high and 600 feet across...
...late for that, though. When they got to the dam a little before 7 a.m., it was gone. And 21 million cubic feet of water and God knows how many tons of mud and slag and crap were headed for the 16 little communities nestled along Buffalo Creek. Pretty soon, they were gone too. The flood swept down the narrow valley, 40 feet high, picking up automobiles and mobile homes and even houses. Even people. And when it was all over, 125 of them were gone...
Having witnessed a ceremony in which the merchants of Georgia received at least 2 million acres from the Creeks and Cherokees as "a discharge of their debts," Bartram has no doubt that the encroachments will continue. Nor will his own words, if they are ever published, dissuade Americans from pressing ever deeper into Indian lands. Wherever he goes, he reports on natural marvels-enchanting springs, crystal lakes, whole hillsides blazing with azaleas, potentially rich farm lands -that are sure to entice others to brave the wilds and tame them too. Bartram himself is next going into the largely unexplored territory...