Word: gobs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with his buddies, the comfortable, hyperhearty, all-male camaraderie, joshing and drinking and regaling one another with tales of assorted, exaggerated prowess. Women are outsiders; when social events are unavoidably mixed, the good ole boys cluster together at one end of the room, leaving wives at the other. The GOB'S magic doesn't work with women; he feels insecure, threatened by them. In fact, he doesn't really like women, except...
...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 mouth, and dump this waste in--there was your...
Still, these minor defects do not mar his skills as a lawyer or the service he did the people of Buffalo Creek. Still, four years later unsafe gob piles periodically overflow in back hollows of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. They are conscientiously disregarded by company officials and state inspectors. The people of Buffalo Creek are still trying to put their lives back together; some still live in the temporary housing the government moved in after the flood. From Stern's account, for the people of Buffalo Creek and the Pittston Company it all came down to one question...
...amount of rescue work, however, could still the acrimonious debate that erupted over who was responsible for the disaster. Slag dams -or gob piles, as they are often called in the region-are an ugly but common sight in West Virginia. Like the one at Buffalo Creek, which was owned by the Buffalo Mining Co., a subsidiary of the Manhattan-based Pittston Co., they are built up from the residue that results from washing coal. The slime and silt settle, and the water that backs up behind the slag heap is often used again for washing the coal. Such dams...