Word: slag
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Chris and his mother barely escaped with their lives last February when a badly constructed coal-slag dam gave way and unleashed 130 million gallons of seething water on the mining communities of Buffalo Creek, W. Va., killing 125 and leaving 4,000 homeless (TIME, March 13). Chris was carried to high ground by his father, but his two sisters were swept from their mother's arms and drowned. Last week, seven months after the disaster, much of the physical havoc caused by the flood had been repaired, but the psychological damage to hundreds of families like the Hopsons...
Three days of rain mixed with a runoff of snow had dramatically raised the level of the lake dammed up behind the huge coal-slag heap at the head of Buffalo Creek. It was still raining hard at 5:30 a.m. when Logan County Deputy Sheriff Otto Mutters was awakened by a phone call from another deputy warning him that the slag heap was in danger of giving way. As Mutters remembers, "My gut went tight...
Holding Fast. After the other deputy's call, Mutters drove to the slag heap and checked with a mining official, who assured him that the dam was holding fast. Unconvinced, Mutters set out in his car to spread the alarm. But there was too little time, and the people of Buffalo Creek had been threatened too often before with false alarms about the dam. Some time after 8 a.m., the wall of slag burst open "like a bomb had hit it," according to one witness, and a huge mountain of water and sludge descended on the hollow, trapping many...
...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...
...which matters little to the grieving and homeless miners of Buffalo Creek Hollow, many of whose kin and neighbors now lie beneath the markers that dot the rolling hills of West Virginia. The people of Buffalo Creek say that they have known for years that the slag pile was dangerous. And yet, in the face of a peril so imminent, they continued to live in the threatened valley because it was the only life they knew...