Interview with Gertie Moore
January 29, 2007

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It is odd that nearly every town with a coal-mine is a rural ghetto, considering the profits from coal. Mining companies do not enrich the communities from where they operate rather, they do more to deplete them. Time and history shows the coal companies’ disregard for the communities they have exploited and often destroyed.

Ed Wiley resides in one of these towns. He is now lobbying for a safer elementary school. Wiley’s granddaughter attends Marsh Fork elementary school in the town of Sundial, West Virginia located near Whitesville. Marsh Fork has 230 children and is 400 yards away from a mountaintop removal coal mine. The school is below the Shumate sludge impoundment that holds 2.8 billion gallons of toxic sludge in a 385-foot-high dam. The creek surrounding the elementary school is polluted and the air conditioners suck in the same coal dust that children will inhale in their barb-wired fenced playground.

If the Shumate sludge impoundment ever breaks the school’s emergency procedure is a bullhorn. The school will have less then three minutes to evacuate the school before the black coal water is 6 feet high and rising to 15 feet.

Wiley has a legitimate pretense to be concerned for his granddaughter’s safety. In 1966 a colliery waste tip collapsed off of Merthyr mountain in Wales and buried 116 children between ages 7 to 10, this was to be known as the Aberfan disaster. Although the waste tip’s instability was known, nothing was done and no apology has ever been made by the coal company.

In 2000 a Massey energy dam in Martin County, Kentucky broke allowing 300 million gallons of sludge to pollute the water supply.

Another tragic example is the Buffalo Creek disaster that occurred 35 years ago. Imagine hearing a horrible boom while you are cooking breakfast at 8 a.m. one morning, you go outside and hear your neighbor screaming “The dam has broke!” and a 25 to 30 foot wave of black coal water is demolishing houses and cars and taking your neighbors with it. It is difficult to describe such an experience. If someone is fortunate enough to survive it, the psychological scars will traumatize for a lifetime.

The Pittston coal company in Buffalo Creek knew about the possibility of danger beforehand but there are mixed stories about a warning call. “Yah, they warned us, one man just laughed it off cause there had been so many warnings before that he didn’t believe it…that man died,â€? said one survivor. Another survivor said she didn’t hear any warning except for the sound the dam made when it broke.

125 people were killed, three were never found, over a thousand were injured and 4,000 were left homeless. The destroyed communities were split apart into different trailer parks and there was nearly nothing left of the town of Saunders, West Virginia.

People were outraged when the Pittston coal company excused the disaster as “an act of God”. “The coal company is more responsible for it than God because they were the ones that built it and they didn’t give out any information on it,â€? said one survivor.

To place responsibility on God immediately after one of your dams has broke and killed over a hundred people sounds insensitive and irresponsible to be heard from a coal company in a time of despair, but it does hold a grain of truth.

It was raining for an entire week before the dam in Buffalo Creek collapsed. Hurricane Katrina was obviously a catalyst for the levee’s collapse in New Orleans as was the rain for Buffalo Creek’s dam.

As global warming continues and the oceans rise the world can expect an increase in the frequency and intensity of harsh weather from hurricanes to storms. The severe weather along with poorly constructed dams will cause more dams to break and it is paramount that Marsh Fork elementary does not become another Buffalo Creek or Aberfan disaster.

It’s important to note that the Buffalo Creek survivors I interviewed have no vendetta against coal mining, they are not deep into politics but they do respect human life and wish that the coal companies had done the same.

written by Kent Kessinger