The Buffalo Creek Disaster of February 26, 1972, occurred when Pittston Coal Company’s coal slurry impoundment dam #3 in Logan County, West Virginia, burst forth after heavy rains, unleashing 132 million gallons of black wastewater.  The burst in dam #3 subsequently caused dams #1 and #2 to fail. The disaster left 118 dead, 7 missing, 1,121 injured, and over 4,000 homeless. Property damages exceeded $50 million. According to Pittston Coal, the dam failure had been an ‘Act of God’. This ‘Act of God’ occurred only four days after the impoundment had been inspected and declared ‘satisfactory‘.

The Governor of West Virginia at the time, Arch Moore, formed an investigative commission, which consisted solely of coal industry supporters. After the commission denied a request that a coal miner be added to the commission, a Citizen’s Commission formed to perform their own independent investigation of the disaster. The citizen’s report concluded that Pittston Coal was guilty of the murder of at least 124 people.

Previously in 1966, after a coal-waste dump in South Aberfan, Wales gave way killing 147 people, a geologist from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Mines conducted a survey of potentially dangerous slag heaps in the coal-mining regions of the U.S. In that survey the Buffalo Creek dam was reported to be ‘unstable’. Later, the U.S. Interior Department gave a report on 38 West Virginia Coal Waste Dams to the Governor. Those in need of immediate repair were fixed, but no other corrections or inspections were done. In February of 1968, concerned residents of Buffalo Creek wrote the Governor expressing their fears that the dams were in danger of collapsing, but the dams were merely looked at and no corrections were made. Dam 3 collapsed in February 1971 causing black water to bubble up in the impoundments behind the dam. More coal refuse was dumped in to fill the break in the dam.

Due to the negligence on the part of Pittston Coal, some 625 survivors sued the Pittston Coal Company for $64 million in damages. They settled for $13.5 million. A second suit by 348 child survivors sought $225 million and settled for $4.8 million. The State of West Virginia also sued the company seeking $100 million, but Governor Moore settled for a mere $1 million. Gerald M. Stern, an attorney with Arnold & Porter, the law firm that had represented the case, wrote a book dedicated to the victims of the flood, entitled, “The Buffalo Creek Disaster.” The West Virginia Division of Culture and History has also compiled information concerning the event on their website.

Buffalo Creek by T. Paige