F. BRIAN FERGUSON/Sunday Gazette-Mail
From the yard of his Pardee home, Donald Johnson, 38, looks up the
hollow in the direction the wall of water traveled 25 years ago.
By Robert J. Byers
SUNDAY GAZETTE-MAIL
PARDEE - Stray dogs roam the barren upper reaches of Buffalo Creek. Peering
from beneath the shelter of the long-deserted tipple, they offer a slow,
wary wag to cars passing along the narrow road.
There once was a town here called Saunders or Three Forks, but it is 25
years gone. There used to be a huge dam filled with black murky water,
but it's gone, too. There's just brush ... standing dormant, waiting for
spring.
* * *
Just down the hollow, among the scattering of houses known
as Pardee, Donald Johnson pauses to consider that it was a quarter-century
ago when his father came home from working all night in the mine and heard
the dam giving way. The family got out in time, but the house was torn
from its foundation.
From that day forward, all was changed for Johnson and most everyone on
Buffalo Creek. Nothing could ever be the same.
While a hundred West Virginia coal towns and hollows underwent and continue
to undergo a slow demise in the face of mining mechanization, Buffalo Creek
and the 17 towns that lined it banks took their medicine in one bitter
dose.
"Things would've been a lot better around here if it never would've
broke," Johnson said.
Upon turning 18, the juvenile survivors of the disaster received a legal
settlement averaging $2,800. Johnson, now 38, was one of those recipients.
"A lot of the kids got their money and turned to drugs. All of a sudden,
they had all this money. They went wild," Johnson said. "Back
before the flood, nobody around here even knew what pot was."
His family home gone, Johnson had moved away from Buffalo Creek following
the disaster, but upon getting his settlement, he bought a pickup truck,
got married and relocated to the only home he had ever known.
Why the survivors returned to the scene of so much horror is unexplainable,
but return they did. Today the hollow is a scaled-down and more modern
version of its past self. Folks keep to themselves a lot more, and there's
an odd quiet that pervades from Kistler to Pardee, but residents of Buffalo
Creek who lived through the flood are like the members of an exclusive
club. They can talk to scores of curious outsiders about what they experienced,
but no one can understand like a "club" member.
"After it washed my house away, I had a place all picked out in Tennessee,"
recalls Charles Crum of Lorado. "Why I didn't go and decided at the
last minute to rebuild here, I can't tell you. I just don't know."
As he walks down a Lorado side street, Crum pauses to let a neighbor walk
on ahead. "He lost his wife in the water," he says softly. "It's
not good to talk about it around him. It still hurts, I know."
Twenty-five years later and the hurt still hangs over Buffalo Creek like
the gray winter sky.
"There's still a lot of pain here, but it gets a little better every
year," Crum says.
"We waited 20 years"
In the coming weeks, at a tiny roadside park in Kistler, two Buffalo Creek
time capsules are to be buried. Inside will be various news clippings and
mementos telling of the disaster over the years.
The capsules are part of an ongoing effort by a small group of residents
bent on keeping alive the memory of the 125 people who lost their lives.
Glenna and Melvin Wylie, mother and son, are leaders of the effort. Last
year, they finalized plans for the roadside park and granite slab listing
the names of the dead.
"We waited 20 years, and finally decided that something had to be
done," said Mrs. Wylie, 71. "It took us about two years just
to get the land."
The memorial is fenced, and inside, a small pavilion protects visitors
from the elements. A signature book lists visitors in the past few months
from as far away as Denver and Phoenix.
Not a drop of spray paint stains the memorial. The small grassy lot is
free of litter.
"The kids have been real good about leaving it be," Mrs. Wylie
said.
Melvin Wylie, 41, is very protective of the memorial, giving a close eye
to a couple of recent visitors.
"The year it happened was my senior year in high school," Wylie
recalled. "I lost my grandfather and a lot of classmates."
Shortly after the water receded, Wylie's father and his teen-aged son left
their Kistler home on a hike up the hollow.
"At that time, all we saw on television was scenes from the war -
men in uniforms and helicopters," Wylie said. "And as we were
walking, I looked around and thought, this must be what Vietnam is like."
That ghastly trip up the hollow is something Wylie will never be able to
banish from his mind.
"It affected me," he said. "It still does."
And as Wylie recently sat in his mother's kitchen, telling of seeing a
large scoop accidentally pluck the head from the body of one of his classmates,
Mrs. Wylie slowly shook her head and said, "I've always thought his
father shouldn't have taken him up there."
In the years after the disaster, Wylie worked for Pittston Coal, the very
company responsible for the faulty dam.
"My job was to fill in the old dam," he said. "We worked
from '78 to '93 on that, filling it in with slate and dirt and rock. It
was always strange driving up there each day to work and thinking this
is the thing that killed all those people."
The dam burst at 8 a.m. on Feb. 26, 1972, after a few days of hard rain.
More than 130 million gallons of black water poured down the hollow, killing
125 people and injuring countless more. Four thousand people were left
homeless.
Pittston called it "an act of God," words that still sting survivors'
hearts.
F. BRIAN FERGUSON /Sunday Gazette-Mail
A memorial at Kistler pays tribute to the victims.
The ideal of home
Mining still goes on in the hills surrounding Buffalo
Creek, but employment opportunities are scarce in the huge mountaintop
surface mines.
Aside for Saunders, which was never rebuilt, the towns remain, although
they more resemble small neighborhoods than towns. There are no grand old
structures left from coal's heyday. Most of the houses and trailers are
less than 25 years old.
In the decades before the flood, sisters Wanda Carter and Anna Salisbury
lived with their parents in a century-old log home at Pardee. It was a
home with a history that precluded their family, but to Wanda and Anna,
it became, and remains to this day, the definition of what home should
be. Unfortunately, it's just an ideal, and 25 years later, it remains an
unattainable goal.
The killing waters tore the house to splinters. The family members were
scattered throughout the hollow that day, and all survived. Carter was
at Saunders and outran the flood by car and on foot.
Salisbury still cries when she thinks about that day and what it did to
her life. She cries over Goldie Sipple, the neighbor fished from the flood
and brought to the house where she was staying.
"She was covered in that black muck from head to toe," she recalled.
"We laid her out on the bed and she would scream and pray to die,
and when she did, you could hear all that black water bubbling inside her,
eating at her like a cancer.
"She died a little while later with her mouth frozen open - she had
been screaming to the end. We had to tie a cloth diaper under her chin
and over her head to close her mouth ... I can still hear her screaming."
The family moved back to Buffalo Creek following the disaster, but what
they found was unfamiliar.
"Everybody there was like one big happy family before the flood,"
Salisbury, 48, recalled.
"Afterward, people weren't as friendly," said Carter, 50. "Everyone's
so protective of what they've got, because they once lost everything."
Salisbury again lives at Pardee, but the familiarity has never returned.
It's not the home she remembers.
Glancing at the ceiling, her mouth set firm to try to stop the tears, she
whispers, "I don't have a home."