The Buffalo Creek Disaster of 1972 | Episode 48

You may hate your job, and your job may hate you, but does your job actively go out of its way to poor hate and death all over your entire community? Hello and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and unspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll learn how insurance companies and the courts use God to ruin your day. We'll hear about a disaster you can actually recreate at home using a washing machine in rocks, and you'll see how you could use a river snake as a comfort animal. This is not the show you play around your kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learned something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. How much do you know about West Virginia? The Civil War mothman, maybe that John Denver song. Well, on the map, West Virginia kind of looks like a frog that got run over by a truck home it's okay, or maybe a hand giving the finger that also looks like it was run over by a truck. But from the ground level, West Virginia is beautiful in a way that's hard to put into words. If you ever wonder why they call it a mountain state. While lots of states do have mountains, West Virginia is the only one of them that sits completely within a mountain range. It's kind of the American Switzerland that way. It sits in the Appalachians, which is a mountain range that runs up the American East Coast all the way from New York State from the very bottom of it down to Georgia and Alabama. The Appalachians have been around since the Ordovician period, almost five hundred million years ago. So yeah, they're old, like older than plants. They've been around longer than fish have known how to walk. But today, whether you're into beautiful mountains or fishing or rafting, West Virginia has something for you. Famous for its scenic mountain beauty and unmatched outdoor recreational opportunities, and it also has some of the friendliest people in the entire country. You probably know it best from Take Me Home Country Road, and it is hauntingly serene. And although it does draw millions of visitors every year to swarm through its woods to hunt and fish and hike and camp and whatnot, it's not on everyone's bucket list. Most of the country is kind of afraid of it. Because of movies and television. They've taught you that Appalachia and the Ozarks are covered in crazy or inbred mountain folk hiding behind every tree, waiting to either or molest you or hunt you down for sport. They dismiss them as hillbillies, and they get portrayed as backwards or lazy, poor people with no shoes and no teeth. And I'm not sure that there's a place in America that is more routinely or unfairly stereotype that way. TV and movies have done a terrible job of teaching you about these people. For one thing, these are your fellow Americans. They're not mutants. Hillbilly, as a term, came from Scotland, and even though it's used so negatively, it just means people from the hills. Let's not stop there, because people also love making fun of the language and the accents, which I always thought was super weird after learning that this is actually a kind of isolated form of Victorian English. They believe that because the early European visitors to this part of the country ended up all tucked away between mountains and valleys, they avoided a lot of outside contacts, so they actually kept and preserve a lot of the original nuance and verbal weirdness of ye old English. Indeed, like they might say far instead of fire, and might start some verbs with a letter A like let's get a go in or got to be a running and Ewan's and Wiean's two hundred year old English. But what a lot of people know West Virginia four is mining. They pull all kinds of stuff out of the ground, stone, cement, gravel. Then they don't get a lot of glamor items. Though, although oddly in saying that, little Trivia, the largest alluvial diamond ever found in North America was found in West Virginia. Here we go, which is great, But what they're really known for is nice dark energy rich but tuminous coal is cheaper and provides more energy than firewood for burning. An electric generation and steel industries eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which means the whole region became heavily dependent in mining and the jobs that it provided. West Virginia is filthy with coal, but a stock crash and a depression in the eighteen hundreds hit the area hard and it just never fully recovered. It's a tail as old as time. Communities too dependent on a single employer or industry. But let's stay focused. We're going to spend our time today in Logan County, West Virginia. The area had been mined since nineteen ten after the rail lines were laid, and back in nineteen forty five, the Laredo Coal Company opened a coal mine a fork off the Buffalo Creek in Logan County. It was mine number five and it was set up in one of the forks off the Middle Fork. And I don't know, you don't understand what I'm saying, but it'll be important and we'll get back to it later. All this operation made an awful lot of the awful slurry or tailings or gob there's tons of names for the kind of waste that comes from coal preparation. If you remember from our Lake Pennier of Vortex in nineteen eighty episode. Mining and water do not mix well, except sometimes, like most times it really does. Coal mining, for example, it requires a ridiculous amount of water. It's used to extract and process and wash the coal. And I don't know how much coal you've handled, but it is pretty dirty stuff. So the bath water ends out pretty dirty too, and not just dirty, highly acidic and toxic. So in the end you've got a butt ton of highly acidic water polluted with heavy metals like selenium and mercury and arsenic and cadmium and thallium and copper and lead. And I really could go on, and maybe I will later. And the bottom line is all that water has to go somewhere. So when they needed somewhere to store that slop, they started dumping it into the mouth of the middle. For a colo, you have to picture the terrain is having a lot of valleys and embankments. They just dammed up and walled off one of the side valleys with about eight hundred thousand tons of coal waste, shale play mine trash just dumped off the back of trucks and oll doze to an even height. Now, admittedly, coal mining waste wasn't as good as concrete, but it was certainly cheaper. And what they got were described as impromptu structures and quote hardly dams in any technical sense. They were only intended to hold the water for shortish periods of time, and they put them up so quick they didn't even clear the trees or vegetation out of the way. They just buried at all. They took all that nightmare fuel they generated and just threw it over the other side until it reached thirty feet deep. By the nineteen seventies, the Buffalo Mining Company this was a child corporation of the Pittston Coal Company. Well by then they owned all the mines and mining operations along Buffalo Creek. When they purchased Laredo in nineteen sixty four as pretty much new Boss same as the old Boss. They operated eight local mines and all that coal ran through the preparation plant above their makeshift dams for cleaning by Mine number five. As a result, thirty ton trucks dumped about a thousand tons of coal waste a day. The earliest version of this dam had filled up over time, and then new dams were just built above the previous one to kind of take over the weight. By nineteen seventy two, there were three of these impowdment dams built into the hills, about two hundred and fifty feet above the valley floor. Each of these dams sat about six hundred feet back from the previous like domino in a line. And yeah, it does all sound gross, no doubt. But you know how you run water through charcoal to remove impurities. Well, you'd never know what to look at it or smell it, or see it or hear it. But the same idea here, these dams filtered relatively clearer water to run slowly through the other side. And I don't know if you could tell by my delivery, but filtered, relatively clearer and water were each said separately in quotes. Yeah, let's take a step back here. The Buffalo Creek valley, where we are going to spend our time today, follows the Buffalo Creek in a kind of a squirrely serpentine fashion for seventeen miles or twenty seven kilometers west towards the Guyandot River. Along the way, it passes sixteen small towns that had built up along its banks over the years. You ever just wander through the woods or plains, and just think about early Europeans coming to America and just walking on forever. You're just driving for hours, and you think that people used to do this on foot and end up in some small hamlet hundreds of miles from the nearest anything, and you wonder why stop here. Well, you remember back in our San Luis Vispo fire tornado episode, that place was settled by a religious group that got lost, found drinkable water and said, good enough, here we are. Rivers were like magnets to pioneers. They'd been the nation's first carpool lanes until they were placed with rail. By nineteen twenty, the Buffalo Valley Creek was peppered with small mining camps that morphed into these small communities after the land was sold off to residence. The hilly and narrow terrain physically limited the number of people who could live there, and they kind of liked it that way. In its heyday, the whole county had a population of around seventy seven thousand, and about five thousand of them lived along the four hundred foot wide valley floor of the Buffalo Creek Valley. In nineteen seventy, the Pittston Coal Company took over the mine. And here's where things get funny, but not hawha foney. The whole site was extensively surveyed by Pittston before they bought. Here's the thing about that Pitston was the fifth largest corporate landowner in Appalachia. They owned oil companies, trucking firms, the Brinkx armored car company, and forty percent of all the warehouses in New York City. They were not hurting for money, and how did they get to stay that way? Well, around the same time they received their five thousandth mind safety violation, but they challenged each and every one of them, and in the end, of one point three million dollars in fines, they only paid two hundred and seventy five dollars. Piston was ranked number two nationally in the number of fatal and non fatal mine accidents. And you know what they say, when you're number two, you try harder. Today's story takes place February the twenty sixth, nineteen seventy two, a Saturday morning. It had been raining for three days straight, which isn't strange for these parts in the later winter months, and not just trickle trickle rain like real rain. And because of this, the water levels in the series of dams had risen, and because of the weather, the Buffalo mining officials sent someone to go and check on the water levels every two hours, and what they measured was astounding. Just four days earlier, federal mine inspectors gave the site a pass. Two days ago, the water levels and the dam sat five feet below the crest. But today now rains were raising the water level by an inch or two an hour, and Dam number three looked aggressively full. They measured nearly fifty acre feet of water sitting behind its containing wall. Fifty Yeah, so people who like to talk water use acre feet as a unit of measurement. So you know, an acre foot is the size of an acre two hundred and seventy two by one hundred and sixty feet one foot deep with water. Yeah. I could practically see you're trying to do the math like you're trying to open a jar on an infomercial or something. So let me say this. It's about three hundred and twenty six thousand gallons or almost one and a quarter million liters of water works out to about forty three and a half thousand cubic feet of water, which means the dam contained two million, seven hundred eighteen thousand, eight hundred and forty pounds. Or let me just make this very easy for you to picture. It's three hundred and seventy eight thousand, four hundred and thirty four dodge caravans worth of water. There you go, You're welcome. And this was not the first negative attention this thing had ever gained. Damn three had a history of complaints. It's stank, it leaked, it had cracks running across its sweaty seebee face, and it was worrisome, especially the people who lived in Saunders. Saunders was the first town located directly below the dams. Three weeks before we got here, a local named pearl Woodrum wrote, the governor is say every time it rains, it scares everyone to death. We're all afraid we'll be washed away and drowned. Please, for God's sake, have the dump and water destroyed. Our lives are in danger. And it is true in the olden days they burned coal waste, but you can barely fathom how terrible that would have been for anything within breathing distance. In fact, I'm going to stop right here just to mention a few things. We keep calling it water, but coal waste is closer to liquid asphyxiant. Here is a list of favored reasons not to play around coal waste, including mercury, lead, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, selenium, aluminum, antimony, nickel, cobalt, barium, manganese, chlorine, born wolbendium, beryllium, thallium, plateu, barattu, zinc, and vanadium. You don't even have to know what half of that stuff is. I made one of those things up. But let's just say you ate a bar of coal waste like it was a lemon pound cake, and well, you just spun a wheel of fortune on your future. So let's see what you may have won asthma, gastro intestinal illness, impaired bone growth, birth defects, kidney disease, neurological disorders, heart disease, cancer, brain damage, nervous system damage, stroke and death. Who lest Virginia Department of Natural Resources pop by from time to time and never once gave this thing a gold star. They found it really hard to overlook the fact that this thing had no overflow or spillway in place to relieve pressure. Think of it this way. You do the spread challenge fully, and now you got yourself a bellyful of gas pressure on every internal surface waiting uncomfortably to explode. That scenario has a lot in common with a full dam. The dam wasn't built to a stand this much pressure, and it showed in March, the year before, the Department of Natural Resources compelled them to install an emergency spillway with the same spirit needed to compel a demon from a body. But from what I can tell, a few of their guys figured out how to kick a twenty four inch pipe through the dam to provide some relief, and that was that, but not that much. It's a little like draining a pool through a straw, and it didn't take long before that blocked up and there was not really much they could do about it. The man in charge at the site was Steve Dazovich. Dazovich was the on site vice president, but he was also kind of de facto public liaison bullshit ambassador, kind of like one of those dolls with a string in the back that you poll and it just tells you everything is fine. During his last visit to the dam, he decided it was probably best to add another relief spillway pipe. On his way to order it, he ran into the local sheriff, who'd been called out to the site by locals who were worried about the dam. They wanted him to order an evacuation, but Dazevich was pretty g shucks about not wanting to bother the people of the valley. On the weekend, he told the sheriff, the things look all right. We're going to do a little work on it, and he told him there was no reason to evacuate anyone. Of course, not everyone shared his optimism. This thing was clearly saturated under immense pressure. Danny Gibson had been a heavy equipment operator at the dam, and he'd visited the dam several times and quietly warned residence on the side to maybe consider moving around a higher ground. But then, as things seemed at their worst, something unexpected happened. The water level had been with inches of the crest line, but suddenly it just started dropping significantly. You see something like that and you desperately want to believe that this is a good thing. But early birds living downstream noticed the creek was rising with a muddy flow. Most households were still asleep, after all, it was Saturday, but nobody slept past eight. The water level continued to fall, and the dam began to visibly slump. Tears in the dam's face quickly grew, and it connected until all of them became one, and the unimaginable force that held back slowly pushed it all wide open, millions of gallons of water to grope through, careening towards Dam number two, which quickly gave way, doubling the size of the flood, racing towards Dam number one, which also stood zero chance of holding back the monstrous torrent and immediately exploded as well, and estimated four hundred acre feet or one hundred and thirty million gallons or about three million Dodge caravans were a poisoned water and slurried evil roared down the Buffalo Creek Valley with no more warning than the sounds of the screens in its path. For the people of Buffalo Creek Valley, that wouldn't be enough. A black wall of death, over thirty feet high and five hundred and fifty feet wide, scoured the land as it raced down the narrow hollow at twenty feet per second, racing from village to village, it destroyed houses and mobile homes. It uprooted trees, It swept top soil, and carried huge rocks, trucks, and cars downstream, which only made things worse. Quote. The slurry wave picked up an abrasive and destructive mixture of semi rotten trees, rocks, and sediment as it went, gouging out the land and becoming a more lethal force capable of battering and sweeping away all in its path. People who decided to evacuate watched as the water came, lifted their home comprehensively, dismantled it, and took the pieces away, adding to the mass of the wave. One resident said, the water acted real funny. It would go this way and that side of the hill and take out a house, take one house or all of them in a row, and then go back to the other side. Who would just go from hillside to hillside downstream. Residents watched as these houses collected up the round a bridge. But for those who hadn't escaped their homes in time, some of them had to survive by surfing on the roofs of their houses until they were able to find something to pull themselves to safety. They couldn't believe that they were looking down and seeing telephone poles beneath them. Roland Statton was a coal miner who managed to jump off his own house with his son in his arms. And there were many stories of people seeing the floodwaters and quickly rescuing as many of their family as they could, but almost never everybody. Roland's pregnant wife couldn't get out. When I looked back and saw her, she said, take care of my baby, and that's the last time I saw her. They were caught in the flood water and crushed by debris. He said he couldn't breathe, and he was pretty sure his eyes were going to pop out, And at some point his son stopped screaming and then just disappeared. Some died praying in their homes. Others tried to escape by car, only to find that their engines became water logged before being carried away. Men and women and children and animals were seen floating in the water. Some hung lifelessly from trees. As the flood passed. It brought death and destruction as far as fifteen miles or twenty four kilometers downstream. Ah, so you are watching fly fishing on TV and the next thing you know, you're watching fish flying by your window. Would you know what to do? Here's a simple formula. Should I worry about flooding? Answer? Do I live somewhere in the world that receives rain? If yes, continue Flooding is the most common natural disaster in the United States, and they kill more people than tornadoes, hurricanes, or lightning. Most rivers will overflood their banks with small floods about once every two years. Moderate floods might occur every five to ten years, and very large floods might happen once in fifty or one hundred years. Of course, the thing is we are currently facing one hundred year floods every year, so yeah, they're kind of topical. If you live in an area that has ever had a flood, even some kind of historical flood, that area can flood again and at any time, So you're gonna want to do flood drills. They're the same as fire drills. You make yourself a plan to get your family and pets out of the home, grab a bugout bag and head to a predetermined safe space. That means you want to keep your medicine and your important documents that prove who you are somewhere safe if you are under or flood warning. Remember flooding rules are the opposite of tornado rules. You want to find shelter as high up as you can, and if that means climbing a hill or climbing your stairs, so be it. Height is your best advantage, but do be careful. Many people are forced in their own attics, which unless you have a good cutting tool, and I mean like an axe or a shotgun, you could become trapped and drowned in the dark. Never walk, or swim or drive through floodwater. Remember what we said, turn around, don't drown. Less than six inches of moving water is enough to take you off your feet and water halfway to your knees. Hey doesn't look like much, but that's enough to sweep away a car. And that's why if you are trapped in your car, if the water is rising around you, you're going to want to get to your roof and pray, because a good rescue is always just a matter of time and opportunity. Many people love gathering on or around bridges is to eat popcorn and watch racing floodwaters. But I've seed water quietly seeped through foundations and carry a bridge away with no warning, which is a problem. Because our brains always tell us that big things are stable because they're heavy and big and protective. Water will always disagree, especially flood water because it's full of debris and completely opaque. You could stick your leg in and pull it out with a piece of wood and several unrelated syringes sticking out of it, or it could be cooked by electrical equipment, or it could be chomped on by a snake or other animal hiding in the water. You have no doubt heard heartwarming stories that people adopting poor creatures affected by a disaster. It's good for both of them to heal by creating this kind of healing bond. And to my knowledge, that has never happened with a gator or a river snake, but there has always got to be a first time. Over the next three hours, the flood devastated the communities of Saunders, Pardie, Laredo, Cranecot, Blundale, Stove, and eleven others. Finally stopping at the town of Man right at the edge of the Gayandot River. Rescuers hoping to enter the area by road, bridge or rail were screwed, although roots and debris were being cleared by locals with the help of the National Guard. And that's because they've got helicopters. It was the only real good way to get in or out of the area. Robert Shy flew for the West Virginia Army National Guard, bringing in supplies and airlifting out the injured. He said, it just broke your heart to see firsthand the devastation that water could do. Roads weren't where they used to be, nor were the houses. Railroad rails were twisted, cars were everywhere, Bridges were on the roads instead of over the creek. Reporters were literally hiking to the site to break the story. Because Governor arch our Field More Junior closed the area of the media for safety reasons. Yeah, not so much. He felt like the disaster put West Virginia in a bad light. And More toured the area by helicopter and already received word from Nixon all the way over in China at Federal Disaster Aid was on its way. The Army, the Red Cross, and officials from across the state were all on the scene, ready to feed, clothe, and comfort survivors. Reporting on the number of dead and missing was difficult because finding and identifying bodies was possible. The human body was not designed to survive being suspended and swirled underwater in flood conditions, and you have to remember everything from the smallest pebble to the largest home. We're swirling freely with them. And because of that, most people killed in flood conditions do so because something knocks the air out of them and they drowned, and not everyone gets a proper burial. In landslides or other disasters like this, bodies and homes are often left buried in the muck where they lay. It's too difficult to consider excavating miles and miles of debris looking for victims, plus DNA evidence wasn't really a thing yet, and West Virginia didn't have bottomless pockets. Hundreds of families lost everything, homes, belongings, memories. Some drowned in the floodwaters and others had been buried by the landslides as the sides of the valley caved in. So what the hell happened? Well? A reporter named Mannix Potterfield, who covered the disaster, said it looked like a battlefield, as if some foreign enemy had flown in and just nuke the place. Debris was everywhere. Bridges were smashed to bits, homes were left and splinters. Railroad tracks yanked up and twisted. They looked like huge metallic pretzels. The wave washed away or demolished over five hundred homes. It left over four thousand homeless, and it injured at least another thousand, and took the lives of one hundred and twenty five people. And that doesn't even begin to touch on the long term effects. Earth defects, cancer and death were only a few of the inevitabilities of being suspended in the water. Potterfield went on to describe a kind of diy morgue that had been set up in a middle school, and he said it kind of gave him Scarlett O'Hara standing over the sea of wounded in gone of the wind vibes, the local high school became a refugee center. When I described the impoundments as being built pretty as you go, I mean, with almost no engineering or real planning, Just a valley plugged up with guck and black. The only paperwork they ever filed was un napkin sketch. And to be clear, this was not the first time that this had happened. In March nineteen sixty seven, a partial collapse at one of the dams caused some flooding, freaking out residents who did not need more reasons to worry. That same year, in nineteen sixty seven, the US Department of the Interior warned state officials that the Buffalo Creek Dam and twenty nine others throughout West Virginia were unstable and dangerous. Then it happened again. In nineteen seventy one, Damn Number three flooded, but Damn number two was able to contain it. West Virginia Congressman Ken Heckler, through the US Bureau of Mines, under the bus about it, but he also slammed the coal industry's power in the area. He said, the people are prisoners of the coal industry, their slave to the company's store and he also suggested that because the valley had been so saturated with coal waste from before, the ground just couldn't absorb rainwater, making the flood even worse. Governor Moore called his own Commission of Inquiry to investigate the disaster and wait for it. Yeah, all nine members were deeply connected to Pittston, Cole and state regulating agencies, so it was pretty obvious they were just filling time until they cleared everyone of any responsibility or wrongdoing. And if you think that's balls, Pittston's New York pr Firm, a godless, soulless entity, if there ever was one, absolved the company of any legal responsibility in a press release stating that the flood was quote an act of God. I've said before that an act of God was a cynical phrase codified into law as a way of negating insurance claims. The dam was simply quote incapable of holding the water that God had poured into it. And where I come from using the fear of God against a god fearing people. I've written a lot in my life, but I can't think of anything that would earn me a typewriter in hell. And I can see why people called them pittstain. One older woman said, I've lived at the top of a hillside for a long time and I ain't never seeing God up there. Driving Nobo dozer dump and slay on that dam, and the public went wild for what she said. And then they set up their own investigation, and then so did the Senate Subcommittee on Labor, in cooperation with the Army Corps of Engineers. The citizens thirty one page report charged the Buffalo Creek Pittston Company with the murder of at least one hundred and twenty four men, women, and children living in the Buffalo Creek Hollow. And God had nothing to do with it, but at least Moore's Commission would be a little more forgiving, except that they weren't. Moore's own commission released a report calling from new legislation and further prosecution, so he tried to shelve it, just make it go away. Then came the US Subcommittee hearing, and a US Geological Survey report, and a US Department of the Interior report, and the US Army Corps of Engineer's report, and every single one found the Pittston Coal Company failed to meet their responsibilities for public health and safety. Yeah you hear that, and I can see why people called them shit. STA six hundred and forty five survivors and victim family members filed a class action lawsuit against Pittston for sixty four million dollars, and they settled out of court for thirteen and a half million in nineteen seventy four, with each individual receiving an average of thirteen thousand dollars after legal costs. West Virginia sued Pittston for one hundred million dollars in disaster and relief damages. But get this, Governor Moore had the final say, so he waited until three days before leaving office in nineteen seventy seven, and then he settled the case pull his buddies for only one million dollars, and, in what seems to be a very foul tasting trend with disasters of this type, no criminal charges were brought against the company or mining executives for their negligence. The whole thing did not even make a dent in their annual profits. The Logan County prosecutors said that Pittston's failure to receive a state damn license was only a misdemeanor and that the statute of limitations for all the really serious stuff was on, so are you guys. They also concluded that Pittston's Buffalo Creek Mining Company could not be charged with negligent homicide because there was no way to put a corporation in jail. So, yeah, Moore was pretty corrupt, like undeniably transparently indisputably corrupt. But good news. He died in his office. He'd been unable to leave for food or bribes because his massive testicles wouldn't fit through the door, and he starved to death. Oh I wish. Actually he left office in seventy seven, only to re enter the office in nineteen eighty five. And this was even with federal racketeering, extortion, bribery, obstruction of justice, filing false income tax returns, and mail fraud charges against the guy swept him right in. He became the longest serving West Virginia governor in state history, who also went on to spend three years in prison between nineteen ninety one and nineteen ninety three. He was disbarred, and he spent years is trying to have his law license reinstated. He said, I want to die a lawyer. Say it with me now. The State Supreme Court unanimously ruled against him in two thousand and three. They concluded that he was guilty of quote, extremely serious misconduct that reveals a willingness on a sustained and knowing basis to be dishonest, to deceive, to conceal the truth, and to bend, manipulate, and violate the law for personal and professional gain. He finally stopped lying and breathing at the age of ninety one, just four days after his daughter, Shelley Moore Capito, was sworn into the US Senate. And all I can tell you is keep an eye on that one. West Virginia got stuck paying the US Army Corps of Engineers about ten million dollars for the recovery work along the Buffalo Creek. By two thousand and two, Pittston had left the mining business for the more lucrative crime and private security industry, and the problem of crappy coal waste impoundments never went away. In the year two thousand, a seventy two acre slurry impowerment near Inez, Kentucky, broke through an abandoned underground mine located below it. Three hundred million gallons of liquid coleways tore through the underground mine chambers and spewed out of mountain side portals into valley streams leading to the Ohio River. Twenty miles of the Ohio River was declared an aquatic dead zone no life could survive. Contact drinking water in ten counties was shut off. Toxic coal slurry eventually reached as far as Cincinnati. The EPA called it the worst environmental disaster in the history of the southeast United States. The coal company called it, that's right, an act of God. In two thousand and eight, the Tennessee Valley Authorities Kingston Fossil Plant blurped out over a billion gallons of toxic sludge, covering the surrounding land six feet deep. By December of twenty fourteen, three hundred and thirty one of these facilities were rated as either holding a high or signal ificant safety hazard, high meaning likely loss of life, and significant meaning economic and environmental disaster on top of it. In a closed or stakeholder meeting, hit Stain resolved to spend more to protect miners and their families, but in spirit only, and then they went on to overrule their own statement. Congress past the National Dam Inspection Act to begin an inventory and inspection of all the nation's dams, but they bought the launch. The Federal District judge originally assigned to the case had to be removed because of his friendship with Pitston's president, and the special grand jury brought no criminal indictments. Literally everything about this was a comedy of bureaucratic errors, and in the end, the people of West Virginia and Appalachia as a whole were no better protected than before, just more aware, but in a good luck with all of that kind of way, you ever hear the phrase garbage in, garbage out. Politicians and captain are industry are kind of like that. Their self interest will never, never be put aside for the common good, not if it means a reduction of profits or bribes or sex or power or whatever it is that fuels their personal needs. It's a little like you get what you pay for, and in this case, the people of Logan County and Appalachia will be paying for this for the rest of their lives, however long that'll be. So this story turned from how come we don't hear much from this part of the world to no wonder we don't hear more from this part of the world. Most of our stories are told in the spirit of we can learn to be safer, and for the most part that means from fire or shrapnel, but some of our stories are told to make sure you know that your elected officials can be as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than a natural disaster, with the exception that politicians are replaceable and preventable. You can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, where you can fire us an email to doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends we are trying to grow the show. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo, or you can just buy me a coffee buy meacoffee dot com slash doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate the globalmedic dot CA. On the next episode, when an escalator breaks down, it basically becomes stairs. But when this escalator breaks down, so do people's legs. It's the Avia Motornaya escalator disaster of nineteen eighty two. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening. M