| Chapter 1: | Buffalo Creek Before, During, and Soon After the Flood |
Dawn brought little light to Buffalo Creek that Saturday morning. It was still midwinter. The weather was overcast and raw. Rain alternated with wet snow. In the coal camps, small numbers of men, mainly retired and off-duty miners, milled about along the creek, nervously watching the water rise. Most of the other residents of Buffalo Creek were sleeping in, except for the miners who were ending their shifts in the local mines and those who had risen to have breakfast and prepare for their work on the day shift in the mines.
At 7:50 a.m., Dennis Gibson, who was a heavy-equipment operator for BMC, arrived at dam #3 in order to install the drainage pipe that Dasovich had ordered. Gibson was shocked to see that the dam had “gone soft.” Alarmed, he then jumped into his truck and drove as fast as he could down Route 16, honking his horn to warn residents of the coal camps that the dam was about to collapse. And this is exactly what it did about ten minutes later.
At 8:00 a.m., by most accounts, dam #3 suddenly collapsed.
“The Disaster at Buffalo Creek” had begun.
Portrayals of the Course of the Flood
Apparently, there were no aerial observers of the flood as it swept its way down through the convoluted ravines of Buffalo Creek Valley. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, is there any film footage to show us exactly how it surged into and through the sixteen coal camps and how it disgorged its ghastly spoils into the Guyandotte River hours later. All that we have as primary testimony are eyewitness descriptions by some survivors of how the flood appeared to them at certain small places along the hollow. Most of these descriptions were not recorded until days, months, and years after the flood had passed them by. These descriptions often refer to the flood as a “big, black wave,” “a huge falling wall of mud and junk” that “churned,” “swept,” “drowned,” “rolled,” and “washed” through the coal camps like a violent flush, or several quick flushes, rather than a flood. The main body of water rushed through each of the coal camps in a matter of minutes, and then was gone—out of sight.