I used to be an agitator, then an activist. Now I am a hell-raiser. At the age of 94, and 95 in September, there's not enough time left.
It began rather suddenly on Oct. 21, 1966. Far off across the Atlantic in the little country of Wales, something happened which seared my conscience. In the little town of Aberfan, a joyful group of over 100 elementary school students in their morning assembly enthusiastically sang "All Things Bright and Beautiful."
Shortly after 9 a.m. a deafening roar resounded just after the assembly. Some of the teachers thought it sounded like a jet plane about to crash into the school. They hurried the students underneath their desks.
There had been a heavy rain the night before. On the mountain above the school a huge collection of coal refuse or "gob" suddenly broke loose. A 40-foot-deep mass of sludge roared down the mountain and crashed headlong into the school. More than 100 little students were entombed along with most of their teachers. They didn't have a chance.
Including adults in Aberfan, 144 lives were snuffled out that day. Less than a year later, just after the Fourth of July, 1967, I began getting phone calls from my friends along Buffalo Creek and other sections of Logan County which I represented in Congress, urging me to come down and see all the damage being done by mudslides of sludge after downpours over the holiday.
What I saw, particularly along Buffalo Creek, horrified me. I telephoned Gov. Hulett Smith and urged him to assemble a team of officials to see for themselves the danger confronting the residents, and to figure out what remedial measures were necessary to save people's lives. I had the disaster at Aberfan very much on my mind.
Gov. Smith said he would ask Finance Commissioner Truman Gore and officials of the State Road Commission and Department of Natural Resources to be ready for a call from me. I also asked two representatives on the Army Corps of Engineers to join the group of state officials to drive down to Buffalo Creek and other threatened areas of Logan County the following morning.
It was raining the next morning, but the officials all showed up. I also asked the local head of Island Creek Coal Co., Richard Herron, to come along, since one of the trouble spots was at Proctor Hollow near Amherstdale on Buffalo Creek.
News reporters from the Logan Banner, The Charleston Gazette and The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington ran accounts of our 1967 warning. But nothing was done - and five years later, 125 people were killed in the historic Buffalo Creek gob pile dam collapse.
That's why 30 of us were arrested on June 23 this year for protesting the sludge pond that hangs like a Sword of Damocles a few hundred yards up the mountain above Marsh Fork Elementary School in Raleigh County. With 2.8 billion gallons of sludge close to the blasting of mountaintop removal nearby, is it any wonder that I think about Aberfan?
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