Strip Mining On Steroids

The sky was spitting sleet on the morning of Feb. 26, 1972, when the phone rang at Glenna Wiley's house in the tiny hamlet of Kistler in southern West Virginia. A friend warned that an earthen dam had burst a dozen miles up Buffalo Creek. Mrs. Wiley rushed to her porch and watched in amazement as a wall of coal-black water swept down the stream. She saw a neighbor's face "turn red and then white," she recalls. "He saw the bodies in the water."

All told, 125 people were killed after the collapse of a dam built to hold waste from a surface coal mine. The disaster became a national rallying cry that resulted in a 1977 federal law to oversee strip mines and reclaim thousands of acres of ravaged land. But 20 years later, strip-mining poses a new threat to the Buffalo Creek region. A new generation of giant motorized shovels and huge dump trucks is being used to cut down entire mountaintops on a scale unknown 25 years ago.