If OIL isn't bad enough...now it's the COAL industry with W's undying support....what's he care about these people and the environment?.....NOTHING!
Flood Puts Town in Rebuild Mode
Appalachia: The second inundation since July also has some residents of mountain community talking about
pulling up stakes and moving.
By DAVID LAMB, TIMES STAFF WRITER
NORTHFORK, W.Va. -- For the second time in 10 months, residents
of the Appalachian coal towns along the Tug Fork river were digging out
from a devastating flood Saturday and talking about rebuilding their lives
and homes and businesses.
"We're tough people up here in the mountains, but we're getting tired of
this," said Marvin Cochran, 45. "I'll put things back together again
because this has always been home. But my father says he's getting out,
if we can get his trailer off the hill."
Near an emergency center where Cochran had come for bottled water,
the river still gurgled with high, muddy water. "At least it's started going
down," he said. Then he looked at the heavy dark clouds overhead and
added, "Those clouds let loose and she'll come right back up." Tug
Fork, which separates West Virginia and Kentucky, crested Friday at
nearly 20 feet above flood stage after a night of heavy rain. The
overflow rushed through the little towns stretched out along Route 52--just as had happened last
July--and left in its wake a sense of weariness among people who for generations have entrusted
their fate to God, nature and the coal companies.
"You really admire the resilience of people like this," said Capt. Sandra Mullins of the Salvation
Army as she handed out ham salad sandwiches. "But you look in their faces and you see the
sadness and the tiredness. They were just recovering from the last flood."
After the last one, the state began investigating whether new coal mining practices were to blame for
the intensity of the flooding. In the last 10 years, coal companies have been shearing off
mountaintops to get to coal and piling the leftover rock and dirt into valleys, forever altering the
region's topography.
Officials said this flood, which also touched part of Virginia and Kentucky, killed at least five
people. Rescue crews were searching door to door for a dozen missing.
Many of the towns, like Northfork (population 591), were temporarily isolated when landslides cut
Route 52. By Saturday, crews with bulldozers and shovels had reopened the road. The National
Guard was helping with the cleanup and search operations.
"I'd taken time off and spent three months repairing my mother's home after the last flood," said
Mike Boyd, 38. "Now this. Her home is a wreck. ... Even my late father's '88 Cadillac was swept
away. I can't take time off again."
On Northfork's main street--littered with plastic bags, tree limbs and debris carried by the
flood--the town's funeral director, Mike Widener, had installed a steel door after the last flood to
protect a display of 25 caskets in his basement. The contractor had guaranteed not a drop of water
would get in.
The steel door splintered Friday and the caskets were destroyed.
Widener's recently remodeled ground floor office was spared, and Saturday, as though unsure what
to do next, Widener was cleaning his desk with a feather duster.
"We lost everything the first time ... But I'll start over. Of course, I will. In Appalachia, it seems
we're always doing that."
That's what people tried to do when the coal companies pulled back from these towns in the 1970s.
The scars are evident: empty store fronts, hotels turned into residences for the elderly, abandoned
car dealerships, the faded words "Montgomery Ward" on the side of a building.
Sometimes, though, there is a sound that harks back to more prosperous times. It came Saturday,
just as Widener was dusting --a lonely wail that reaches up the hollows, then the rumble of
Northfork Southern Railroad engines, snaking out of the mountains, bound for Roanoke, Va., with a
mile-long procession of loaded coal cars.
It is a reminder that life goes on.
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