March 4, 2025 - As they do every year, survivors — as well as family members of survivors — of the 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster gathered at the Buffalo Creek Memorial Library in South Man to mark the anniversary of the flood and remember its 125 victims.

The communal gathering provides the survivors a way to — as retired Buffalo Creek Memorial Library Director Elizabeth Tackett puts it — talk amongst themselves in an informal manner and make sure the catastrophic flood and those who perished in it are never forgotten. Tackett has held the gathering for about 20 years now, with exceptions being the more monumental anniversary years like 2022, which marked the flood’s 50th, where a bigger service was held at Man High School.

“It’s just out of respect,” Tackett said. “It’s not to dredge up old memories or hard feelings or whatever. It’s just to take a little bit of time out in remembrance.”

Every year, there are several recurring faces and some new. One of the familiar faces is Gertie Moore, who recalls — sometimes tearfully — memories of the flood victims, many of which she knew as a longtime bus driver for schools in the Man area.

“It’s like you went to bed with one life and woke up with another,” Moore said.

One attendee at this year’s gathering was Logan County Commissioner Billy Jack Dickerson, who was only 10 years old at the time his house in Lundale was destroyed by the flood waters. 56 of the 125 deceased lived in Dickerson’s community.

Dickerson, who gave an emotional recalling of his story at the 50th anniversary event in 2022, was once again on the verge of tears at the Buffalo Creek Memorial Library on Wednesday.

“You think after 53 years, it would take a little bit of the edge off,” Dickerson said. “I hate February … the flood, and both my parents passed in February. I hate it.”

Dickerson also worked as an environmental science teacher at Man High School for 32 years, and he was responsible for large-scale educational lessons of the Buffalo Creek disaster that persisted at the school for many years. When he started the lessons, he said many local students — who were only one or two generations removed from the flood — knew little about it because, as he and some of the others in the room put it, many survivors didn’t want to talk about it for a long time.

“That was one of the problems that we really had when we were trying to gather information,” Dickerson said. “Some folks just said no. They didn’t want to rehash it. They didn’t want to relive it, but there’s that old adage about history not told is destined to be repeated, and so that was the line that I always used with them to try to get them to come forward with things that they had.”

Harold Bailey said the flood happened so quickly that most people who lived along Buffalo Creek didn’t even realize what was going on before it was too late.

“Most didn’t have time,” Bailey said. “It just hit and it was the aftermath.”

Dickerson and Karen Arms, whom he worked alongside at Man High, noted the bitter feelings that people in the Man area — particularly survivors — often still feel toward the Moore family in West Virginia. Gov. Arch Moore, who was governor at the time of the flood, infamously accepted a lowly $1 million settlement from the Pittston Coal Company on Jan. 14, 1977, just three days before leaving office.

“That’s what you have to do in life,” Arms said. “You can’t constantly be bitter about things. You have to let some things go. It happened. You learn from it. That’s what, as a teacher, I tried to instill in students — that you learn from the mistakes of the past and you try not to repeat those mistakes.”

The Buffalo Creek disaster occurred on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 26, 1972. It was the result of a coal slurry impoundment dam — operated by the Pittston Coal Company — bursting and unleashing approximately 132 million gallons of black waste water along the 18 Buffalo Creek communities.

In the end, 125 people lost their lives, 1,121 were injured and over 4,000 were left homeless. It is considered the worst flood in West Virginia’s history.