40 Years After Buffalo Creek: Digital Memory and Environmental Advocacy in Contemporary Appalachia

This presentation explores the potential of digital memory as a viable resource for Appalachian social and environmental advocates. To investigate this potential, this presentation examines a series of digital remembrances marking the 40th anniversary of the Buffalo Creek, WV flood. The flood, which was a result of the failure of a coal slurry impoundment dam, killed 125 residents, injured 1,100, and left 4,000 homeless. The disaster remains etched within the Appalachian consciousness, yet little has been done to try to understand how the memory of such an event may provide a rhetorical and political resource for environmental advocates. This presentation argues that these acts of remembrance serve as a form of public memory and as such provide a resource to constitute an environmental public responsive to and critical of the contexts and practices of contemporary risk society, especially in relation to the contemporary practices of the coal mining industry and the state officials who oversee the industry. By weaving remembrances of the past disaster at Buffalo Creek with the contemporary concerns of Appalachia, these current commemorations dialogically create “coalitions of anxiety” (Zinn 38) and “create meaning through time” (Olick 83) that challenge notions of security proposed by coal and government officials. In keeping with the conference theme, these digital commemorations take a known reality, the past, to imagine new possibilities of how to think about and address contemporary environmental concerns.