| FLOOD 2001 HOME |
PREMIER
| After the May 2 floods, the Division of Forestry inspectors went to look at all the timbering jobs in the flooded parts of McDowell County--a more thorough investigation than they had made in July 2001. Large maps hang on the walls of the Beckley office. And the timbered areas are shaded in. I had seen several hollows filled with washed out rocks on the south side of Route 52 near Premier. So I was interested to find a timbered site marked on the east side of a stream named Bad Way Branch. I went back to McDowell and thought I had found the right stream, but wanted to confirm with the people living at the top of the hollow. All I got were puzzled stares. For all their lives, they've called this Number Four Premier Hollow, after the mining operation that had long ago employed many of the men in the families. The tipple is gone now, leaving only a hint in the black dirt along the creek. |
Residents of Premier keep the community tidy.
But there's no question in anyone's mind about the timbering. Not only is it on the east side, it's on the west side and further down Route 52 at Number Two Premier Hollow, according to Ida Roberts and her neighbor Taylor Clyde Martin.
Roberts and her husband, a disabled miner, live in almost the last house in the hollow, next to a culvert over one creek and near the junction of that and another creek. Water came down from the creek to the right of their house and nearly washed out the bridge and culvert, obliterating Roberts' lawn and garden. That water joined the runoff from the other creek and sent flood waters raging down the hollow towards Route 52. The Roberts own home was high enough to escape damage.
The washout next to the Roberts' house (not pictured) What's left of the Roberts' lawn. Timbering is both behind the trailer in the photo on the left and up the road in the photo on the right. You can see cut logs lying below the washed out bridge.
"They can't keep taking all the trees off and putting nothing back," Martin said. "You wouldn't believe the logs that came out of there."
The rain did come hard: 3 inches in five hours, Martin estimates, and 5 inches in two days. But they had as much last July. The difference? He thinks there's been more logging since last July.
Ida Roberts was eager to show me the timbering sites. She and her husband travel the hills often. He was disabled in a 1994 accident at the U.S. Steel mine in Pineville. He would love to go back to work but will never be able to. So she likes to take him out into the mountains as often as possible.
We climbed into her brawny olive green Ford pickup and set off on a gas road up the hollow just above her house. In about a third of a mile, she stopped to point out timbering on the hillside above to the right and then showed me the logs and cut timber washed out below the road. Another quarter mile, the road made a hairpin turn to the left. In the hollow above the curve, more cut logs had been washed out. (See photos below).
Next we drove out of the hollow and west on Route 52 a half a mile to Number Two Premier, a hollow which runs on the other side of the mountain from Number Four. As we drove, she told me about her family. One son works at a manufacturing plant in southwest Virginia. The other works for Georgia Pacific in Bluefield -- in the office, there, not out cutting trees, for which she is grateful.
"I'm not against them cutting the trees," she mused. "But they ought to do it do it right...It is jobs for people." Later she said that the people who own the land should be made to fix it.
We drove past the last houses and over a reclaimed slate dump. As the road rose, considerable washout appeared along the sides. A tall tangle of cut logs was piled on one side, spilling down into the creek and the roadway. In the hollow at the curve of the road, more logs had been washed down from the timbering on the hill above. (See photos below).
For Roberts, there may have been one good thing about the flood. "Sometimes it takes something like this to let the new stuff come back," she said, indicating how much trash and debris had been swept out of the hollows by the raging waters. A way of cleansing McDowell County.