BOB WHITE

    About eight miles east, past Van, we saw a wave of rocks behind a grey mobile home that reminded us of Freddie Steele in Ritter Hollow. John and Christine Gunnoe had moved out of a flood plain near Van to what they thought was higher ground. John estimated it took two hours to submerge the hollow in a quarter mile of rocks. The swath nudged a small shed behind the trailer, but fell short of the home. Yes, he told us, they had logged up the hollow. And cut logs lodged in the rocks were the evidence.

John Gunnoe next to rock slide behind his home. The rocks and logs grazed his shed, but missed his home.   

    We probably wouldn’t have found Maria Pitzer if she hadn’t called the papers and gotten a story in The Charleston Gazette that day. Her one-story rambling ranch with sky-blue vertical textured siding is tucked into the hillside above Bob White, at least 20 feet above Pond Fork, surely safe from floods. Not so, and the evidence was the 75-foot-wide, 12-foot deep crater in her yard—where Big Branch Creek had once meandered with a few inches of water. The ground in front of her garage was crumbling away each day, with less than 10 feet to the edge of the hole. The 20 acres up the hillside had been her grandfather’s, a Cherokee, and then her father’s. She has seen the valley fill creeping down the hollow, the logging nearby, as well as slides from old mining. With two brothers who are miners, “I can’t say a whole lot against mining,” she said. “But they need to step up and clean up.” Two days later she and a DEP inspector walked up to the ponds. They had overflowed, she said, but the inspector did not blame the mines since the slips were below the ponds. When Bob later filmed from the air, the slides are clearly visible.

    As of April 2004, not one had cleaned up the crater in her yard. Maria joined the staff of Coal River Mountain Watch and now speaks out against mountaintop removal and flooding all over the country.

Maria walks to meet Bob Gates (left). Maria talks while Bob films (right). The washed-out crater can be seen in both photos.