Steven Broadwater
West Virginia University College of Law, 2L
Mining – West Virginia and Guanajuato

While in Guanajuato, we were able to participate in a tour of the city. The tour highlighted two churches and even took us through a typical home in the area that was being renovated. Most interesting to me, however, was the city’s history as a mining town. The city began as a silver and gold mining town hundred’s of years ago and mines still remain in the area to this day.

Apparently, the city actually has been completely flooded over four times starting early in the 1700’s. A river still runs underneath the city. This river was the channel for the floods, but the floods were so devastating because of mining practices. See, the floods were not just water that washed away the town; no, the floods were thick sediment that settled in the town, buried everything, and Guanajuato was simply built on top of. At many mining operations, including those in WV, water is mixed with mined ore that isn’t purely the mineral being sought. Somehow the gold or silver (or coal in WV) can then more easily be separated from the other dirt and rock. This process leaves thick mud or slurry that is no longer clean water and is often stored as waste behind a dam built of dirt and rock previously removed from the site before the minerals were reached.

These slurry dams remain in WV, and were the cause of major loss of life as recently as 1972 with the Buffalo Creek Mine Disaster. There was a mining operation along buffalo creek and three separate dams had been built in succession upriver to store the coal slurry. On February 36, 1972, after days of nearly continuous rainfall, the highest dam collapsed, obliterating the two dams downriver. According to the WV Division of Culture and History, 125 people were dead, 1,100 injured, and over 4,000 were left homeless in a matter of minutes.

This seems to be very similar to the floods that have buried various parts of Guanajuato at least four times since the early 1700s. In such an arid and dry climate, since there wouldn’t be enough water to flush out all the rock and mud after an initial flood, parts of the city were left buried under a thick, concrete-like substance that was simply built over top of. I was moved, sadly, by the realization that a mining problem that surely killed so many people hundreds of years ago in Guanajuato was a problem that still resulted in death and destruction as recently as 1972 in my home state, in the United States, were we pride ourselves in being one of the best, most developed and smartest countries in the world. It appears to me that the mining disasters in Guanajuato compared with the Buffalo Creek disaster are a clear reiteration that mankind must learn from history, or we are doomed to repeat our mistakes.