Buffalo Creek Disaster Case Summary

Today, I am going to tell my side of the 1972 Buffalo Creek Disaster case as I interned for Arnold & Porter. As an intern, I shadowed Gerald M. Stern during the lawsuit. Needless to say, I was experienced several events that I applied concepts of business law to. The Buffalo Creek Disaster was an incident that occurred due to Dam Three failing at the Buffalo Mining Company’s location in West Virginia. This incident killed one hundred twenty-five individuals, injuring one thousand twenty-one citizens, and left four thousand homeless. With Stern as the leader, my firm acquired the task of representing the plaintiffs who were affected by the catastrophe. After the lawsuit was settled, Stern wrote a book on the case, which I will reference from

This was due to the fact that Pittston was wealthier and the case would be more successful in federal court. In Stern’s book, The Buffalo Creek Disaster, he stated, “If the plaintiffs were to sue Buffalo Mining Company they could only do it in state court, however if they went after Pittston they could use in either state or federal court” (Buffalo Creek Disaster, Gerald Stern, pg. 13). In order to pierce the corporate veil, our firm needed to prove that Pittston was over involved within the operations of the Buffalo Mining Company. From the documents that we acquired from Pittston, we were able to prove

Our firm wished to sue in federal court rather than West Virginia state court. Stern described our reasoning for this as “Coal companies have more influence on West Virginia state courts than they do with less political federal courts” (Buffalo Creek Disaster, Gerald Stern, pg. 13). During my undergraduate business law course, I learned that “State court judges are elected and generally support companies who create jobs for their state” (Bock, Lecture notes on The American Legal System, pg. 6). Professor Bock described the different jurisdictions as, “State courts have jurisdiction over all cases that are not in the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal courts and for a case to proceed in a federal court, there must be federal subject matter jurisdiction” (Bock, Lecture notes on The American Legal System, pg.