Buffalo Creek
It’s 8:02 a.m. on a soggy morning. After raining buckets for days, everyone’s mood is glum. While serving your children breakfast before shooing them out the door to school, your husband finally sleeps after a long night shift deep in the bowels of the Buffalo Creek coal mines. Minutes tick by and your only thought is getting the kids out the door on time with all their books and school supplies. Suddenly you hear a noise so foreign and loud, it takes a moment to register which of your senses is picking up the signal. You look out the window and see a wall of water complete with homes, cars and people bobbing in it coming at you faster than anything you have ever experienced. You scream and then….. Such was the experience of some people who resided near the Buffalo Creek in February 1972. Their homes, lives, and families destroyed when the dams holding back 138 million gallons of black waste water failed and flooded the area in an instant.
In this paper I will discuss the four elements necessary to group the victims of this tragic disaster into a class action suit. The group must have commonality, typicality, numerosity and fair and adequate representation to qualify as a class action suit. In order to prove commonality, all plaintiffs must share a common issue. Each affected person must have experienced the same breach of law, whether it be negligence, product liability, or any other tort and similar final outcomes to the breach of law. In this instance all the injured parties endured the flood that wiped out their homes, vehicles, animals, and in some cases family members, even though the authorities warned owners of the mines in advance about the imminent dam collapse. Secondly, a group of injured people need typicality which requires that the claims and defenses alleged by the one chosen to represent the class are typical, or similar in nature, to the claims and defenses of the other members of the class. The people who resided along Buffalo Creek at
In this paper I will discuss the four elements necessary to group the victims of this tragic disaster into a class action suit. The group must have commonality, typicality, numerosity and fair and adequate representation to qualify as a class action suit. In order to prove commonality, all plaintiffs must share a common issue. Each affected person must have experienced the same breach of law, whether it be negligence, product liability, or any other tort and similar final outcomes to the breach of law. In this instance all the injured parties endured the flood that wiped out their homes, vehicles, animals, and in some cases family members, even though the authorities warned owners of the mines in advance about the imminent dam collapse. Secondly, a group of injured people need typicality which requires that the claims and defenses alleged by the one chosen to represent the class are typical, or similar in nature, to the claims and defenses of the other members of the class. The people who resided along Buffalo Creek at