Kai T. Erikson
The Earth and the environment are consistently changing and will continue to be altered, changed and experience different events that will affect the environment along with the organisms within it. Along with the environment changing and experiencing different events consistently, it can create hazards and risks within the environment that can ultimately lead to disasters affecting the areas around it. These hazards are not only natural, but can be technological and contextual as well. The book Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood, written in 1976 by Kai T. Erickson is broken into three different parts. These include the description of the technological disaster that caused the massive destruction of the Buffalo Creek community in Logan County, West Virginia, information about the area, and the affects of this terrible disaster on these people of the Appalachian Mountains.
The author Kai T. Erickson was sent to Buffalo Creek area a year after the disaster to report and provide a sociological view on the incident due to a law firm doing a case on it. The book begins with part one describing the disaster that occurred on February 26, 1972. This was when 132 million gallons of debris-filled muddy water broke through the Buffalo Mining Company’s dam and went surging down through Buffalo Creek flooding and destroying many residents homes, lives and the community itself. The author speaks to several residents who survived through the flash flood and they give their accounts of the horrible ordeal. “It was a wall of water and debris. It looked like it was about twenty-five or thirty foot high coming running at us” (Erickson, 1976). The dam rested on a spongy base of silt and sludge and varied from forty-five feet to sixty feet high stretching across the hollow. The dam trapped about 132 million gallons of black water, which created a reservoir about twenty acres in size and 40 feet deep at the edge of the impoundment. The dam was constructed by dumping tons of mine waste into the back of a settling pond and grading it with a bulldozer occasionally. It was made out of slag and whatever fragment of metal or timber that was thrown out in the refuse pile. The day of the disaster a worker noticed that the water was very close to the crest of the dam and that the structure had already turned soft. A short time after the inspection when the worker went to give a warning it was too late the dam collapsed allowing for no chance of a warning for evacuation.
The second section of the book is dedicated to describing the history and the area of where this disaster occurred. The author begins with explaining the history of settlers coming to the Appalachian Mountains and either continuing on their journeys or staying and forming their own communities tucked away in the valleys. The ways of life of the people in this area are also described including their family lifestyles, religions, the conflicts they encountered, and the individualism or ethos that occurred in many character traits for the mountaineers. The author then moves into describing the coming of the coal camps to the area disrupting the naturalness that was found in the mountains. The coal camps brought pollution to the air, garbage strewn everywhere, the construction of small run-down shacks, and the stench of human waste coming from the mines. The coal mines also brought danger and risk to the areas, where many communities were not ready or equipped to handle the perils of the mines. The last chapter in part two describes the history and characteristics of Buffalo Creek. The most important developments in the history of Buffalo Creek in Logan county was the construction of railroad lines along with the building of coal mines in the area. These developments brought people and goods to the region which was fairly isolated to begin with.
In the final section of the book the author describes the aftermath of the disaster and the affects it had on the people of this area. The author expresses that while the damage caused by the mine dam collapsing and the surge of water and waste down the mountain valley was disastrous, the worst damage was in the minds and spirits of the people who survived this disaster. Even though the event happened in the past when the author interviews people years later, their faces darken and they have an almost ongoing fear that something of that magnitude can happen again. In a few of the interviews with the residents, they explain how before the flood their communities were fairly tight, they raised their children with their neighbors children and they would always greet people in the community as well, almost as if they were one big family. This sense of community changed after the flood, people weren’t out talking to one another, or seemed as friendly, the sense of family within the community was lost according to one of the residents interviewed. “But anymore you never see nobody out talking to one another. They’re not friendly like they used to be. It’s just a whole different life, that’s all” (Erikson, 1976). The author divides the trauma that occurred within the community as “individual trauma” and “collective trauma”. This meaning that individually there was a deep shock embedded in people seeing so much death and devastation, along with as a community there was an altering of the social life with damages done to the bonds and relationships of the people.
Overall the book was very good at giving a detailed look into the disaster that shook up this small Appalachian community. What I thought was most interesting was the actual quotes from interviews with the survivors of the event and how they described in their own words their reactions to the flash flood. The second part gave a good description, history and background on the mountaineer lifestyle, life in the Appalachians, the impact of coal mines and then focusing on the specific area of Buffalo Creek. The final part of the book, looking at the scars left behind by the disaster and the interviews of residents accounts on the loss of community and the trauma of the event was interesting in how a people described how much their sense of community has changed. Erikson gave a good and detailed account of the disaster, but in dealing with natural disasters and hazards it took a more sociological approach. The author spent a great deal of time looking at the lifestyles of the people involved and their interactions with each other in a time of tragedy. The book doesn’t focus as much on the statistical numbers involved in the disaster, such as the death toll, amount of damages, or what the cost was in the recovery stage, such as reconstruction of their community. The event described in this book is also a technological disaster; it doesn’t involve a natural flood that occurred, so readers need to be interested in reading about technological disasters. I would recommend this book to people who are interested in a sociological approach to human reactions in times of trauma and disaster, along with learning about the dynamics of a community that was once bound together, to one that seemed to have become strangers as a result of one fateful day.
Erikson, Kai T. Everything in it’s Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.
