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Research articles and the book, Prolonged Psychological Effects of Disaster: A Study of Buffalo Creek—by a team of psychologists and psychiatrists, including Bonnie L. Green and Goldine C. Gleser—were more circumspect about the permanence of the psychological damages that were suffered by many of the survivors. This is in keeping with many research studies of disasters that often have found considerable psychological recovery by many survivors within a few years of natural disasters. This book was written several years after the other three books, so Green and Gleser had more time to determine whether psychological recovery was occurring, and the survivors had more time to recover before they were studied and “written about.”
New Questions, Motivations, and Efforts
It has been more than thirty-five years since the flood. What has been recovered or re-created since then? What damages, if any, remain in the social lives of its people? Does the flood of 1972 hang over the spirit and culture of Buffalo Creek like a curse? Do some people somehow believe it to have been a warning, a lesson to be learned, a revelation? If adversity can build character, can it also build community? Have new forms of social relationships and a new sense of community emerged? If so, how? Is Buffalo Creek once again a community with qualities similar to other small, settled places in rural America?
Since the year 2000, I have been meeting former and current residents of Buffalo Creek and other small villages and towns in the United States in order to answer these questions. What I found might surprise you, reassure you, and encourage you to think more deeply about how human beings, their families, and their communities adjust, in the long run, not only to disastrous events like floods, but also to an onslaught of modern economic, social, and technological changes. It is often claimed that automobiles, telephones, TVs, “the pill,” recreational drugs, credit cards, the Internet, and globalization, among other innovations, have diminished social community and neighboring across the United States—especially in small towns in rural America that were once so vibrant, essential, and symbolic of social life in the United States.