Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor: for we are members one of another.

—Ephesians 4:25

Now, more than six months later, desolation and despair are nearly all that is left in Buffalo Creek Valley…The horror of Buffalo Creek has done much to awaken the state to an awareness of its plight and to start it moving into modern times. Accountability is coming at last to the hills and hollows.

—Appalachian author Harry M. Caudill, “Buffalo Creek Aftermath”

In all of these ways, Buffalo Creek epitomizes the tenuousness of so much of contemporary existence—our combination of survival of old and anticipation of new holocausts, and our struggles, equally inadequate, to confront that death-dominated precariousness as a source of new vitality and of transformation.

—Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson, “The Human Meaning of Total Disaster: The Buffalo Creek Experience”