It is not often that a scholar with empathy for rural citizens returns to a place for many years in order to understand the longer-term implications of disasters for individual well-being. This monograph provides a view of place long after the tragedy took place. It illustrates how community residents struggle to re-create community and well-being after a serious ecological shock. The resilience of the human character and the adaptability of community structures are the core of this book.
Taking us through the days before the flash flood at Buffalo Creek, the author paints a portrait of human failings and of growing environmental danger. He draws on the voices that were there on the scene. He also gives us a detailed review of newspaper accounts, government documents, and research studies, including Kai Erikson’s classic disaster study, Everything in Its Path. From these many sources, we get a multifaceted account of how the disaster occurred and how dozens of local, state, and federal agencies responded to it.
But this book is much more than an account of a return to examine a community some thirty years after a disaster. It is a human look at the pain, suffering, and survival of many individuals and the communities they inhabit. At a first cut, this book provides a clear indication of the strength of human beings and their willingness to rebuild and re-create community. Yet there is more to it than this. By drawing on sociological and psychological theories, the author empirically evaluates neighboring, social integration, social well-being, and community well-being. On all of these dimensions, residents of Buffalo Creek score higher than one would expect—given what has been published about Buffalo Creek until now by other authors.
To gain a better sense of whether Buffalo Creek lags behind other rural communities in the United States, the author then takes us to two other communities that have not been subjected to a dramatic environmental crisis. They are Elk Creek, West Virginia, and St. John, Washington (a community where I lived, worked, and neighbored for many years in the 1980s—as reported in a book that I coauthored with Don A. Dillman, Against All Odds: Rural Community in the Information Age).