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At St. John, Washington, Stephanie Swannack, Muriel Jordan, and Becky Dickerson were especially cordial and valuable sources of insight. At Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Linda Dinan provided me with many documents that revealed similarities between the disaster at Buffalo Creek and the many floods that have continued to damage communities in and around Johnstown for more than one hundred years.
My lady, Donna Schwartz-Barcott, helped me greatly in doing many days of research at Buffalo Creek and St. John. Others who collected data at these locations are Mark Steven Duty, Marlynda Adkins, Doug Barrett, and Stephanie Swannack.
Scholars who commented on one or more chapters of this book while it was in manuscript form include Professors Donna Schwartz-Barcott of the University of Rhode Island, John Allen of Utah State University, Virginia Aldige of North Carolina State University, Dwight Billings of the University of Kentucky, Bonnie L. Green of Georgetown University, and Emeritus Professors John Shelton Reed of the University of North Carolina, Russell R. Dynes and Enrico L. Quarantelli of the University of Delaware, and Kai Erikson of Yale University. For more than thirty years now, Erikson’s book about the disaster at Buffalo Creek has stimulated my thinking about the nature of human communities and how people remember them. Besides this, Erikson also was very gracious and helpful to me in the early stages of my research. It was a pleasure to be able to show him around the re-created Buffalo Creek Valley for two days in 2002, comparing observations and attending a thirtieth-anniversary service in memory of the victims of the disaster.
George Roberts Coulter, a friend of many years, exercised his sharp eye and red pencil on an early draft of the manuscript and influenced the current subtitle of this book. Another longtime friend, Steve Applegate, provided useful recollections of the coal camps of Logan County in the 1970s. And yet another friend through the ages, George Levendis, Esq., of Levendis Law Group, PLLC, Washington, DC, helped me understand some of the complexities of the lawsuits against the coal companies following the disaster.