Everything in Its Path

Everything in Its Path:Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (1976), a non-fiction book by American author Kai T. Erikson, won the 1978 National Book Award for documenting the aftermath of the Buffalo Creek flood disaster in Logan County, West Virginia which killed 125 people and left 4,000 people homeless out of a 5,000-person local population.

On February 26, 1972, a coal slurry impoundment dam managed by the Pittstown Coal Company burst, unleashing over 130 gallons of black coal wastewater. Following the dam break, a wave of black water rose to thirty feet high, rushing over a whopping sixteen coal towns: Saunders, Pardee, Lorado, Craneco, Lundale, Stowe, Crites, Latrobe, Robinette, Amherstdale, Becco, Fanco, Braeholm, Accoville, Crown, and Kistler. Around 5,000 people lived in the affected area, and of those 5,000 people, 125 were killed and 4,000 were left homeless.

In addition to the massive human impact of the disaster, the Buffalo Creek flood was significant because a federal mine inspector had declared the dam "satisfactory" only four days prior to the disaster. In all, three dams ultimately failed, but the first dam—the one deemed "satisfactory"—directly caused the other two to break. The break occurred during a period of rains that, while heavy, were hardly an anomaly in either a historic or geographic sense.

Due to the huge human impact of the disaster, an investigation was immediately launched. Unfortunately, as Erikson notes, the first investigation was conducted by individuals who were closely connected to the coal industry and were thus sympathetic to that corporate community. The Governor of West Virginia, Arch A. Moore, Jr., also stacked the investigation with government employees whose departments would be the ones found complicit for allowing the flood, if wrongdoing or negligence were determined. Therefore, the investigatory commission had huge incentives on both the corporate and the governmental ends to conclude that the disaster was an "Act of God" and, therefore, unavoidable by all responsible parties.

Despite this, the Governor's Commission didn't let the responsible parties off the hook completely. The Commission's findings called for new legislation designed to prevent future catastrophes, along with further investigations by prosecutors. It wasn't until a separate citizen-run commission, however, that blame was explicitly laid at the feet of the Pittstown Coal Company. The company was found guilty of murder in the deaths of at least "124 men, women, and children." Moreover, the commission called for legislation to be passed that would prohibit strip mining in West Virginia.

Unfortunately, the legislation was never passed. Even worse, the state of West Virginia settled with the Pittstown Coal Company for $1 million, even though it was sued for $100 million. Adding insult to injury, a portion of the settlement was supposed to have been donated to the cause of building a new community center, but the community center to this date has never been built.

After summarizing the disaster, Erikson goes into detail about how, aside from the loss of life and property, the survivors faced enormous post-traumatic stress in the wake of the flood. Eriksen discusses the "loss of community" that took place. While the term "disaster syndrome" was already well-known, Eriksen says this syndrome manifested itself in an unprecedented way after the dam break. The people in these towns were forced to deal with the fact the coal industry, which had provided the town's primary source of income, had betrayed it. The contours of this type of trauma are much different than, say, the trauma experienced after a natural disaster or "Act of God."

Erikson further writes that many natural disasters are followed by a sense of communal euphoria. A community generally bands together in the wake of a disaster, creating a sense of belonging that is a comfort to disaster victims. However, Eriksen writes, the community couldn't come together after the flood because the community was virtually gone. There were no communal outlets that the victims could use to cope with the trauma.

Eriksen also describes the timing of the disaster occurring at a particularly unfortunate time. The affected coal communities in the preceding decade were down on their luck, and a whopping 65 percent of residents who were between the ages of ten and nineteen in 1960 had left by 1970. Nevertheless, the town was starting to make a turnaround. Hope had been restored, albeit to a small degree. Then the flood happened and tore down all that hope.

Everything in its Path is a harrowing and tragic look at communal grief in the wake of an unimaginable disaster.