• The Psychology of Disaster

  Psychologists have studied the effects of disasters and have found that survivors of different disasters have certain reactions in common. In each disaster there is an initial shock and a state of depression. Victims usually report that a state of euphoria then follows when the people who suffered the same horror can share their grief. By so doing, they find a community of strength to help them recreate their lives. On Buffalo Creek the Federal Government added to the psychological problems of the survivors by relocating them in mass mobile home camps without any consideration for former neighborhood ties. The Buffalo Creek survivors found it doubly hard to share their grief since there was no official effort to reconstitute their community.

  It was from studying the Buffalo Creek disaster that psychologists conceptualized and diagnosed “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”(PTS), a diagnosis that was then utilized in treatment of Vietnam veterans and continues to be used with other military and civilian trauma victims.

  In 1976, Yale sociologist Kai Erikson published Everything In Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood , a study that described a second trauma right after the first, one that lent "a degree of permanence to what might otherwise have been a transitional state of shock," because the physical and social communities of the survivors were also victims of the flood.

  Although Erikson’s work is used in many sociology courses, Appalachian scholars object to his methodology and conclusions. Marshall University’s Lynda Ann Ewen writes:

  The inhabitants of Buffalo Creek were to suffer another form of degradation and indignity. Despite overwhelming evidence of resiliency, including militant strikes, they were stereotyped as a culture that could not “recover.” Erikson blamed a “fatalistic” culture, grounded in individualism, for this supposed failure to recover. His book became a famous one, and was widely used to explain the cultural problems of Appalachia as a classic case of “blame the victim.” A reanalysis of the data used by Erikson shows instead that within weeks of the flood, members of the community were organizing not only a citizen’s panel of inquiry, but women’s quilting groups and union activities. This was all in the face of the fact that the Federal Government’s relocation efforts added to the psychological problems of the survivors.

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