Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood

This book was written about two years after the collapse of a containment pond that changed the landscape for a small town in rural Appalachia by a sociologist whose main job was to collect testimony of eye witnesses and survivors of the flood that scraped the valley bare for use in a law suit made on behalf of the victims against the mining company whose job it was to maintain the containment pond.the way it went about carefully reviewing the history of the area since settlement helped to understand the disaster in the context of the community, its cultural norms, its strengths and weaknesses.The story is often one of people finding it difficult to pick up the pieces. So much of their social fabric had been picked up and washed away. One question left unanswered is what has happened in the intervening decades.This man-made disaster has become a yardstick for comparison to judge other disasters.

This was a very intersting book for me. I was looking for information on this flood & I found the information plus more. I didn't really realize it was going to deal so much with "how the person works" in tragedies. I came to understand the Appalacian people as a unique group. I also understand how & why the flood started. But I also learned a lot about how people's "mind" deals with events such as this type of tragedy. And I also can understand how people in general, including myself, react to events in much smaller every-day problems. I can now understand many of my "reactions" & how they are normal & very unique to each individual. It helped me a lot Plus I learned a lot about the needless tragedy. It made me think a little. Good Read.

My copy came pre marked up which made me so happy lol! It’s like someone already did all the hard work for me!

A classic text that should be taken with a bit of grain of salt in understanding communities. I would recommend reading for understanding how Appalachia has been negatively portrayed.

The author claims that the flood completely destroyed the social bonds of community in this area, from which the people never recovered. Yes, this was a serious disaster, and people were killed. But the author was there as an employee of a law firm that was suing the mining company on behalf of the residents. So, not surprisingly, everyone he interviewed complained bitterly about the aftermath of the flood, and the author reports results right in line with what his employers wanted--maximal negative information about the consequences of the disaster. This is highly biased reporting. How did such a book win an award in sociology? The book reviews in professional sociology journals are pretty negative (for this bias, and for other problems, such as faulty background scholarship); I should have listened to those reviews before buying the book.

I bought the older version & Ms Erickson might have made her newer one seem less like a sociology text than this one.I wanted to know what happened and how the survivors coped immediately after the flood and what eventually happened to them. I did not want a discourse on community that for the "mountineers" was family oriented and then based on their coal mining "town". And lastly on the HUD trailer parks the survivors lived in. It read like a thesis for a grad school degree.

First person accounts are always interesting.

Book arrived as described. Used, but in excellent condition. Would definitely buy from this seller again.

Great book and delivery was Brilliant by the seller