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Everything in Its Path
On February 26, 1972, 132 million gallons of debris-filled muddy water burst through a makeshift mining-company dam and roared through Buffalo Creek, a narrow mountain hollow in West Virginia. Following the flood, survivors from a previously tightly knit community were crowded into trailer homes with no concern for former neighborhoods. The result was a collective trauma that lasted longer than the individual traumas caused by the original disaster.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
February 28, 2020
This is more of a sociological study of Appalachian people's before and after the Buffalo Creek Flood. There is not much on the actual event or the things that created it. A lot of it is the author's theories on how people felt before and after, taken from actual quotes from survivors. I was expecting a book about how this catastrophe happened. What led up to it. What happened during and after. I got very little of that. Mostly the author's sociological theories mixed with quotes from survivors. Not at all what I was looking for.
November 14, 2018
Everything in Its Path is an account of the causes and lasting impact of the Buffalo Creek Flood of 1972 on an Appalachian community and its people. Four thousand of town’s population of 5,000 were displaced by a flood along with 125 fatalities in a preventable disaster caused by a poorly maintained dam operated by the town’s primary employer. Kai T. Erikson makes a compelling case that the avoidable circumstances of this disaster and the trauma that ensued as emblematic of the nature of power and privilege, not just in Buffalo Creek but in subjugated communities everywhere
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Erikson’s research questions were twofold: to gather facts about the disaster itself and to contribute to the knowledge about natural disasters in general. The author not only answered these questions but created a poignant tableau of loss experienced by a community in a multifaceted account of grief exacerbated by long-term cultural oppression. Erikson termed this a “loss of communality” as “an important ingredient of the trauma that struck so many people in Buffalo Creek in the months and years following the flood.” This concept of loss is the key byproduct of Erikson’s inductive process of research and the major strength of this study.
Structured research can ensure replicability, but the inductive nature of Erikson’s approach allows the reader to explore the connections between individualized trauma and the importance of cultural context in shared experiences. Before reading this book, I wondered how this account from 1972 could be relevant today, but as the updated introduction points out, the story of Buffalo Creek is one we’ve seen in New Orleans and will continue to witness as disasters exacerbated by climate change become more prevalent. The study is one that will maintain relevancy as those who are living on the most tenuous fringes of society will continue to be those most impacted by disasters, natural and manmade. It is with the grounding of tragedy within a wider sociological context that makes Erikson’s methodological approach in Buffalo Creek so successful.
The structure of this account was both phenomenological and ethnographic. Like many qualitative studies, the research began in an exploratory fashion. In the case of Buffalo Creek, the impetus for study was to build legal evidence about the disaster on behalf of the town’s residents as plaintiffs in a case against the Pittston Coal Company.
The methodology that followed was both loosely structured and highly rigorous. The researcher combined personal interviews with detailed historical research on mountain community and Appalachian culture. So, while the researcher’s initial approach may have appeared informal—his initial sampling method was to stand in a gas station parking lot to meet and engage residents—he framed the subsequent conversations within a cultural and historical context. While it was clear that the magnitude of the tragedy in Buffalo Creek compelled the researcher to take part in this project, his grounding in personal interest with the victims of this tragedy, allowed for a cogent and respectful accounting of the cultural history of Appalachian people. His approach in detailing the cultural history of Appalachia and the subjugation of its people is what I envision his approach with individual participants would have been—respectful and grounded in reverence for the community and their experiences.
I cannot overstate the importance that the cultural history of Appalachian people had framing and validating the experiences of individuals that whose voices are in this work. The person-in-environment approach was a necessary facet of this study that postulated that for communities that lack traditional modes to power and resources, people serve as an environment onto themselves. This was particularly true for the Buffalo Creek community, who leaned so heavily on social capital they did not notice its impact within their identity until it was gone.
A high level of rapport was built with the researcher and the people of Buffalo Creek and though how that took place remains unclear, the immersion that he undertook as part of this research allowed for building those strong relationships. In taking on a study like this, I would emulate this method of immersion, but would include some rigor with member checking. Buchbinder (2011) claims that this technique can level the power dynamic among respondents and researcher. As detailed by the Erikson himself, Appalachian cultures have historically experienced exploitation by outsiders, so the inclusion of this validation rigor would have been an important element to fold into the study. Especially given the researcher’s aim to contribute to the knowledge of natural disasters beyond Buffalo Creek, and given the wide popularity of this book, incorporating validation techniques would have served to strengthen future accounts of these kinds of disasters.
.
Erikson’s research questions were twofold: to gather facts about the disaster itself and to contribute to the knowledge about natural disasters in general. The author not only answered these questions but created a poignant tableau of loss experienced by a community in a multifaceted account of grief exacerbated by long-term cultural oppression. Erikson termed this a “loss of communality” as “an important ingredient of the trauma that struck so many people in Buffalo Creek in the months and years following the flood.” This concept of loss is the key byproduct of Erikson’s inductive process of research and the major strength of this study.
Structured research can ensure replicability, but the inductive nature of Erikson’s approach allows the reader to explore the connections between individualized trauma and the importance of cultural context in shared experiences. Before reading this book, I wondered how this account from 1972 could be relevant today, but as the updated introduction points out, the story of Buffalo Creek is one we’ve seen in New Orleans and will continue to witness as disasters exacerbated by climate change become more prevalent. The study is one that will maintain relevancy as those who are living on the most tenuous fringes of society will continue to be those most impacted by disasters, natural and manmade. It is with the grounding of tragedy within a wider sociological context that makes Erikson’s methodological approach in Buffalo Creek so successful.
The structure of this account was both phenomenological and ethnographic. Like many qualitative studies, the research began in an exploratory fashion. In the case of Buffalo Creek, the impetus for study was to build legal evidence about the disaster on behalf of the town’s residents as plaintiffs in a case against the Pittston Coal Company.
The methodology that followed was both loosely structured and highly rigorous. The researcher combined personal interviews with detailed historical research on mountain community and Appalachian culture. So, while the researcher’s initial approach may have appeared informal—his initial sampling method was to stand in a gas station parking lot to meet and engage residents—he framed the subsequent conversations within a cultural and historical context. While it was clear that the magnitude of the tragedy in Buffalo Creek compelled the researcher to take part in this project, his grounding in personal interest with the victims of this tragedy, allowed for a cogent and respectful accounting of the cultural history of Appalachian people. His approach in detailing the cultural history of Appalachia and the subjugation of its people is what I envision his approach with individual participants would have been—respectful and grounded in reverence for the community and their experiences.
I cannot overstate the importance that the cultural history of Appalachian people had framing and validating the experiences of individuals that whose voices are in this work. The person-in-environment approach was a necessary facet of this study that postulated that for communities that lack traditional modes to power and resources, people serve as an environment onto themselves. This was particularly true for the Buffalo Creek community, who leaned so heavily on social capital they did not notice its impact within their identity until it was gone.
A high level of rapport was built with the researcher and the people of Buffalo Creek and though how that took place remains unclear, the immersion that he undertook as part of this research allowed for building those strong relationships. In taking on a study like this, I would emulate this method of immersion, but would include some rigor with member checking. Buchbinder (2011) claims that this technique can level the power dynamic among respondents and researcher. As detailed by the Erikson himself, Appalachian cultures have historically experienced exploitation by outsiders, so the inclusion of this validation rigor would have been an important element to fold into the study. Especially given the researcher’s aim to contribute to the knowledge of natural disasters beyond Buffalo Creek, and given the wide popularity of this book, incorporating validation techniques would have served to strengthen future accounts of these kinds of disasters.
January 27, 2013
This is a great overview of the 1972 Buffalo Creek Flood,in West Virginia coal mines, providing a social and cultural context for the trauma, emotional and socio-cultural, that crippled the people of the towns that were destroyed. It explores what disaster is, what disaster does, how rescue operations, private and governmental, further traumatize individuals and communities through their actions and policies, without ever realizing the role they play in doing so.
July 31, 2017
Repetitive but compelling and interesting
February 26, 2017
Everything in the path of the Buffalo Creek flood was washed away. An entire hollow of West Virginia coal-mining villages was destroyed when a carelessly constructed coal slurry dam gave way under heavy rains on February 26, 1972; over one hundred people were killed, and thousands left homeless. Yet the fast-moving flood was followed by a slow-motion disaster that continued to cause trauma among the flood’s survivors, as sociologist Kai Erikson of Yale University explains.
In Everything In Its Path, Erikson talks about the process by which he came to Buffalo Creek as a consultant to a legal case being waged by attorney Gerald Stern on behalf of the Buffalo Creek survivors. (Stern’s book The Buffalo Creek Disaster is another important study of the flood.) Yet Erikson focuses not so much on the legal case, or on the drama and suspense of the disaster itself, as on Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (the book’s subtitle).
In that connection, Erikson writes that "[I]n order to understand the context in which this event took place, it is important to appreciate that life in Appalachia has been the source of a deeper and more sustained form of trauma for many years. If the Buffalo Creek flood is viewed as an acute disaster, a sharp and abrupt assault on the integrity of human lives, then the Appalachian experience in general has to be viewed as something akin to a chronic disaster that has worked its way into the human spirit in a more gradual fashion” (pp. 131-32). That disaster has historical and economic dimensions: “[T]he men and women of Appalachia are among the most truly exploited people to be found anywhere”, people who occupied a resource-rich land the resources of which “were cut or scraped or gouged away; and when the land lay bruised and exhausted from the punishment it had received, the people of the region had virtually nothing to show for it” (p. 68).
The coal-mining villages of the Buffalo Creek hollow, a characteristic Appalachian community, experienced a disaster the totality of which shook the community to its core. Erikson points out that in most disaster situations – the Chicago fire of 1871, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 – “victims are invariably outnumbered by non-victims”; the Buffalo Creek flood, by contrast, offered a scenario in which “the victims outnumbered the non-victims by so large a margin that the community itself has to be counted a casualty” (p. 202).
Everything In Its Path draws much of its power from the personal testimony of Buffalo Creek survivors. The testimony of one survivor, who was fortunate enough to get himself and his family out of their Lorado, West Virginia, home and up into the hills above the town as the flood ravaged the town, was characteristic: he recalled looking back down at the town and seeing that “The first five houses above me, there was about fourteen drowned, and I saw every one of them in their homes as they floated by where I was at. Well, I looked back on down the valley, and everything had done washed out and gone” (p. 140).
Yet the Buffalo Creek disaster was more than just the fast-moving flood that ravaged the valley and killed over 100 people. Survivors were placed in hastily built trailer camps provided by the federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (FEMA did not exist yet), on a first-come, first-served basis that disrupted the traditional basis of kin, township, and local community on which the people of the Buffalo Creek hollow had depended. As a result, “people all over the hollow live with a lasting sense of being out of place, uprooted, torn loose from their moorings, and this feeling has long outlasted the initial trauma of the disaster itself” (p. 212).
The same survivor quoted above described the unwelcome difference between post-flood life in the trailer camps and pre-flood life in the towns of the Buffalo Creek hollow: “Back before this thing happened, you never went up the road or down it but what somebody was ahollering at you….[T]here’d be half a dozen families would just group up and stand there and talk. But anymore you never see nobody out talking to one another. They’re not friendly like they used to be. It’s just a whole different life, that’s all” (pp. 146-47).
In Erikson’s reading, Appalachian life is characterized by certain inherent contradictions – Erikson calls them “axes of variation” – in the mountaineer ethos of the region. Those “axes of variation” include the following:
1. Love of tradition vs. respect for personal liberty;
2. Self-assertion vs. resignation;
3. Self-centeredness vs. group-centeredness;
4. Ability vs. disability; and
5. A sense of independence vs. a need for dependence. (pp. 84-88)
Every culture, it can be argued, has its own “axes of variation,” its own internal contradictions; but in the context of Appalachian culture, Erikson seems to argue that Appalachia’s “axes of variation” impose unique challenges for the region’s residents, given the region’s lack of major cities (aside from Pittsburgh), the relative poverty of so many of the region’s residents, and the manner in which the resource wealth of the region has largely been drawn off to benefit other people in faraway areas, leaving many of Appalachia’s residents living precariously, at a subsistence level.
What all of this means is that, while The Buffalo Creek Disaster and Everything In Its Path are both very good books about the Buffalo Creek flood, their messages are quite different. Stern, a lawyer, ends The Buffalo Creek Disaster on a note of relative optimism; the people whom he represented won their case, and a company that had been careless about the lives of the people of the Buffalo Creek hollow was made to pay for its neglect. By contrast, Erikson, a sociologist, points to internal contradictions within Appalachian life and culture – contradictions that challenge the ability of the people of Appalachia to respond meaningfully to future crises or traumatic events.
The Buffalo Creek flood is 45 years in the past now; but other disasters will strike Appalachia in the future. How successfully will the people of the region respond to those future events? The scenario that Kai Erikson sets forth in Everything In Its Path is not a promising one.
In Everything In Its Path, Erikson talks about the process by which he came to Buffalo Creek as a consultant to a legal case being waged by attorney Gerald Stern on behalf of the Buffalo Creek survivors. (Stern’s book The Buffalo Creek Disaster is another important study of the flood.) Yet Erikson focuses not so much on the legal case, or on the drama and suspense of the disaster itself, as on Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (the book’s subtitle).
In that connection, Erikson writes that "[I]n order to understand the context in which this event took place, it is important to appreciate that life in Appalachia has been the source of a deeper and more sustained form of trauma for many years. If the Buffalo Creek flood is viewed as an acute disaster, a sharp and abrupt assault on the integrity of human lives, then the Appalachian experience in general has to be viewed as something akin to a chronic disaster that has worked its way into the human spirit in a more gradual fashion” (pp. 131-32). That disaster has historical and economic dimensions: “[T]he men and women of Appalachia are among the most truly exploited people to be found anywhere”, people who occupied a resource-rich land the resources of which “were cut or scraped or gouged away; and when the land lay bruised and exhausted from the punishment it had received, the people of the region had virtually nothing to show for it” (p. 68).
The coal-mining villages of the Buffalo Creek hollow, a characteristic Appalachian community, experienced a disaster the totality of which shook the community to its core. Erikson points out that in most disaster situations – the Chicago fire of 1871, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 – “victims are invariably outnumbered by non-victims”; the Buffalo Creek flood, by contrast, offered a scenario in which “the victims outnumbered the non-victims by so large a margin that the community itself has to be counted a casualty” (p. 202).
Everything In Its Path draws much of its power from the personal testimony of Buffalo Creek survivors. The testimony of one survivor, who was fortunate enough to get himself and his family out of their Lorado, West Virginia, home and up into the hills above the town as the flood ravaged the town, was characteristic: he recalled looking back down at the town and seeing that “The first five houses above me, there was about fourteen drowned, and I saw every one of them in their homes as they floated by where I was at. Well, I looked back on down the valley, and everything had done washed out and gone” (p. 140).
Yet the Buffalo Creek disaster was more than just the fast-moving flood that ravaged the valley and killed over 100 people. Survivors were placed in hastily built trailer camps provided by the federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (FEMA did not exist yet), on a first-come, first-served basis that disrupted the traditional basis of kin, township, and local community on which the people of the Buffalo Creek hollow had depended. As a result, “people all over the hollow live with a lasting sense of being out of place, uprooted, torn loose from their moorings, and this feeling has long outlasted the initial trauma of the disaster itself” (p. 212).
The same survivor quoted above described the unwelcome difference between post-flood life in the trailer camps and pre-flood life in the towns of the Buffalo Creek hollow: “Back before this thing happened, you never went up the road or down it but what somebody was ahollering at you….[T]here’d be half a dozen families would just group up and stand there and talk. But anymore you never see nobody out talking to one another. They’re not friendly like they used to be. It’s just a whole different life, that’s all” (pp. 146-47).
In Erikson’s reading, Appalachian life is characterized by certain inherent contradictions – Erikson calls them “axes of variation” – in the mountaineer ethos of the region. Those “axes of variation” include the following:
1. Love of tradition vs. respect for personal liberty;
2. Self-assertion vs. resignation;
3. Self-centeredness vs. group-centeredness;
4. Ability vs. disability; and
5. A sense of independence vs. a need for dependence. (pp. 84-88)
Every culture, it can be argued, has its own “axes of variation,” its own internal contradictions; but in the context of Appalachian culture, Erikson seems to argue that Appalachia’s “axes of variation” impose unique challenges for the region’s residents, given the region’s lack of major cities (aside from Pittsburgh), the relative poverty of so many of the region’s residents, and the manner in which the resource wealth of the region has largely been drawn off to benefit other people in faraway areas, leaving many of Appalachia’s residents living precariously, at a subsistence level.
What all of this means is that, while The Buffalo Creek Disaster and Everything In Its Path are both very good books about the Buffalo Creek flood, their messages are quite different. Stern, a lawyer, ends The Buffalo Creek Disaster on a note of relative optimism; the people whom he represented won their case, and a company that had been careless about the lives of the people of the Buffalo Creek hollow was made to pay for its neglect. By contrast, Erikson, a sociologist, points to internal contradictions within Appalachian life and culture – contradictions that challenge the ability of the people of Appalachia to respond meaningfully to future crises or traumatic events.
The Buffalo Creek flood is 45 years in the past now; but other disasters will strike Appalachia in the future. How successfully will the people of the region respond to those future events? The scenario that Kai Erikson sets forth in Everything In Its Path is not a promising one.
August 19, 2019
This classic ethnography explores the 1972 Buffalo Creek Flood in West Virginia. The disaster, a result of heavy rains breaching a poorly constructed coal mining dam, was due to the confluence of two forces: the human/industrial, and the "natural"/rains. Although Erikson doesn't really mention climate change at all, his framework and analysis fits well within understandings of nature itself as fundamentally social. Unlike most contemporary sociological ethnographies, Erikson often presents his interviewees' words in long text blocks of personal narrative, so that often the reader is presented with several pages of his participants' own words. The major theoretical contribution of the book is Erikson's conception of loss and collective trauma as a requisite of a disaster- if you're interested in this theory, these ideas have been further fleshed out by Rebecca Elliott in her fantastic article "The Sociology of Climate Change as a Sociology of Loss". Sadly, there is no methodological appendix, which would have been illuminating into Erikson's interview structures and his participants. An important read for anyone studying the sociology of climate change and disasters.
June 27, 2018
Because it's a sociological study, Erikson is forced to adhere to some standards of academic style and structure, which slows the momentum of the narrative. He acknowledges the repetitive nature of the victims' suffering, anxieties and depressions – though together, it does convey the scope of the community's physical and psychic annihilation.
But rarely do the last few pages of a book stay with me for as long as these did; forty years later, Erikson's prophetic vision of our country and culture is chillingly resonant.
But rarely do the last few pages of a book stay with me for as long as these did; forty years later, Erikson's prophetic vision of our country and culture is chillingly resonant.
October 13, 2021
Though I did not update my reading regularly for this book, I did complete reading it. No, I would not read this book if it wasn't for my class, but yes, it was interesting. To live through the Buffalo Creek Flood is similar to Sandy and Katrina, and in relatively close proximity to the disasters, though the communality that is lacking in the majority of America is what sets trauma reactions apart. Very interesting and honestly a good read (though the paper I wrote is shit)
September 14, 2022
I liked Erikson’s portrayal of human cultures as “axes of variation” with people and communities occupying different areas along those axes between one extreme and the other. This was a useful way to describe how the people of Buffalo Creek lived and behaved in response to the chronic disasters leading up to the flood and the acute disaster that was the flood. Excited to read Erikson’s new book on Katrina. Also excited to read more oral histories
December 31, 2022
This was required reading for a social psychology course a number of years ago. I picked it up again and gave it a re-read. No, the event isn’t dissected. It shows how a catastrophic event has far reaching consequences. What happens when communities are destroyed. How it effects community members. Everything in its path refers to more than just the physical devastation.
March 11, 2018
Remarkable tale about the destruction of a whole micro-civilization in a flood in West Virginia. I read it because many members of my family were wiped out in the great flood of 1889 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
March 2, 2018
I read this in a sociology class in college and still think about it. I'd love to find time to re-read it.
June 10, 2019
Sociological exploration of the effects of traumatic disaster on mining community in West Virginia in 1972 includes lots of quotes of residents.
August 5, 2019
Well written, interesting book. Informative, especially for being a relatively short book.
Read
March 25, 2020Not bad if you ignore everything he says about Appalachia
July 21, 2020
Great book, very valuable and interesting
January 18, 2023
A powerfully personal accounting of the flood brought about by environmental abuse and the mishandling of the human crisis after. Stunning to read, in part because so little has changed.
September 16, 2023
read for my sociology of disaster class. very interesting and insightful. i found the sections about individual and collective trauma particularly compelling.
March 6, 2025
Post Helene research and comfort seeking
January 14, 2023
Loved this book in Sociology 101
February 23, 2022
Required reading for my Disaster Science Fellowship. It was one of the handful of readings I actually enjoyed
July 17, 2025
This is a dated study but, man, is it ever current. The writing is so well crafted and points laid out, I forgot this is how people used to compose written thoughts. This is on my perpetual-favorites shelf.
April 8, 2015
I read this for a Social Psychology class. Kai Erikson, the son of famed psychologist Erik Erikson discects the Buffalo Creek disaster in a way that I've never quite seen done before. The book is broken up into very distinct parts. First there is the background information about Appalachian culture, which was fascinating. Later you have many personal narrative accounts of the Buffalo Creek disaster. Erikson captures the utter devestation that these people went through and the ways in which their lives were impacted by the flood. Lastly, in the most interesting part of the book, Erikson uses more narrative accounts of the residents of Buffalo Creek to describe the loss of community that resulted from this awful disaster. This is a grim, intensely sad, but incredibly important book that anyone interested in social psychology would benefit from reading. Highly recommended.
May 29, 2011
Although the social theory offered is outdated, the ideas presented, particularly about individual and collective trauma, are still useful. And anyway, his work with the old theory is really well described, vivid. More importantly, the respectful physical and psychological portrait drawn of the Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972 is indelible and incredibly touching. For me, the setting of both natural resource exploitation and natural disaster, and their destruction of local community, is especially relevant for my research in Aceh.
November 2, 2009
Read this in Sociology class at Grinnell. Had vague memories of it that came rushing back as I visited Logan County for the WV project. Was able to figure out what the book was called and reread it. Very interesting discussion of what happened to the folks (and why) who were "displaced" by the Buffalo Creek disaster. As if frequently the case, I found it much more interesting to read it by choice than because it was required
February 18, 2016
Actual rating 2.5
Very informative read and definitely gives the reader great insight into such a horrific tragedy. There were so many eye witness interviews and information that made you feel like you were actually there. Well as close to there as you can be. This was another book that I had to read for school and though I wouldn't have picked it up on my own I was not completely disappointed.
Very informative read and definitely gives the reader great insight into such a horrific tragedy. There were so many eye witness interviews and information that made you feel like you were actually there. Well as close to there as you can be. This was another book that I had to read for school and though I wouldn't have picked it up on my own I was not completely disappointed.
March 6, 2011
Excellent sociological study of the destruction of the Buffalo Creek community in the 1970s. Having been to the Appalachian Region several times, I could not believe that I never heard of this book until graduate school. A MUST READ for students who have an interest in the dynamics of community and poverty in Appalachia.
August 23, 2009
sociological non-fiction should all be this humane. My eyes were full much of the time I read this account of the Buffalo Creek flooding of '72. Erikson has his father's (Eric) sense of narrative and gift for situating big concepts and theory in affective prose.
June 22, 2024
I grew up in that area and had people in Logan County - heard about the disaster, but never really knew about it. A good book. Explained what happened and the aftermath - the effects on the community.
March 1, 2014
This was a sociological text book but none the less it was well written and the use of first person accounts not only made it interesting but really showed the impact of a major disaster on a community
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