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History stopped on the day of the flood. Editor's Note: The disastrous Buffalo Creek, West Virginia flood occurred on February 26, 1972. The sudden collapse of the Pittston Company's (the local coal company and absentee landlord) massive refuse pile dam unleashed 132 million gallons of water and coal waste materials on the unsuspecting residents of Buffalo Creek. The rampaging wave of water and sludge traveled down the creek in waves of between twenty and thirty feet and at speeds sometimes approaching thirty miles per hour. Buffalo Creek's sixteen small towns were devastated by the deluge, over 125 people were killed, and over four thousand survivors were left homeless.
Some 615 survivors of the Buffalo Creek flood were examined by psychiatrists one and one-half years after the event, and 570 of them, a grim 93 percent, were found to be suffering from an identifiable emotional disturbance. A skeptical neighbor from another of the behavioral sciences may want to make allowance for the fact that psychiatrists looking for mental disorder are more than apt to find it; but even so, the sheer volume of pathology is horrifying.
The medical names for the conditions observed are depression, anxiety, phobia, emotional lability, hypochondria, apathy; and the broader syndrome into which these various symptoms naturally fall is posttraumatic neurosis, or, in a few cases, post-traumatic psychosis. But the nearest expressions in everyday English would be something like confusion, despair, and hopelessness.
Most of the survivors responded to the disaster with a deep sense of loss-a nameless feeling that something had gone grotesquely awry in the order of things, that their minds and spirits had been bruised beyond repair, that they would never again be able to find coherence, that the world as they knew it had come to an end. Now these feelings, of course, were experienced as a generalized, pervading sense of gloom, and the men and women of the hollow did not try to catalogue the various strains that contributed to it. But there are recognizable themes in the stories they tell that give us some idea of what the sources of their pain might be.
On Being Numbed
Almost everybody who survived the disaster did so by the thinnest of margins; and the closeness of their...