Pain in the wake of catastrophe can be as elusive as pain in illness. Kai Erikson argues that the events of catastrophe such as the flooding of Buffalo Creek Virginia cause a syndrome which includes pains such as numbness, reliving of the event, familial loss, loss of community as well as many others. The problem that arises from such a catastrophe is how to handle the pain suffered by its victims. Veena Das and Elaine Scarry argue that pain is unshareable but it also calls for attention. Through an extensive look into Kai Erikson’s piece on the events that took place in Buffalo Creek and the leading literature on pain it becomes clear that recognition and generalizability of victims pain and suffering is impossible to validate and because of this disaster relief efforts are greatly impaired.
Buffalo Creek is a coal mining town in the Appalachia of Virginia. The town revolves around coal mining. Generations upon generations have benefitted from the plethora of coal the mountains provided. However, along with the plethora of coal came an immense amount of coal by-products one of which being coal slurry. Coal companies had for years dumped the massive amounts of toxin filled water-coal slush down the sides of the mountains into nearby streams and mountainsides. In Buffalo Creek, the Buffalo Mining Company “used more than a half million gallons of water a day to clean the four thousand tons of coal it loaded onto railroads (Erikson, 25).” The company used the landscape of the mountains and the left over debris which was compacted together by bulldozers to create a man-made impoundment, or “dam,” as the town-people called it. This man-made structure held back a whopping 132 million gallons of toxic coal sludge. By creatin...
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...s no wonder that the silt and sludge that was originally used to construct the impoundment itself still lingers throughout the town years after the disaster. Everything was left contaminated. Another detrimental blow to the community was the fallacy that they were safe. Before the flood, the people of Buffalo Creek felt safe in their neighborhood and their homes but that feeling of security was washed away with their towns. All that they are left with is the feeling of impending doom, many individuals reported in interview conducted by Erikson that they fear everything. One man even reporting that if there is just a storm warning it will keep him awake the entire night worrying about his looming destruction.
Along with individual and collective trauma, pain also arises in the legal formality and coldness shown to the survivors of the Buffalo Creek disaster.
The South Fork Dam collapsed and unleashed 20 million tons of water from its reservoir. A wall of water, reaching up to 70 feet high, swept 14 miles down the Little Conemaugh River Valley, carrying away steel mills, houses, livestock and people. At 4:07 p.m., the floodwaters rushed into the industrial city of Johnstown, crushing houses and downtown businesses in a whirlpool that lasted 10 minutes. (New York Times, 1889).
In a passage from his book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, author John M. Barry makes an attempt use different rhetorical techniques to transmit his purpose. While to most, the Mississippi River is only some brown water in the middle of the state of Mississippi, to author John M. Barry, the lower Mississippi is an extremely complex and turbulent river. John M. Barry builds his ethos, uses elevated diction, several forms of figurative language, and different styles of syntax and sentence structure to communicate his fascination with the Mississippi River to a possible audience of students, teachers, and scientists.
Removal of the mountaintops causes environmental impacts from blasting. The blasting has caused rocks to be deposited into valleys on the hillsides, burying almost 2,000 miles of streams which feed the Mississippi River. Slurry, the residue which is used to clean the coal can wash into groundwater and may contain arsenic, lead, manganese, iron, sodium, strontium, and sulfate. A recent research study is beginning to link these environmental impacts to the grave health concerns in the Appalachian communities. During most of the Mountaintop removal mining’s history coal industries have been able to obtain permits easily to operate, but once under the Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) those permits now take more time to obtain. The permit process requires all applications to be reviewed before being given out to coal
The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was one of the most devastating floods in the country. The flood had a major effect on the economy. Because of the flood, thousands of acres of agricultural land and animals were lost, many homes were destroyed, and people were displaced.
Most of the destructions from the events of August 29th 2005, when Katrina Hit the City Of New Orleans, were not only caused by the storm itself; but also, by failure of the engineering of the levee system protecting the entire infrastructure of the city. The years of poor decision making and avoidance of the levee system led to one of the most catastrophic events in the history of the United States. Throughout our research, we have identified three key players in charge of the levee system design, construction and maintenance. These three organizations are the Unites States Corps of Engineers, the New Orleans Levee District and the Louisiana Department of Transportation. The consequences of the hurricane showed the organizations negligence in the design, construction and maintenance of the protective walls. Later independent sresearch showed that more than 50 levees and food walls failed during the passage of the hurricane. This failure caused the flooding of most of New Orleans and all of ST. Bernard Parish. The Unites States Corps of Engineers had been in charge of the of the levee system and flood walls construction since the 1936 flood act. According to the law, the Louisiana Department of Transportation is in charge to inspect the overall design and engineering practices implemented in the construction of the system. Once the levee systems were finished, they were handed over to the New Orleans Levee District for regular maintenance and periodically inspections. The uncoordinated actions of these three agencies resulted in the complete failure of a system that was supposed to protect the people of New Orleans. The evidence is clear that this catastrophic event did not happened by chance. The uncoordinated response of these...
Pain is one of the most complex words in the modern day language. It is perceived differently with every situation with varying definitions for all types of people. Pain for an infant who scraped their knee seems petty compared to a terminally ill mother who will leave behind three children. The feeling of discomfort or agony may never go away in some cases, especially mental pain. Author of In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien, writes a novel about war stress and how PTSD can change a person’s entire personality. John Wade suffers through tremendous pain that eventually leads to the disappearance of his wife Kathy. O’Brien portrays the effects of pain through John Wade’s post traumatic stress disorder throughout his lifetime during
In the early 1880s, Chicago was a bustling city on its way to becoming one of great cities in the world. There was a problem though. Horrible sanitation problems plagued the city. The Chicago River was virtually an open sewer covered with visible filth. Most of the river’s worst pollution came from homes and bathroom waste thought the city. “Bubbly Creek” was one of the worst branches of the river. It was filled with enough stockyard waste to equal the pollution from a sizable city. To further the problem, all of the contents of the river flowed into Lake Michigan, polluting Chicago’s drinking water causing a sever outbreak of water born diseases.
The Cumberland and Cumberland River basin experienced a 36 hour rainfall that produced flooding in Nashville and its greater area (After Action Report, II). The 2010 two day storm was believed to be greater than a 100 year event. Storm activity began on May 1st and 2nd which created a large scale flash flood along the Cumberland and Lower Tennessee rivers, and within its tributaries. Historically the Cumberland River basin has received great amounts of precipitation and has experienced extreme rainfall before, making it prone to severe flooding (After Action Report, I). Some of the historic floods that have affected the Cumberland River are the December 1926, January 1927, January 1937 and March 1975 floods, which produced a maximum flood height in much of the river. Before the May 2010 flood, the Cumberland River reached a flood stage of 45.26 feet during the May 1987 flood which was a result of a series of flooding events that took place during an extensive amount of time (After Action Report, 4). The 2010 flood which affected much of Nashville acted more like a flash flood, which produced record breaking rainfall for much of the area. According to the Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) on April 30th rainfall totaled 7.8 inches across central Tennessee. The report also states that there was a widespread of rainfall equaling to 2 to 6 inch in total, over southeastern US stretching to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Rainfall for parts of western Tennessee and Kentucky totaled 3 to 4 inches with a high of 4.65 inches (After Action Report, III). As it is stated by the report areas around Nashville received more than 13 inches of rain in a span of 36 hours, which doubled the record set by the September 1979 flood event. At th...
Stephens, N. M., Hamedani, M. G., Markus, H. R., Bergsieker, H. B., & Eloul, L. (2009). Why did they “choose” to stay? Perspectives of Hurricane Katrina observers and survivors. Psychological Science, 20(7), 878-886.
The initial response or lack thereof, to the widespread disaster in the Gulf Coast, caused by Hurricane Katrina, demonstrated high levels of incompetence and disorganization by government officials. Images of desperate individuals awaiting rescue on their rooftops, and masses of people packed together in deplorable conditions in the Super Dome, circulated the globe. There was no hiding from the painful reality and the obvious inaction or inability of those responsible to care for these individual in the wake of this catastrophe. (12, 791)
Trauma is an incident that leads to a great suffering of body or mind. It is a severe torture to the body and breaks the body’s natural equilibrium. It is defined as an emotional wound causing a psychological injury. American Psychological Association, defined trauma as an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks and strained relationships. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis assert, “Trauma is an event in the subject life defined by its intensity by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization” (qtd. by Hwangbo 1).
On January 9th, 2014, it was reported that a chemical spill has occurred from a storage tank owned by Freedom Industries. The spill occurred on the banks of Elk River in West Virginia, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without tap water. The company first reported that 7500 gallons of the chemicals had spilled into the river through a one-inch whole but had found that two weeks later, there was an estimated 10000 gallons of the toxic chemical in the river. The chemicals released include 4-methylcyclohexane (MCHM) and PPH. Methylcyclohexane is a chemical that is used in coal to reduce the amount of ash it produces(Field & Catherine, 2014). The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection are still calculating the exact amount of how much of the chemicals were spilled.
The article “5 Years after Coal-Ash Spill, Little Has Changed” by Duane W. Gang, informs that there has been little change since the spill. In the beginning of the article, a Tennessee resident Tommy Charles talk about how his life had changed after the coal spill. This was the day when the dike failed at TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant, spilling 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash into the Emory and Clinch rivers. The spill was covering about 300 acres of land. After five years, coal ash still remains mostly unregulated. EPA and Congress still have not figured out how to see the material and the corporation still continue to argue about classifying coal ash as hazardous. Stephen Smith, who is chief executive of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy mentions that the final solution is not available yet. Later in the article it is discussed on how much TVA is spending to clean up...
Gallers, J., Grossman, R. The Use of Flooding with Adult Survivors of Sexual Trauma. 1990.
Any pain from a large trauma can affect many people on a daily basis with no end or weakening in strength. When pain becomes a regular part of one’s life, present in everything at every moment, the mind often copes by trying to make sure the