Community in Disaster

Technological Disasters

Kai Erikson, a Yale sociologist who has studied disasters since the mid-1970s, makes a qualitative distinction between “natural” and “technological” disasters. The latter constitutes “a new species of trouble” (the title of his book). For Erikson, there is “a profound difference between those disasters that can be understood as the work of nature and those that need to be understood as the work of humankind.”” Thus, such diverse disasters as the mercury spill at the Grassy Narrows Indian Reserve, and the toxic gas leak at East Swallow, Colorado, share something in common with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Their similarity is due not to the extent of the damage but to the nature of the crisis (Erikson 1994, pp. 19–20).

Community disaster in its technological dimension is a new species of danger that tears apart fundamental structures of human existence, Erikson argues. “Human beings are surrounded by layers of trust, radiating out in concentric circles like the ripples in a pond. The experience of (collective) trauma, at its worst, can mean not only a loss of confidence in the self, but a loss of confidence in the scaffolding of family and community, in the structures of human government, in larger logics by which humankind lives, and in the ways of nature itself”” (Erikson 1994, p. 234). It is the community that offers persons a cushion for pain, a context for intimacy, a repository for binding traditions. When the community suffers violation, “one can speak of a damaged social organism in almost the same way that one would speak of a damaged body” (p. 242).

Erikson has studied five communities in disaster that were impacted by technological crises in the twentieth century: (1) Buffalo Creek—a West Virginia rural community devastated by a flood; (2) Grassy Narrows—an Ojibwa Indian reserve in Canada damaged by a mercury spill; (3) Immokalee—Haitian migrants in a farmworker camp in south Florida, robbed of their resources, [Page 271]struggle to survive American exploitation after their narrow escape by boat from their native land; (4) East Swallow—a suburban community in Colorado contaminated by toxic gas; and (5) Three Mile Island—neighborhoods exposed to radioactivity adjacent to the nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. In his damage assessments, he identifies three diagnostic principles for understanding this new species of danger.

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