Everything in Its Path by Kai T. Erikson

You know how pretty much everyone has an album that was a turning point in their lives, the first one that connected with them on some profound level when they were a young person? It was the moment where they stopped having the music their parents played be their main influence and started their own journey of finding other stuff that was meaningful to them? For me, that was Hi Fi Way by You Am I, introduced to me by one of my best friend’s older brother in 1995. It blew my Beach Boys, Elvis Costello, Rolling Stones, Van Morrison listening mind.

But I had that moment in the disaster world too. That moment where I felt like I connected with a bigger picture and got the thing that other people talked about (also, incidentally introduced to me by an older brother figure, John Richardson). It wasn’t an album, it was a book called ‘Everything in Its Path’ by Kai T Erikson, and it was one of the first things that made me think I could have a career in disaster recovery management.

For those who haven’t come across it, ‘Everything in Its Path’ was a seminal book published in 1976 about the slag heap collapse at Buffalo Creek in West Virginia, USA in 1972. Erikson had an unusual role – he was a young sociologist gathering stories as part of a legal case, and used these stories to write the book and push our understanding of what makes a disaster a disaster and why the recovery process can be as hard or harder than the event. The disaster at Buffalo Creek happened 50 years ago this year, and the lessons from the event are still relevant for us today.  

This book was (and remains) an influential piece on how we understand the interplay between community and individual impacts of disasters. He breaks the book into three main sections – looking at the events itself, backtracking to look at the history of the community the event affected and then turning to the individual and community consequences. He highlights that the way that the aftermath is handled can be worse for some people than the disaster event itself, and shows how the disruption to community, relationships, worldview and connections can change everything.

Clearly, I’m a fan and recommend that you find yourself a copy and see what you think (in fact, it may be time to dig out my old copy and have another read).