Digital Commons Network^™

On January 9, 2014, residents across Charleston, West Virginia, awoke to an unusual licorice smell in the air and a similar taste in the public drinking water. That evening residents were informed the tap water in tens of thousands of homes, hundreds of businesses, and dozens of schools and hospitals—the water made available to as many as 300,000 citizens in a nine-county region—had been contaminated with a chemical used for cleaning crushed coal. This book tells a particular set of stories about that chemical spill and its aftermath, an unfolding water crisis that would lead to months, even years, of …

While idealized crisis response involves smooth coordination between relevant actors, friction between levels of government and between the state and civil society in responding to catastrophe may be more common. This article builds a theory of cross-level friction during and after crisis by analyzing the conditions when discord is most likely. With a medium-N dataset (N = 18) of disaster responses from, among other countries, Chile, Haiti, Japan, North America, the Philippines, and Somalia, I carry out quantitative and qualitative analysis of cases with a variety of levels of friction to investigate the conditions that lead to misalignment. Tobit regression, …