Assessing Adaptive Capacity to Discern Community Resilience in Charleston, West Virginia: Case Study of the 2014 MCHM/PPH Spill

The capacity of a community to respond to contamination events is a measure of its resilience. This study employs the domains of adaptive capacity to assess whether past contamination events increases the ability of a community to better respond to future contamination events by analyzing a 2014 chemical spill from an aboveground storage tank contaminating the public drinking water supply of 300,000 residents in Charleston, WV. Using a qualitative design and snowball sampling methodology, 48 semi-structured interviews with residents, emergency responders, emergency managers, public health officials, local government officials, and members of community-based organizations were conducted to assess how the domains of community adaptive capacity established in the literature relate to technological disasters. The history of chemical and environmental contamination events in the Charleston, WV community increased the resilience of both formal and informal networks in the community. Interviewees demonstrates strong adaptive capacities by emerging and existing horizontal and lateral leadership; a high degree of social support and networks; a deep connection to community history, values, critical reflection, organizing skills; and community power, and a purposeful participation in community organizing initiatives. These qualities were invaluable in articulating community needs and resources in responding to and recovering from the 2014 chemical spill. However, distrust in the state and federal government response and mistrust of information during this and previous emergencies also manifested in these domains. This study finds trust is essential to building community capacity and calls on public health practitioners and emergency planners to develop programs that facilitate community trust to build resilience. These findings also demonstrate the importance of informal and formal networks and have implications for policy makers to develop community programs that strengthen these networks. This findings from this study also support the development of a measurement tool to further analyze community resilience from chemical contamination events. Finally, these findings reinforce the use a set of capacities to build community resilience in the context of chemical contamination events.