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“The response to the disaster was recognized as a bureaucratic nightmare that, regardless of the intent of the federal and state governments, appeared to homeowners as a sign of their having been abandoned.”

"What I experienced was coming back to the devastation of the city. No grocery stores, no cell phone service, certainly no phone service, no regular phone service. We actually had to get other cell phones. You know, it was a ghost town."

'“Chronic disaster syndrome” thus refers in this analysis to the cluster of trauma-and posttrauma-related phenomena that are at once individual, social, and political and that are associated with disaster as simultaneously causative and experiential of a chronic condition of distress in relation to displacement."

The main argument Knowles develops in this article is structural and engineering integrity of buildings and equipment is not always questioned until a disaster occurs and there is public outcry for regulations to be put in place. Whereas if building codes and safety equipment was being regularly tested and enforced, when disasters occured they would not be as tramatic. 

The focus of this article is on the communities affected by the Chernobyl explosions and how it continues to devastate the surrounding area today. It furthermore defines a new society framed by the disaster and the problems they have had to encounter because of the radiation.