A sense of communitas, well noted by social scientists, occurs in human societies during times of natural disaster. Using the Red River Valley Flood of 1997 as a case example, it is found that disaster communitas has similarities to ritual communitas specifically because people consciously ritualize and mythologize their actions during disaster. While this sacralization of practical action serves to optimize disaster response, it also creates an expanded sense of self, community, and purpose that can leave many survivors of disaster with a sense that they have undergone a profoundly meaningful peak experience.Scholars have researched the spontaneous sense of communitas that arises in human societies in times of natural disaster. Some attribute this "disaster solidarity" to a simple process of practical cost/benefit analysis by disaster victims (De Alessi 1975;Hirshleifer 1988). Others ascribe it to deeply felt emotions brought on by the stress of disaster, with stress defined broadly and vaguely. But no one has ever sufficiently investigated it in its details (Chappie 1970;Oliver-Smith 1999). One assumes disaster to be stressful and leaves it at that. But is the stress emotional, involving grief, worry, and fear, or does it include physical stress as well, that of injury, cold, and hunger? Are there aspects of disaster in addition to communitas that resemble ritual? Are the similarities accidental, or are they conscious cultural creations? And importantly, is there something about the active process of coping with stress that is the real creator of communitas in both ritual and disaster?Considerable progress has been made in the anthropological study of disaster over the past few decades. We have come a long way since Wallace's pioneering disaster studies of the 1950s (1956,1957). Yet we still have a long way to go, as Oliver-Smith points out in his recent co-edited volume devoted to anthropological disaster studies (Oliver-Smith 1999;Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999). In particular, Oliver-Smith cites a serious lack of holistic studies linking expressiveemotive human responses in times of disaster to those of practical action. Yet he views this link as manifestly real and-although mediated by specific cultural settings-as essentially universal, at least in potential. I agree with his assertion that greater understanding of the ritualized and emotive aspects of disaster response, especially communitas, will contribute practical knowledge of use in the mitigation of disaster consequences in an increasingly imperiled world.To investigate the question of disaster communitas, I will focus on the North Dakota/Minnesota Red River Valley Flood of 1997 in search of particular stresses, human choices, and rational and emotional motivations and actions. This particular flood produced a deep sense of communitas, which led many to describe the month-long battle as "Our Finest Hour" and caused many victims to describe the process by which they lost their homes as "a positive experience." Listen to the voices of flood survivors: ...