vOne of the most serious consequences of disasters is the disruption or even the loss of social
support relationships. Hence, this paper analyses the social support relationships in the
framework of community resilience based on face-to-face interviews with direct (180 people)
and indirect (180 people) victims of the red sludge disaster, using data for 2013 and 2020.
(Hungary, Devecser district).
The focus was analysed according to four types of social support relationship: reciprocal,
donor to recipient and incomplete/disintegrated. At the time of the disaster, we identified a high
level of support activity and a strong reciprocal-donor type of aid model. In contrast, in 2013, we
found an incomplete/disintegrated - reciprocal model with low support activity, and in 2020, a
reciprocal- incomplete/disintegrated model with medium activity.
Based on a detailed statistical analysis of different social support types among the red
sludge disaster’s victims the paper explores and presents the social support activities and
their various patterns with respect to their roles in the resilience of communities. The different
patterns of social supports relationships that emerged in each period examined varied widely,
though – with different intensity – they were primarily influenced by the fact how people were
affected by disaster’s damages (directly and indirectly). Nevertheless, by 2020, other factors,
such as residence, age, and economic activity had already an equally strong impact on different
types of social support relationships as the affectedness by the disaster of 2010. We found that
communities responded to the red sludge disaster in 2010 and to the Covid-19 epidemic in 2020
in a reactive way by activating their social support relationship.