  Attribution of responsibility and blame are important topics in political
science especially as individuals tend to think of political issues in terms of
questions of responsibility, and as blame carries far more weight in voting
behavior than that of credit. However, surprisingly, there is a paucity of
studies on the attribution of responsibility and blame in the field of disaster
research.
  The Flint water crisis is a story of government failure at all levels. By
studying microblog posts about it, we understand how citizens assign
responsibility and blame regarding such a man-made disaster online. We form
hypotheses based on social scientific theories in disaster research and then
operationalize them on unobtrusive, observational social media data. In
particular, we investigate the following phenomena: the source for blame; the
partisan predisposition; the concerned geographies; and the contagion of
complaining.
  This paper adds to the sociology of disasters research by exploiting a new,
rarely used data source (the social web), and by employing new computational
methods (such as sentiment analysis and retrospective cohort study design) on
this new form of data. In this regard, this work should be seen as the first
step toward drawing more challenging inferences on the sociology of disasters
from "big social data".
