Hurricane Katrina (and Rita, which came right afterwards) has had long-term effects on the cities and towns of the Gulf Coast. Several hundred thousand people were evacuated. By July 2012, seven years later, the City of New Orleans counted about 370,000 population, compared to 455,000 in July 2005.

Our purpose is to identify which communities were most affected, which have been rebuilt and how they are different from before. We integrate remotely sensed ecological data with environmental hazard information as well as demographic and socioeconomic data to understand the social and ecological vulnerabilities of impacted communities. By studying which population groups lived in different areas, we seek to identify with precision the differential impacts of the disaster. We also follow the progress of post-disaster adjustment, identifying new configurations of what are considered safe or desirable areas, choices about public infrastructure investments, and locational decisions made by past and potential new residents. How did city, state and federal officials make use of public policy to support the recovery? What role was played by residents of different neighborhoods in policy choices?

Our study of New Orleans has several components that we are able to share here:

Intensive fieldwork in and around New Orleans during 2005-2009. Several young scholars in the area participated in this fieldwork, coordinated by Kimberly Krupa who was a doctoral student in the Department of Planning and Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans. They collected extensive materials from newspapers, reports, leaflets, and handouts at meetings all around the city. Those materials are now available as a digital archive, thanks to the staff of Brown University Library's Center for Digital Initiatives. Enter the Hurricane Katrina Archive here.

Another aspect of our fieldwork focused on four neighborhoods in different parts of the city that suffered extensive damage. We conducted interviews with several families on each block, some by phone but most in person, and in some cases we were able to do a follow-up interview. Our photos of the homes in each neighborhood from May 2006 through March 2009 document the uneven and slow pace of recovery, from houses that were fully restored soon after the hurricane to those that became just empty lots. Click here to see this photo archive.

An early step in our research was to develop a web-based mapping system that allows us and others to visualize the areas that were most affected by the hurricane and flooding, identify them in terms of population, race, and socioeconomic composition, and download these data for analysis. This system shows the areas that were flooded, and includes aerial photos from September 2005 for much of the region. The system now shows information from Census 2000 (before Katrina), and post-Katrina data from the 2006-2010 American Community Survey and Census 2010 (to provide information on change). Other data not yet loaded into the maps documents aspects of neighborhood recovery during the first 5 years after Katrina. Click here to enter the Katrina map system.