What Do I Know?

By John Benson

It has now been three months since Hurricane Katrina wreaked its devastation on the Gulf Coast and areas nearby—a long time in the minds of a public whose attention span rarely extends past whatever newsworthy event occurs to displace the previous one. But this is one disaster whose effects are unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon—if ever—by the people who suffered harm, or those who are trying to help them.

Living as I do in Massachusetts, I wasn’t among the one in four Americans, according to a September NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, who had a close personal friend or relative directly affected by Katrina.

Oddly, my closest “personal” experience with the hurricane happened because of the small press magazine I edit. Several years ago I published a story by a musician working in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and he had submitted four or five other stories to me since then. He evacuated his home in New Orleans just before Katrina hit, but he couldn’t take with him his computer or most of the stories he had written over the past decade.

Like many people who left New Orleans because of Katrina, he ended up staying with friends, in his case, in Baton Rouge. From there, he was able to email a genre-fiction interviewer he knew and ask him to contact me and a couple of other editors he thought might still have copies of the stories he had submitted to our magazines. Unfortunately, I didn’t, but he was able to recover a good deal of his writing past from disk backups, friends, and other editors.

This musician/writer is not especially well-heeled, but he did have access to essentials needed to survive a major disaster. As we have learned through survey research, many poorer and less fortunate people did not. He had heard the mandatory evacuation order and had a social network that included a friend outside of town with whom he could stay, as well as enough money to survive the first few days. He had a way to start putting at least his literary possessions back together, emailing mutual contacts until he could reach people like me who might be able to help.

So he was “lucky” compared with most of folks interviewed in the Houston evacuation shelters. While some of those who stayed through the hurricane did so more or less voluntarily, many others were unable to leave for medical reasons or because they had to care for someone who couldn’t leave. Others had no means of leaving, no transportation or money, or were afraid of losing their possessions if they left.

This writer, whom I now consider a friend even though we have never met or spoken with each other, returned to New Orleans in October. Fortunately, the French Quarter seems to have survived better than other sections of the city, although it may be awhile before there are enough people there who can pay to see a musician perform. Then there’s the question of housing. In a September/October CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, three in five people from New Orleans who had applied for assistance from the Red Cross because of the effects of Hurricane Katrina reported that the house or apartment where they had been living was either completely destroyed (24 percent) or damaged so they couldn’t live in it (38 percent), while another 21 percent said they still didn’t know what condition their home was in.  The housing situation of the people interviewed in this survey was probably more dire than it would be for a cross-section of all New Orleans residents, but I couldn’t help worrying about where my new friend would live.

I wish him well. I’m trying to find a publisher for his novel, which he managed to salvage, and I’ve ordered his band’s CD from a Baton Rouge record label. Just one person helping another.

Survey research can help, too, by trying to understand how people respond to evacuation orders, why some don’t leave, what problems people face trying to get out or when they can’t leave, how we can better communicate information about how to prepare for disasters, how to leave, where to go, what to bring.

The crisis in New Orleans and other areas affected by Katrina is far from over, and the chances of a similar catastrophe occurring at any time are, of course, indeterminate, but very real. Apart from whatever we can do as individuals through donations and volunteer work, let’s do what we can as professionals to learn from the recent past to try to save lives in future disasters.

John Benson is managing director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program, Harvard School of Public Health, and associate editor of Public Opinion Pros.

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