Abstract
Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a category 3 storm on August 29, 2005. Over a million residents of the US Gulf Coast evacuated in anticipation of this epic storm. For those directly affected, displacement from hurricane-ravaged homes and neighborhoods forced a fundamental question: Do we relocate away from the coast or return to rebuild in an area devastated by disaster? In this chapter, we examine the psychosocial consequences of environmental destruction for former and current coastal residents of south Louisiana ranging from 18 to 89 years of age. An ecological systems perspective drawn from the disaster research literature is reviewed briefly to provide a conceptual framework for addressing the psychosocial consequences of environmental loss. Next, we present findings from a mixed method study on post-Katrina resilience and long-term recovery. All participants experienced catastrophic hurricane damage and displacement from south Louisiana coastal parishes (counties) in 2005. Two groups were compared and contrasted: former coastal residents who relocated permanently to non-coastal communities and current residents who returned to rebuild their homes and communities. We describe the sample, interview procedures, coding process, and qualitative analyses. Among the major findings are two emergent themes which we present here: (1) There’s No Going Back: The “Old Normal” is Gone Forever and (2) You Don’t Understand Unless You Were There. Implications of these findings for adjustment to new environmental circumstances after disaster are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
Participant 215 is referencing the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Coast (see Chap. 4, this volume).
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Sr. Mary Keefe and Fr. John Arnone of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Violet, LA and Gayle Buckley, Judy Chiappetta, and Catherine Serpas for their assistance with recruitment. We thank Susan McNeil of the St. Bernard Council on Aging and Sean Warner of the Gulf Coast Trust Bank in St. Bernard for providing space for interviews. We thank Kelli Broome, Susan Brigman, Ashley Cacamo, Pamela Nezat, and Mary Beth Tamor for their help with data collection and Robert Pressley, Penni Fontenot, Sarah Finney, Lauren Edwards, Allison Kennedy, Amy Goff and Graham Belou for their assistance with transcriptions. We also thank Yaxin Lu, Bethany Pinkston, Sarah Hebert, Savannah Ballard, Trevor Johnson, and Brandon Cohen for assistance with qualitative analyses, and Carl Weems for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.
This research was supported by grants from the Louisiana Board of Regents and the BP Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, Office of Research and Economic Development, Louisiana State University. This support is gratefully acknowledged.
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Kytola, K., Cherry, K., Marks, L., Hatch, T. (2015). When Neighborhoods Are Destroyed by Disaster: Relocate or Return and Rebuild?. In: Cherry, K. (eds) Traumatic Stress and Long-Term Recovery. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18866-9_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18866-9_12
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