Last night @nigreaux posted about his #DisasterResearchBackstory which led others to chime in, including me. I made a vague reference to a cowboy and it has been requested that I follow up.
So anyway, here’s that story.
So anyway, here’s that story.
(I can’t believe I’m going to publicly tell this story 1. because it’s not really that good & 2. it’s embarrassing)
I lived in Maine when Katrina and the levee failure happened. Our high school organized a trip for a bunch of us to go spend spring break gutting and rebuilding houses. I thought that sounded like an excellent idea so I signed up to go (it was all very Cher & Pismo Beach Relief).
I got to the city. Saw neighborhood after neighborhood of destroyed houses was like “What The Actual Fuck” @ the federal gov't & decided to move to NO to help with recovery. (It’s the classic post-Katrina high school volunteer story. It’s not unique & it’s not very interesting.)
As @ValerieGMarlowe said, “The above is what I tell people when they ask how I got into disaster work. But the story of how I became a *researcher* is where”… the cowboy comes in.
About half way into our trip we were assigned to a new house and met our site leader — a cowboy named Stephen.
A few things here. 1. His name may have been Steven but we decided Stephen was more sophisticated. 2. He was not, presumably, an actual cowboy but rather a man wearing a cowboy hat. It’s important to understand how novel a cowboy hat was to a group of people from southern Maine.
Anyway, Stephen was very cute (it very much might have just been the hat) and we, being 16 and all, had absolutely zero chill. There was extensive whispering and squealing to my GREAT current embarrassment.
Him being a cowboy isn’t really important except for the fact that it led to us inviting him to join us for lunch. He accepted. Often site leaders try to get away from high school volunteers on their lunch break so I can only assume he was IN LOVE with all 12 of us.
Over lunch we GRILLED him. I only remember one question though which was “how long do you think it will take to rebuild New Orleans.”
He said, 10 years.
He said, 10 years.
This is a pretty fundamental question and we had been there for many days. I am very sure someone else mentioned this estimate at some point but none of those people were a man in a cowboy hat so I did not listen (again, I don’t come across well in this story).
Look, I don’t know how long I expected the rebuilding of nearly an entire city to take but I’ll tell you that I did think ten years was WAY too long.
(An important note is that he was wrong - it’s been more than 10 years.)
(An important note is that he was wrong - it’s been more than 10 years.)
I was *deeply* horrified for 1,000 reasons as I began to learn about Katrina but the one that grabbed me the most was Stephen's answer about the length of recovery. I became borderline obsessed with how it could take so long.
A whole bunch of circumstances has led me to focus on a lot of other parts of emergency management but the question: how can we make recovery more efficient, effective, and just is still the question I care about most.
I still don’t know how long a recovery *should* take but I do know that it takes WAY too long. (This is also why I study nonprofits and volunteerism — they’re doing a substantial part of the recovery work and have remarkably little support.)
So, there you go. Not "after dark" material. Sorry, @wesinjapan. Your turn @KsChmutina.
