After the disaster

After the rumbles of an earthquake, the winds of a hurricane, or the waves of a flood, first responders lay claim to the most dramatic jobs. But quick on the heels of relief workers come the disaster researchers - people who leave the ivory tower of academia and head to the scene, hoping their analyses can improve people's lives the next time calamity strikes.

Alongside the engineers and meteorologists stand a small band of social scientists who train their lenses on the human picture. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, last year's tsunami, a catastrophic hurricane season, and a devastating earthquake in Pakistan, their specialty is gaining respect - and an influx of scholars whose skills are in high demand.

"In Katrina, people who have a wide variety of interests can see the applicability [of the social sciences] ... in the disaster context - and when these people come out [of school], they're going to get jobs," says Kathleen Tierney, a sociology professor and director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Three PhD candidates at Boulder who had never considered disaster research before are now focusing on Katrina, she says. For one of them, "it never occurred to him that social inequality was related in some way to disasters until he saw Katrina, and it was like a light bulb going on."

For researchers who need to collect "perishable data" after a disaster, the Hazards Center awards government-funded quick-response grants. The center's initial 25 hurricane Katrina grants (totaling about $75,000) included subjects ranging from the experience of evacuees to questions about looting and other crimes.

"We also had significant interest in researching the media ... a fairly new subject for us," says Greg Guibert, manager of the quick-response program.

Lauren Barsky used her grant to study post-disaster looting during a 10-day trip to Louisiana with fellow graduate students from the University of Delaware. "They made a Greyhound bus terminal in New Orleans into a makeshift jail for looters," she says. The majority of cases involved people taking items for survival, such as food. Those who looted other goods "were more likely to have taken part in negative behavior anyway," officials told her.

It was the first field research for Ms. Barsky, who switched her major from psychology to sociology because she was inspired by a class on the sociology of disaster. "You feel like you can make a bit of a difference," she says. "It's definitely stressful ... but it's worth it."

When Alice Fothergill arrived in New Orleans this fall, the scene was eerily familiar. Eight years earlier, she had studied women's experiences after the massive flood in Grand Forks, N.D. - the first entire US city to be evacuated after a disaster.

This time around, the University of Vermont professor looked at children's adjustments. She and Lori Peek, a colleague from Colorado State University, had been discussing the need for more disaster research on children, but they had no idea the opportunity would arise so soon, just as the semester was getting under way.

In this "drop everything" discipline, it takes some doing to arrange for substitute teachers and child-care at the last minute, but by mid-October they were in Cajun country, interviewing everyone from parents to shelter workers about children in their care. (They would have had to jump through too many hoops, Ms. Fothergill says, to be able to interview children directly.)

Adults often directed children to keep journals or draw pictures about their experience, Fothergill says, but kids also found other ways to process what had happened. "One family lost their house, and every day the boy and girl played evacuation - they'd run around with a bag and start throwing things in it really fast."

This brief exploration will lay the groundwork for a bigger study, Fothergill hopes. In the meantime, it will be published in a Natural Hazards Center collection of post-Katrina research.

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