Published: September 09, 2008 10:50 pm         

STEPHANIE SALTER: Academic lesson from Katrina: Love and know thy neighborhood

TERRE HAUTE — A fascinating thing happened to Daniel Aldrich when his New Orleans home and neighborhood were severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina:

He discovered how crucial a strong community is to disaster recovery.

Aldrich is now an assistant professor of political science at Purdue University. Lest you assume his post-Katrina epiphany led to a touchy-feely book of personal photos and poems about people helping people, do not.

It led to social science research in New Orleans, Japan and India, and a boatload of evidence that indicates a direct correlation between pre-disaster community health and effective post-disaster recovery.

“Whatever the culture,” said Aldrich, “people matter. Networks matter. Social contracts matter.”

Where those people have strong bonds — whether they get a little government disaster aid or a lot, whether they’re upper middle-class or poor — they and their neighborhoods fare better after trauma than do people who are not engaged in their community.

New York-born into a family of academics, Aldrich was raised in the United States and Europe. He got his bachelor’s at the University of North Carolina, a master’s in Asian studies at the University of California-Berkeley and a master’s and Ph.D. in political science at Harvard.

In the summer of 2005 he had just moved to New Orleans with his wife and two children to begin the fall semester teaching Japanese government and politics to Tulane University students.

Katrina changed all that.

Aldrich’s Lakeview neighborhood, populated predominately by white professionals, was among the severely flooded. With the means to evacuate, the Aldriches left New Orleans about 3:30 a.m., in a mass of out-bound humanity.

They took up temporary residence in Houston — Tulane shut down for months — and didn’t return to their damaged home and neighborhood until Spring 2006.

As he watched his community not come back together while others did, Aldrich started researching the subject of disaster recovery. The reading included seminal works by Howard Kunreuther, which are based on, among other disasters, the 9.2 magnitude Alaska earthquake of March 1964.

Common analytical wisdom uses three factors to measure effective recovery: The extent of damage; the financial resources of the disaster victims before the occurrence; and the amount of post-disaster aid from outside sources.

“I looked at [the criteria] and thought, ‘There are no human beings in here, no discussion of community,’” said Aldrich.

With what he already knew about Japanese sociology and culture, Aldrich decided to dig into the aftermath of such disasters as the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. A modern, bustling seaport, the greater Kobe area lost nearly 7,000 people in that 7.2 quake.

A grant from Japan’s Abe Foundation allowed Aldrich to study Kobe, before and after the earthquake. He also analyzed data from 39 neighborhoods in Tokyo affected by a huge 1923 temblor, from New Orleans and from 15 cities along the southeastern coast of India, which were devastated by a 2004 tsunami.

In Kobe, the citizens who fared the poorest among survivors were people who were relocated to clean, safe but colorless, Soviet-style apartment complexes that isolated them from their former neighborhoods and friends.

“The individuals who felt as if they weren’t being noticed or seen died earlier” or became ill, Aldrich said. “The Japanese have a word for this. Kodokushi. It means ‘people who die a lonely death.’”

The pattern has repeated itself in every situation Aldrich has investigated. Strong social networks that nurtured people before a disaster nurtured them after.

Nowhere was this more evident in New Orleans than the Village de L’est neighborhood. Made up primarily of Vietnamese Americans who are barely a generation removed from refugee status, the area borders the northeast shore of Lake Ponchartrain.

Six months after Katrina, said Aldrich, as his own neighborhood lay fallow and semi-abandoned, “90 percent of the residents of Village de L’est were back. At that time, less than half the whole town had come back.”

The Village de L’est inhabitants had been super-tight before Katrina. After, they kept in communication, refused to lose track of one another and helped foster hope from family to family.

“They came back en masse,” Aldrich said.

Aldrich is working on a book, still untitled, that will make a case for adding “community ties” to the other elements of effective disaster recovery. So convinced is the Japanese government of the significance of this human element, it has invested in a program to expand and strengthen such bonds.

Dubbed “community currency,” the program essentially pays people to give their time and energy to projects that benefit their neighborhoods, whether it is sweeping a sidewalk, escorting seniors on outings, or myriad other tasks that get people engaged in the lives of those around them. The work is then paid for in coupon-like currency that can be spent for goods and services only within the neighborhood.

That kind of focus, Aldrich said, ought to be part of disaster planning for municipalities and individuals. Added to levies and emergency systems and individual family preparedness kits should be active ownership of the community in which we live.

“It’s not an expensive proposition to get to know your neighbor,” Aldrich said.

He and his wife and now three children are doing that in West Lafayette. Jewish, they have immersed themselves in that community. They have joined an association of parents who homeschool their kids and, of course, they are getting to know their geographic neighbors.

Ticking off the three long-accepted elements of disaster recovery, Aldrich said, “We can’t control where people live and come back to, we can’t control our salaries very much or our government, but we can control our level of participation in our community. And we can stimulate the growth of these ties.”

Without the hurricane of Aug. 29, 2005, Aldrich acknowledges, he never would have turned his attention to the rich research that now occupies his time and talent.

“As someone who went through this process, it feels really good to be doing something with the experience,” he said. “This project is a product of Katrina.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.