Caught in the Path of Katrina: A Survey of the Hurricane's Human Effects

In 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina cut a deadly path along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, researchers J. Steven Picou and Keith Nicholls conducted a survey of the survivors in Louisiana and Mississippi, receiving more than twenty-five hundred responses, and followed up two years later with their than five hundred of the initial respondents. Showcasing these landmark findings, Caught in the Path of Katrina: A Survey of the Hurricane's Human Effects yields a more complete understanding of the traumas endured as a result of the Storm of the Century.

The authors report on evacuation behaviors, separations from family, damage to homes, and physical and psychological conditions among residents of seven of the parishes and counties that bore the brunt of Katrina. The findings underscore the frequently disproportionate suffering of African Americans and the agonizingly slow pace of recovery. Highlighting the lessons learned, the book offers suggestions for improved governmental emergency management techniques to increase preparedness, better mitigate storm damage, and reduce the level of trauma in future disasters. Multiple major hurricanes have unleashed their destruction in the years since Katrina, making this a crucial study whose importance only continues to grow.

J. Steven Picou is the founding director of the USA Coastal Resource & Resiliency Center and an award-winning professor of sociology at the University of South Alabama. He has published more than one hundred and fifty peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and research monographs and is the coeditor of The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe.

Keith Nicholls is the senior associate director of the USA Coastal Resource & Resiliency Center and an associate professor of political science at the University of South Alabama. In addition to undertaking numerous other leadership roles, including conducting wide-ranging research on the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills, he has recently administered grant-funded activities to increase health-care capacity in disaster-prone areas along the Gulf of Mexico coast.