RH: You were formerly a professor of political science at Purdue University. What led you to study resilience?
DA: Personal experience. In July 2005, my family moved to New Orleans so I could begin an assistant professorship at Tulane. Six weeks later, at four in the morning on the 28th of August, my wife and I packed our two small children into the van and drove west toward Houston as the first rains of Hurricane Katrina came down. A neighbor, Kathy, who understood the Gulf Coast, had warned us to leave. We grabbed toys for our two young kids, our slow cooker, and some photographs, and we left everything else behind. The eleven feet of water that poured into our Lakeview neighborhood from the Seventeenth Street Canal sat there for nearly three weeks and destroyed all of it.
What happened next shaped the rest of my career. We had arrived too recently to have flood or renters’ insurance, so we had no coverage at all. Our applications to FEMA [the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, which assists those affected by natural disasters] were denied, and we received nothing essentially until our appeals finally went through the following March. During those months, I kept noticing who actually showed up for us. It was friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, and family who did the most. The government was slow and the market offered us nothing.
I was trained as a political scientist who studied Japan and focused on the siting of controversial facilities, not as a disaster researcher. But living through the failure of the standard recovery model made me want to understand it. I started reading the disaster literature and found very little agreement on what makes one community bounce back while another empties out. Our own experiences as evacuees showed that the two pillars of our society that we expect to assist—the market and the state—did little to help us back on our feet. But friends, faith-based organizations, and even people that we had never met stood us up. That gap became my research question.
