Experts Discuss Katrina

As most of the Harvard community basked in Friday’s sun, more than 50 students and faculty members absorbed the fluorescent lighting of Longfellow Hall in order to hear a four-hour “teach-in” about the ramifications of Hurricane Katrina.

The teach-in, sponsored by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, brought together a dozen experts on crisis response, disaster management, and human rights to address what they called a mismanagement of the Katrina threat. In three panels, the group of experts, which included two former residents of New Orleans, discussed the humanitarian issues that the hurricane raised.

The teach-in gave the audience opportunities to make comments and pose questions to the panelists. Professor of International Health Jennifer Leaning ’68, moderator of the discussion and co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, said she was glad to see that the Katrina crisis was able to receive such attention within the University.

“I was surprised by the resonance of the humanitarian and human rights analysis with everybody in the audience,” Leaning, a faculty member at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), said in an interview.

To date, Katrina has affected a region the size of the United Kingdom. Well more than 100,000 victims of flooding, over-crowded relief sites, and nationwide redistribution are in need of aid. Even so, new problems continue to emerge.

David Henderson, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, spoke about the mental health of hurricane victims, which he said is often marginalized during disasters. Nevertheless, he said that complete hurricane recovery will necessarily entail work on mental health issues.

“If we leave out the mental health approach, then the recovery is dramatically delayed,” he said. “It may lead to chronic mental illness.”

Eric Scott, a University of New Orleans student enrolled at the Harvard Extension School for this semester, said he hoped the response would involve as multifaceted an approach a possible. Overdramatized coverage of the crisis, he said, favors sensationalism over an accurate portrait of victims’ needs.

“People outside of New Orleans who are not dealing with this daily, they want to see more and more ‘shocking,’” Scott said in an interview. “They want to see the high-angle helicopter shot...but they didn’t get that, so now it’s like, ‘Well, okay, let’s move on, get ready for the Super Bowl.’”

Panelist Tonya Cropper, a student at the Kennedy School of Government and former New Orleans resident, also said that Americans have forgotten that the victims of Katrina are human like them.

“Most people cannot identify themselves with black babies on the streets, elderly people on the streets. People will think, ‘Oh, I would leave,’ but do not realize these people cannot get out,” she said.

While the discussion centered on such appeals to humanitarian efforts and human rights, the majority of the experts focused their comments on the future of relief.

Michael VanRooyen, associate director of the Program on Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights at HSPH, said the hurricane exacerbated the vulnerability of many people in the Gulf Coast.

“In response to Katrina...we ignored vulnerable people...This cannot be our model for a successful response,” VanRooyen said. “What separates us from less stable countries is our ability to provide protection for our population.”

Daniel Curran, director of the Humanitarian Leadership Program at Harvard Business School, emphasized the need for future plans to focus on “decentralized action with centralized coordination.” In other words, he advocated having individuals, organizations, and local governments manage the recovery effort of their own communities while the state and national governments restore core systems like road and communication repairs.

The need for local effort was a leitmotiv of the teach-in. A discussion titled “Public Health Priorities in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina” will take place this Thursday from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Kresge Building at HSPH.