Natural Disasters

Entire rooms black with mold. Boats sitting in trees, miles from shore. Hospitals with windows broken -- not just by the storm, but by patients and staff desperate for fresh air. City officials standing at major intersections wearing sandwich boards that said "Boil water" since there was no other way to get the word out. Enough solid waste to fill 11 World Trade Center Towers. These are some of the vivid pictures that were drawnat the University at Buffalo by six researchers from various disciplines who presented findings to colleagues about what they saw during reconnaissance trips to the Gulf Coast in September and October.

In a live and online Webcast seminar, structural engineers and social scientists who were dispatched to New Orleans and Mississippi in the days after Katrina hit will describe the vast devastation they saw and discuss strategies for improving U.S. resilience and response to natural disasters, terrorist attack and other extreme events.

Days after Hurricane Katrina hit, research teams from the University at Buffalo's Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research were dispatched to the Mississippi coast to conduct structural analysis and remote sensing of damage to large structures. On Oct, 3, MCEER will send three teams of researchers to New Orleans, again with funding primarily from the National Science Foundation.

The desire to assign cosmic significance to the arrival of hurricanes Katrina and Rita is an example of humankind's ages-old need to find reason within chaos, according to University at Buffalo anthropologist Phillips Stevens Jr., Ph.D., a renowned expert on the origins, nature and meaning of cults, superstitions and cultural identities.

The failure of levees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina points out the need for new technologies to strengthen levees and monitor their reliability, according to Deborah D. L. Chung, Ph.D., a University at Buffalo materials scientist and inventor of "smart concrete."

Three short weeks after they fled New Orleans, many victims of Hurricane Katrina housed in shelters in Texas are having difficulties dealing emotionally with the disaster, particularly with another destructive hurricane headed toward the state where they took refuge, according to Nancy J. Smyth, Ph.D., associate professor and dean of social work at the University at Buffalo.

Aug. 29., the day that Hurricane Katrina barreled ashore on the Gulf Coast, also was the first day of class for Geology 428/528, "Preventing Geologic Disasters," at the University at Buffalo. Even though he had already prepared a semester's worth of historical examples, Michael F. Sheridan, Ph.D., UB professor of geology, decided that day to ditch much of it and to focus, instead, on Katrina as the harshest of case studies.

After spending five hectic, sleep-deprived days on the Gulf Coast assessing structural damage to buildings in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, engineers from the University at Buffalo's Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER) have returned home to start doing the scientific work that they hope one day will help curb structural damage from future severe events.

Media discussion of race and class in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has done the country a great disservice by oversimplifying and distorting what is fundamentally a very complex problem, according to a sociologist who recently published a major study of the residential segregation of jobless black, Asian and Hispanic men in urban communities.

Reestablishment of wastewater and drinking-water treatment facilities is a critical step for rebuilding New Orleans, but it likely will take months to get those systems operational, according to wastewater treatment expert at the University at Buffalo.