Surviving Katrina and its aftermath: evacuation and community mobilization by Vietnamese Americans and African Americans.(Report)

The flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina on 29 August 2005 uncovered critical issues in local, state, and national strategies for emergency preparedness and disaster relief. The Katrina disaster reveals the persistent racial inequality and economic disparities in American society. This paper examines the pre-Katrina socio-spatial configuration of the African-American and Vietnamese-American communities in an eastern New Orleans suburb. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to collect data and compare the two groups, our study reveals media are the first and foremost information sources for both groups. Many Katrina victims evacuated more than once, some not with their families during their first and subsequent relocations. However, the communities mobilized to provide intra- and inter-group self-help among families and relatives, friends and neighbors, while receiving assistance from community organizations, religious institutions, and the government. Compared to African Americans, there were higher percentages of Vietnamese Americans learning about Katrina's impending landfall from government sources, evacuating before Katrina's landfall, and being more satisfied with assistance provided by the government. Those who are lacking in English skills reported more difficulties compared to their co-ethnics. These findings lead to several policy recommendations.

Keywords: African Americans; Vietnamese Americans; Hurricane Katrina; evacuation; New Orleans

Introduction

The flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina on 29 August 2005 uncovered several critical issues in local, state, and national strategies for emergency preparedness and disaster relief. The hardest hit areas were those characterized by socio-economically marginalized communities; these also were the areas that had restricted access to communications about evacuation, the extent of flooding, and evacuation procedures. The Katrina disaster serves as a 'wake-up call' for institutions providing disaster relief and reveals the persistent racial inequality and economic disparities in American society. There is a need to empirically analyze the spatial, socio-economic and health consequences of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath for the most vulnerable segments of our society: those who are economically marginalized, racially stigmatized, spatially segregated, and/or linguistically isolated.

Much of the media analysis about access to emergency resources during the Katrina crisis has focused primarily on African-American communities (e.g. Cass 2006; Russell 2006). It took time for the media to begin dedicating attention to the impact of Katrina on the large Vietnamese-American community in New Orleans, despite the fact that the easternmost New Orleans residential subdivisions had an almost equal distribution of Vietnamese Americans and African Americans prior to Katrina. Academic studies about Katrina and its impacts have thus far focused more on either conceptual or large-scale secondary data analyses of New Orleans or the Gulf Region as a whole (e.g. Elliot and Pais 2006; Logan 2006), while systematic examination of the experiences of Katrina victims during the evacuation process has been limited (Lachlan et al. 2007). On the other hand, there has been periodic, at times intensive, media coverage of the Versailles neighborhood for the past two years. But in contrast to the general trend, most media coverage of this neighborhood has focused on Vietnamese Americans, and specifically the critical role of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in the evacuation and recovery process (Hauser 2005; Joe 2005; Zucchino 2005; Hill 2006), leaving the stories and struggles of African-American residents from this neighborhood largely untold.

Most academic research has focused on white-black disparities of Katrina experiences, with fewer studies addressing other minority groups, and none addressing minority-to-minority comparisons (Trujillo-Pagan (2007) analyzes Latino experiences). It is important and timely to conduct an empirical analysis that documents and compares the experiences during evacuation, the access to relief assistance, and the resettlement process for the two groups in the study area. This study has assembled a tri-university interdisciplinary team consisting of geographers, a nursing scientist, a medical sociologist, a historian, Asian- and African-Americanists, and Southeast Asian language specialists, with complementary analytical and language skills to conduct research which results in this paper. Specifically, the paper aims to address these research questions: (1) How did the two groups in the study area survive Katrina and what were their evacuation experiences? (2) What sources did each community primarily rely upon for information and assistance before and during the evacuation process? (3) How did the two communities mobilize within their own ethnic communities, as well as cross-group interaction during the evacuation process?

The paper first briefly presents pertinent existing literature on ethnic minority communities and disaster research in general, and Katrina in particular. Second, it examines the pre-Katrina socio-spatial configuration of the African-American and Vietnamese-American communities in the study area, followed by a discussion of our data sources and research methods. After a brief description of the flood surge and damage, the storm-related experiences of the two communities are compared, with reference to how each community negotiated evacuation and accessed emergency relief services and relocation assistance through racial/ethnic and/or faith-based community networks or government agencies. The paper concluded with some policy implications based on the research findings.