Flooded City: Affects of (Slow) Catastrophe in Post-Harvey Houston (original) (raw)
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Bayou City: (Re)Configuring the Waterscape of a Post-Harvey Houston
2018
Hurricane Harvey caused the third major “500-year flood” to devastate Houston, Texas, in the past three years. This has had a significant impact on not just the city as a whole, but on residents of many of the floodplains in the bayous which make up Houston. This project hopes to understand the social impacts this event has posed from the context of local residents in Braeswood Place, a neighborhood inundated by flooding after Hurricane Harvey. By looking at the decision-making process and judgment protocols used by residents, aid organizations, and flood management, this process will help inform how local residents perceive flooding events to impact their daily lives and ultimately configure the waterscape of Houston. The main method of this research is a singular case study- one which seeks to thoroughly understand the experiences and actions of Braeswood Place residents during and after Hurricane Harvey and follows through to how these experiences might be considered in the flood management process. This research, being qualitative and ethnographic in nature, will facilitate inferences on how the waterscape comes to be manifested from a grassroots perspective through resident’s daily interactions and uncertainties with water.
2019
We use a co-auto-ethnographic study of Hurricane Harvey where both authors were citizen responders and disaster researchers. In practice, large-scale disaster helps temporarily foster an ideal of community which is then appropriated by emergency management institutions. The advancement of disaster research must look to more radical perspectives on human response in disaster and what this means for the formation of communities and society itself. It is the collective task as those invested in the management of crises to defer to the potentials of publics, rather than disdain and appropriate them. We present this work in the advancement of more empirically informed mitigation of societal ills that produce major causes of disaster. Our work presents a departure from the more traditional disaster work into a critical and theoretical realm using novel research methods.
Social Dimensions of Urban Flood Experience, Exposure, and Concern
JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 2018
With growing urban populations and climate change, urban flooding is an important global issue, even in dryland regions. Flood risk assessments are usually used to identify vulnerable locations and populations, flooding experience patterns, or levels of concern about flooding, but rarely are all of these approaches combined. Furthermore, the social dynamics of flood concerns, exposure, and experience are underexplored. We combined geographic and survey data on household‐level measures of flood experience, concern, and exposure in Utah's urbanizing Wasatch Front. We asked: (1) Are socially vulnerable groups more likely to be exposed to flood risk? (2) How common are flooding experiences among urban residents, and how are these experiences related to sociodemographic characteristics and exposure? and (3) How concerned are urban residents about flooding, and does concern vary by exposure, flood experience, and sociodemographic characteristics? Although floodplain residents were mor...
This dissertation examines how the phenomenon of climate change is changing the public conception of natural disasters, and vice versa. Using the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York City as a case study, this project draws on a year of in-depth fieldwork triangulated with media coverage, public reports, and city-level quantitative data to illustrate how popular misconceptions about how disasters happen were at work in the public response to the catastrophe. In particular, my research develops a conceptual framework using discourse analysis, to identify two false doctrines or tropes which underlie many of these misconceptions. The first, the doctrine of natural disaster, asserts that environmental disasters are fundamentally physiological rather than social in origin. The second, the doctrine of disaster exceptionalism, asserts that so-called natural disasters are rare and unpredictable events. The results of this project indicate that while climate change has the potential to disrupt these two false doctrines, this is not yet occurring in the public response to disaster. This dissertation also extends earlier work on the intersection of climate policy and environmental justice, known as the “climate gap”, and extends it to adaptation, proposing an “adaptation gap” is also at work. Finally, this dissertation proposes a new test for delineating different types of climate change adaptation, further developing work on what constitutes transformational adaptation.
Cities and the Environment, 2021
Coastal communities are threatened by extreme weather events in the form of storm surge and by frequent, chronic, or nuisance flooding. The physical damage of these events is vast and established in the literature; however, the social-emotional impacts are less well-documented. This pilot study sought to understand the impacts of tidal flooding on flood-prone communities in Queens, NY. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews (n=9) with civic science participants, we document flooding impacts, identify adaptations to flooding, and examine sources of information about flooding-including local networks and relationship to government. We found that participants are knowledgeable about and engaged with the processes, rhythms, and impacts of tidal flooding. Qualitative methods can be used to surface experiences of living with flooding and therefore inform planning processes. This work demonstrates the need to attune methods and data collection to better capture and understand lived experience, local ecological knowledge, and civic engagement-as these are crucial building blocks for strengthening social resilience. Finally, by rooting the research in civic science and a co-production approach, this study provides a starting point for building shared knowledge across different stakeholders to inform collaborative adaptation planning. Ultimately, we seek to better engage local knowledge-including rich, qualitative data capturing lived experience-into adaptation and resilience planning.
Hurricane Harvey: Human barriers to remembering, environmental repercussions of forgetting
International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2018
The death toll would have been higher if not for citizen volunteers who used their own boats to rescue people trapped by the flood (Mann & Salamon, 2017). Survivors were emotionally traumatized (Plohetsi, Ball, & Taboada, 2017) and approximately 47,000 left homeless (Espinosa & Muhammad, 2017). Incredibly, some of downtown Houston was spared, including the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies where I am a faculty member. Once the institute leaders determined that the faculty and trainees were safe, it was decided to start classes as scheduled on September 8. Many of us were in a mental fog during a somber meeting that day. We learned that our administrator lost a close friend to drowning. A faculty member was rescued from the second story of his home after the first story flooded. Others experienced the total or partial destruction of homes. Some clinicians were volunteering in refugee centers. By the third week of classes, the acute mental fog was lifting, but the losses and difficulties continued. For example, one trainee's family could not afford to leave their home, so they lived upstairs without a kitchen because the first story was gutted. Although Harvey was not the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, it was an environmental disaster. Ecological crises will persist for years due to oil, chemical, and sewer spills and the destruction of water treatment facilities (Bajak & Minkoff, 2017; Haurwitz, 2017). Mold grew in buildings that were invaded by floodwaters full of dirt, chemicals, and sewage. Throughout the area were piles of rotting debris left by the storm and clean-up efforts (Mann & Salamon, 2017). In addition to compromised groundwater, there was increased air pollution. As plant and refinery workers hurriedly burned off compounds that might combust, nearby residents experienced headaches, nausea, and itchiness (Bajak & Minkoff, 2017). Damage estimates made Harvey the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history (Swartz, 2017), and small towns with fewer resources faced particular challenges in rebuilding (Chang, 2017; Schwartz, 2017; Walsh, 2017b). This presentation will examine the environmental crisis, its antecedents, and aftermath from various theoretical viewpoints, topics historically neglected in psychoanalysis.
Following Hurricane Katrina, critics noted that most neighborhoods of New Orleans which failed to recover had previously been heavily populated by African-Americans and the working classes. Josh Neufeld's graphic novel, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (2009), which depicts the experiences of six New Orleans residents during and after the storm, reflects this theorization. For instance, of Neufeld's characters only one, a rich white resident whose home lies on high ground, avoids flooding and displacement. A.D. presents a geography in which wealthier, white neighborhoods are less vulnerable to extreme climate events than African-American and/or lower-income neighborhoods. Yet this misses a key characteristic of the emerging geography not only of contemporary New Orleans but of the world of climate change in general: post-catastrophe recovery is becoming a function of who can afford it, not of who is most affected by the disaster. In the case of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina provided white urban capital the opportunity to engage in one of the largest urban renewal programs in American history: the socioeconomic footprint of African-Americans and the poor was reduced in order to consolidate the world of the white middle-and upper-classes. In addition to Neufeld's narrative, which represents the emerging geography of climate change as one in which a white, monied world is spared the forces of the Anthropocene and made the de facto center of power, I argue that the United States' unequal geography of climate change is created through de jure political decisions and urban planning.
Disrupting the Complacency: Disaster Experience and Emergent Environmentalism
Socius, 2021
As climate change intensifies, scholars are beginning to ask whether firsthand experience with disaster will cause complacent people to develop greater environmental concern and engage in more proenvironmental behaviors. Will the disruption caused by experiencing a local environmental disaster be enough to motivate residents to change their values and behaviors? The aim of this study is to answer that question by analyzing qualitative interview data collected from 40 residents of Calgary, Alberta, who survived the devastating and costly 2013 southern Alberta flood. Despite normally high levels of climate change denial and complacency, findings indicate that the flood prompted residents to concern themselves more with climate change and the climate crisis and to begin adopting many householdlevel proenvironmental behaviors. The findings also point to important gender differences in both environmental concern and proenvironmental behaviors. Thus, the article establishes a social-psychological process of attitudinal and behavioral change, allowing us to better understand how jarring environmental events disrupt complacency.