Dr. Sam Montano

So when I lived in New Orleans, I lived there for four years, I was going to college.

So in some ways, I was mostly living on campus in uptown New Orleans.

You know, you could walk around outside and not really know that Katrina had happened in the past few years.

There were like some signs here and there, but for the most part, things looked quote unquote normal.

But because of the organizations I worked with and the other things that I did, I was regularly spending time in all different neighborhoods throughout the entire city.

And, you know, when you live in a place that is going through a recovery, especially of the size of Katrina's recovery...

it affects kind of every aspect of your day from, you know, certain roads being closed down because they're still doing construction on those roads or fixing the sewer lines for the first time since the storm like years later, or, you know, trash and recycling not being back or it being two to three years before the streetcar starts running again, right?

Every different aspect of the city had to be rebuilt.

And so you're operating within this space that is

not operating at its full capacity.

And so that kind of like that eats at you, that affects your daily life.

And even I, who was very much still removed from that, like I myself was not going through a recovery.

I myself was like living in like a place that was recovered.

And even then, when I left New Orleans, I like felt the difference of moving to Fargo and being in a community that was

all put together and operating the way you expect a community to operate.

And so, yeah, it definitely eats at you.

We also see that in the research in terms of people's mental health and the way that stress manifests during recovery.

We see an increase in domestic violence, an increase in suicides during recovery among people who are going through that process.

And yeah, it's extremely, extremely difficult to go through, particularly as a survivor of that disaster.

Yeah, I'm mad like all the time.

Okay.

That's what I figured.

Just constantly mad.

Certainly, everything about disasters is injustice manifesting.

who is affected most directly by disasters, which communities are affected and what ways they're affected, their ability to prepare for disasters, their ability to mitigate disasters, their ability to recover, their ability to literally survive disasters.

All of this is tied to policies that are shaped by race, class, gender, and all of those inequalities come out in the middle of a disaster.

You know, those inequalities exist in all four phases, but of course it's during the response that they are kind of most visible and in everyone's face.