Tulane University student Jeffery Nittrouer was only a few weeks from
defending his master’s thesis — studying the movement of streambed materials
in the Mississippi River — when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Louisiana
coast Aug. 29. Attending a conference in New Zealand thousands of miles away from
his New Orleans school, Nittrouer avoided evacuation hassles. But he did not know
whether years of his research and data in the Department of Earth and Environmental
Sciences, or even his apartment, had survived. “It was pretty hairy there
for a little while,” Nittrouer says. The University of New Orleans sign showed
a distinct watermark on Sept. 18, after flooding finally receded following Hurricane
Katrina. Floodwater was less of an issue for the university than it was for
faculty and students, most of whom lived in the surrounding severely flooded
area at lower elevations. Image courtesy of Denise Reed, University of New Orleans.
Fortunately, Nittrouer and fellow earth science graduate students had a department
to return to when classes resumed Jan. 17 — not all Tulane students were
as lucky. University officials decided that to keep afloat financially, they
would have to make cuts, including eliminating the civil, environmental and
electrical engineering departments, as well as computer science. Tulane’s
return to normalcy, however, will take time and the continued aid from other
universities, some of which are also working to recover from the disaster.
Among Louisiana’s major universities, Tulane suffered some of the most
severe damage from Hurricane Katrina. Flood-water reached levels between 60
and 120 centimeters (2 to 4 feet) high at the back of campus, where several
science facilities are located, including the biomedical labs. The earth science
department in the front part of campus stayed dry, however, suffering only wind
damage.
Stephen Nelson, a volcanologist and chair of Tulane’s earth science department,
says that he “wasn’t all that concerned” that his department
would be cut, as the department’s numbers appear to remain strong. As a
private university, Tulane strongly depends on tuition, Nelson says. Departments
with fewer students, such as in the engineering school, have always faced more
of a funding challenge because it’s “difficult for them to pay their
own way,” Nelson says. As a result, the engineering department has historically
been heavily subsidized by the rest of the university, and was an easy target
for cuts post-Katrina.
Prior
to Katrina, the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences had good numbers
compared to other departments at Tulane, with about 10 undergraduate students,
28 graduate students and 10 faculty members, but it remains unknown how many
will return this semester. Nelson expects that most of the undergraduates will
return, but has heard that five or six graduate students left and two faculty
members resigned.
These books at Tulane University’s
library suffered severe water damage from Hurricane Katrina. University personnel
continue to sort through books, microfilm and government documents, some of
which are irreplaceable. Image courtesy of P. Burch, Tulane University Publications.
While Tulane was out of commission, most students found other universities to
take them in, Nelson says. Graduate student Nittrouer, for example, spent three
months at the University of Washington’s oceanography department in Seattle
following a brief return to New Orleans to retrieve his computer and other belongings
from his apartment, which to his relief had survived the hurricane.
Other Tulane earth science students stayed closer to home, attending classes
at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge as a small part of the total
3,000 students that the university took in. LSU was not damaged by the hurricane,
according to Laurie Anderson, chair of the Geology and Geophysics department
at LSU. As a result, Anderson says, the campus “became a major hub”
for the emergency response that included an 800-bed field hospital and animal
shelter.
LSU also supported earth science students from the University of New Orleans
(UNO), which closed for a semester following Hurricane Katrina. Most buildings
on the UNO campus reopened the first week of January, but the earth science
department still awaited inspection for electrical problems, according to Denise
Reed, a geoscience professor at UNO. Those inspections could delay the department’s
opening, Reed says. Severe flooding of surrounding low-lying apartments and
houses, however, posed a larger problem for the school than damage to the university,
which sits atop a hill, Reed says. UNO officials are concerned that students
and faculty, without a place to live, might not return to the school.
Still, the earth science department at UNO, which, like Tulane, depends heavily
on student tuition, has survived intact without any cuts thus far. That’s
because the university has been working hard to retain students, Reed says.
Although the department was physically closed last semester, students could
continue taking courses that Reed and others taught through intensified online
curricula — one student, Reed notes, worked from as far away as Nigeria.
UNO is also combating the potential loss of students and faculty by arranging
temporary trailer housing on campus.
ExxonMobil is also helping UNO recover. Each year, the company donates money
to the earth science programs to support minority education and outreach to
high school students. This year, ExxonMobil doubled their contribution to $100,000,
to help earth science students return to UNO, Reed says.
Of the total university’s average of 15,000 to 17,000 students, Reed says
that 12,000 must remain enrolled to avoid cuts due to budget stress. As of early
January, only two-thirds of that number had registered.
In the meantime at Tulane, Nelson has been preparing for upcoming classes. The
natural disasters class that he teaches, for example, will include an added
focus on the local geology for the first time. “I do my research in places
where there are mountains; I come from places where there are mountains,”
Nelson says. “I have been here for 25 years and have pretty much ignored
the geology of New Orleans.”
In November, however, Nelson started offering public field trips to see the
geology that Katrina “brought back to the surface,” such as sand deposits
and the cross-bedding of those deposits exposed by bulldozers recreating streets.
Nelson plans to incorporate these trips into his class because he says that
geology is important to people’s understanding of what happened in New
Orleans and south Louisiana.
“In New Orleans, we have to send out two messages,” Nelson says. “One,
we’re back in business, and two, we really need further help here because
there is so much devastation still existing.”
Amid the devastation, the biggest challenge in getting the Tulane earth science
department up and running, Nelson says, has been trying to accommodate students’
needs with a reduced number of faculty and graduate students to teach. Graduate
student Nittrouer, who plans to reschedule the defense of his thesis in the
coming months, says that “if things look really dire,” he will be
happy to help teach for the department that he says “does a lot of work
and a lot of good things.”
Kathryn Hansen
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