The article is supported through the use of interviews with Katrina survivors, statistics and policy moves from FEMA and other response agencies, and data from census reports and other various goverment sources.
Vincanne Adams is a PhD at UCSF School of Medicine, she's the former Director and Vice-Chair of Medical Anthropology and History and Social Medicine. Her areas of research and publications include: Global Health, Asian Medical Systems, Social Theory, Critical Medical Anthropology, Sexuality and Gender, Safe Motherhood and Disaster Recovery, Tibet, Nepal, China and the US. Van Hattum works at the Louisiana Public Health Institute and Diana English is a professor at Stanford hospital. They all deal with populations that are effected my disaster and are disadvantaged economically and socially.
Emergency response is addressed in different ways in this article. In terms of true emergency response during and immediately following the disaster, examples of emergency response can be seen in the recounting of those that were interviewed, but they weren't explicitly discussed in the article. The article does however extensively discuss aid that followed the disaster and discusses that aspect of emergency response, and more so the recovery and resiliency aspects of it. Such as government funding, aid relief, conditions in which things were left, hardships that those who survived came back and had to deal with, how medical care, socioeconomic factors and much more were highly effected post Katrina.
This article focuses on "chronic disaster syndrome," a condition that arises in the aftermath of a large scale disaster where factors from the disaster lead to perminant physical and mental changes in the lives of those effected.
I looked further into governmental relief policies after disasters, mental health policies in regard to emergencies, and New Orleans current state.
The article utilizes first hand testimony from those living in new Orleans that lived through the disaster and were evacuated, documenting their hardships faced. The article also cited different government agencies as well as different papers and organizations for statistics on post disaster government funding, emergency response and preparedness.
The authors, Vicanne Adams, Taslim Van Hattum, and Diana English work at the University of California San Francisco in the department of anthropology, history, and social medicine. The department’s research includes aspects of global health, social theory, critical medical anthropology, and disaster recovery.
This article has been referenced in various other articles and papers in regard to the socio-economic affects of disasters.
"Depression and anxiety disorders were pervasive. Many residents had regular nightmares of waking up in water. They talked about recurring “breakdowns” in which they became overcome with emotion and physically collapsed. A 2007 study showed that 20 percent of New Orleans residents were categorized as having a Katrina-related serious mental illness, and 19 percent showed signs of minimal to mild mental illness (Sastry and VanLandingham 2008; Thomas 2008). "
"The stress-inducing factors that prevailed among New Orleans residents were multiple and layered, including physical, psychological, and social displacements around house and home, work, financial security, and family security. The loss of home and jobs and, in some cases, the cost of rebuilding produced huge financial worries for residents. "
"What I experienced was coming back to the devastation of the city. No grocery stores, no cell phone service, certainly no phone service, no regular phone service. We actually had to get other cell phones. You know, it was a ghost town. I think I, probably, maybe not now, but I was in shock, you know, because I couldn’t take in the enormity of it. I wondered knowing the politics of the city, and the state, and actually the federal government, how it was ever going to be fixed. "
“Chronic disaster syndrome” thus refers in this analysis to the cluster of trauma-and posttrauma-related phenomena that are at once individual, social, and political and that are associated with disaster as simultaneously causative and experiential of a chronic condition of distress in relation to displacement. "
"Not surprisingly, residents and those still trying to return to New Orleans are asking the question: Where did all the federal money go? Residents still living out of their trailers wonder why they could not get Road Home or FEMA funds and continue to wait to find out if their rental housing will be rebuilt. "
I further researched governmental policies on natural disasters as well as the agencies that were frequently discussed in the article such as FEMA. I also researched the general current state of New Orleans today in comparison to pre Hurricane and post Hurricane (within the first few years) conditions and then compared it with today. I also researched any forms of direct emergency response that occurred during the hurricane and after out of interest on the topic.