Wendong Wang had deadlines to meet. So in late August when Hurricane Katrina was approaching and his colleagues were evacuating, Wang hunkered down in his lab at the University of New Orleans and kept writing conference papers. By the time he was rescued by helicopter five days later, Wang, a postdoc working on magnetic materials, was scared. More than 1000 people from the flooding city had been deposited at the university. His fellow refugees “were very nice,” Wang says, “but with time going on, without food or drink, that could change.” When they were collected, many of them were wearing blue-and-silver UNO T-shirts they’d taken from the campus store.
Wang was taken to the New Orleans airport and flown to San Antonio, Texas. He made his own way to the University of Houston, where—interrupted by a second evacuation in September to flee Hurricane Rita—he plans to continue his research until UNO reopens.
In the wake of Katrina, thousands of displaced scholars have, like Wang, been taken in by universities and colleges around the country. A month after Katrina hit, students were enrolled in classes and professors were teaching and had found most of their graduate students. But many questions remained unanswered. What was the condition of researchers’ labs? Their homes? Would they be paid? By their home or host university? What would happen to their grants? Would course credit transfer? Could foreign students temporarily transfer to other universities? When would the universities in the affected parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama reopen? Would students return?
Lab damage
Assessing the damage from Katrina will take time, but early signs suggest that physics departments were largely spared; with cells and other samples lost to extended power outages, research in biology and medicine was harder hit. Visits by university officials to the UNO and Tulane University physics departments in September revealed puddles but no wind damage or looting. “The whole [physics] building will need to be scrubbed down to get rid of the mold and smell,” says UNO physics chair Gregory Seab, “but things look much better than I had feared.” Even the university’s telescope dome survived, he adds.
Xavier University of Louisiana, which produces more black physics bachelors than any other US institution, got six feet or more of water. In the physical sciences building, classrooms were drenched, but research labs are on upper floors and are “probably safe,” says physics chair Kathleen McCloud. “I am worried about stuff corroding in the humidity. We’ll have to thoroughly test any sort of delicate equipment before we use it.”
At the University of Southern Mississippi in Long Beach, “the storm surge did away with most of the buildings and left computers in the trees,” says Cecil Burge, vice president of research and economic development. About 25 researchers lost specimens and data, he adds, citing collections of formaldehyde-preserved sharks and dolphin blood serum that were destroyed. “The replacement cost would be around $20 million, but some things can’t be replaced.” In information technology, he adds, “we are triaging. We estimate losses of $16 million.”
Stennis Space Center near the Mississippi coast encompasses a NASA rocket propulsion testing ground and applied research in disaster management, oceanography, agricultural efficiency, and other areas. The center had a roof blown off and sustained some rain damage, and about 1200 out of 4300 employees lost their homes. LIGO, the gravitational-wave observatory in Livingston, Louisiana, got by with minor scratches.
All told, research labs and facilities, at least in the physical sciences, suffered relatively little. The more pressing problems are people’s homes and basic infrastructure in the affected areas.
Picking up the pieces
UNO began offering online courses in October, and planned to set up satellite campuses around New Orleans and have a condensed semester this winter before opening for the spring term. Tulane and Xavier say they will reopen in January but plan to juggle their schedules to make up for lost time, and Loyola University and other institutions plan to open no later than January.
Those plans may be realistic “if you just look at the university, because the university did not get hit very hard,” Ulrike Diebold says of Tulane, where she is a surface scientist. “But it needs a city around it to function—everyone needs to have housing, schools, hospitals. Traffic needs to be functional. I think Tulane will do everything it can to reopen. Being closed for a whole semester makes recruiting hard.”
About half the physics faculty at UNO lost their homes. “Mine was under eight and a half feet of water. The best single word to describe it is “wasteland,”’ says Seab. “If the house had wind damage or was burned down, we would be in good shape. Flood coverage [by insurance] is not as good—mine covers only about a third of my belongings. And I still have to pay the mortgage.” While he looks for a place to live in newly jam-packed Baton Rouge, Seab is staying with the chair of Louisiana State University’s physics and astronomy department a couple of days a week and in a cabin in Mississippi the rest of the time. “It’s taken a lot of time to deal with personal losses,” Seab says. “But I’m still able to function as department chair, and I’m teaching a course here at LSU—second-semester algebra-based physics, largely to expat New Orleans students.”
Scattered scholars
For the fall term, some 2700 undergraduates have swelled LSU’s student body by about 9%. To handle the increased load, “UNO and Xavier faculty are being asked to teach at LSU,” says Kevin Carman, dean of basic sciences. “We don’t have a guarantee of resources, but the bottom line is that some faculty have stepped forward to teach, and we are hoping the tooth fairy will show up somewhere along the line to pay graduate students to help with labs.” At LSU, tuition for student evacuees is being waived if they’ve already paid their home institution.
Located only 130 km from New Orleans, LSU has enrolled more than its share of displaced students. But students are scattered around the country. Umar Farooq, a Tulane senior and New Orleans local, for example, is spending the semester at the University of Illinois, Urbana—Champaign. After first moving to LSU, he says, “I heard that almost every university in the country was taking students for free. I wanted to come [to Urbana—Champaign] for graduate school anyway, so this is a great opportunity.”
Federal funding agencies have also been quick to respond to the crisis. NSF has sought out its grant awardees at 66 institutions in the affected region and promises to extend grants and grant deadlines, assist in transferring grant money to displaced awardees, and be generally flexible and consider requests case by case. “We will work with affected students and researchers and their home institutions closely and do whatever is necessary within reason to get things going again,” says Fae Korsmo, a staff associate in the NSF director’s office. NSF has also seen a spike in applications for its small grants for exploratory research from engineers and behavioral scientists eager to use the aftermath of the hurricane as a laboratory.
The US Department of Energy’s Office of Science is matching displaced scientists—whether or not they have DOE funding—with researchers who have DOE grants, and is making modest supplementary awards. As of press time, more than two dozen displaced scientists had asked DOE for help in finding host labs. In one instance, a Xavier biologist was fast-tracked for a sabbatical position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory arranged through an Office of Science program for minority-serving institutions. The lab provided a job for the scientist’s husband and found the family rent-free housing for six months.
Many funding agencies, other government bodies, and professional societies have created websites with hurricane-response news and bulletin boards to help displaced scientists find their colleagues, their students, and potential hosts.
Academic concerns
“One of the most frustrating things has been the lack of communication,” says Xavier’s McCloud, who for now is at Pacific University near Portland, Oregon. More than a month after the hurricane, internet servers at many of the affected universities remained down. “Xavier has been able to publish a list of faculty [e-mail addresses on its website], but finding students is more problematical. I know that many are enrolled at other campuses. I know that not all of them evacuated,” McCloud says.
Perhaps the biggest worry for universities is that legions of the estimated 70 000 to 100 000 displaced students won’t return. Alongside gratitude toward other universities for taking in their students, the stricken institutions “have expressed worries about losing students,” says Carman. “Tulane, the University of New Orleans, and other universities in New Orleans are facing the very serious problem of getting their programs restarted. Most of Tulane’s students come from out of state. Will they come back?” Adds UNO physicist Carl Ventrice, “I’m guessing we will be lucky if we get 40% [of our students] back.”
Money is another concern shared by faculty, postdocs, and grad students. Some of the affected universities have promised to pay salaries through the academic year. Others have committed only to this semester or less. Diebold says that in September she had graduate students “who were living off FEMA and Red Cross checks,” although they eventually received their paychecks from Tulane. On the bright side, she says Rutgers University, where she and about half of her group have reunited, “has been unbelievably helpful. They provided housing free to my first-year student. They’re paying rent for my postdoc and her husband, and they’ve given me a little fund for research that we can use to supplement their living costs.” Being away from New Orleans, Diebold adds, “is also better for the students psychologically—they can talk about science instead of just the hurricane.”
Back in August, Diebold did what she always does for a hurricane evacuation: “The first thing you do is call a hotel and make a reservation. You leave early to avoid the traffic. You take your documents and your wedding pictures and clothes for three days.” When the scope of the devastation became clear, “I had many offers from universities to house me,” says Diebold. “At my hotel in Shreveport [Louisiana], we met all the other evacuees who didn’t have money to pay for the hotel. Being in academia, we are much better off.”
Pitching in. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey invited Tulane University physics professor Ulrike Diebold (dark red shirt, lower right) for an indefinite stay. With her are members of her research group and some of her hosts, from left: Stephanie Tchatchoua (gray sweatshirt), Yves Chabal (white striped shirt), Jane Hinch (royal blue), Donna Kohl (light blue), Bulat Katsiev (white and pink), Olga Dulub (red), Alim Alchagirov, Bob Bartynski (pink), Ted Madey, and Roger Jones. Graduate students Tchatchoua and Katsiev and postdocs Dulub and Alchagirov are from Tulane.
Pitching in. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey invited Tulane University physics professor Ulrike Diebold (dark red shirt, lower right) for an indefinite stay. With her are members of her research group and some of her hosts, from left: Stephanie Tchatchoua (gray sweatshirt), Yves Chabal (white striped shirt), Jane Hinch (royal blue), Donna Kohl (light blue), Bulat Katsiev (white and pink), Olga Dulub (red), Alim Alchagirov, Bob Bartynski (pink), Ted Madey, and Roger Jones. Graduate students Tchatchoua and Katsiev and postdocs Dulub and Alchagirov are from Tulane.
