United By Disaster: Two researchers connect 12 years after Hurricane Katrina to aid disaster-damaged communities.

Written by Rebecca Watts
Published on Texas A&M Stories
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Abbey Hotard ’19, ’23 was just a kid when she and 1.2 million other Americans left New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. Just over an hour northwest of New Orleans, Ashley Ross ’03, ’10 worked on her political science thesis at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. Neither were prepared for what happened the day after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on Aug. 29, 2005.

“You go to sleep thinking this hurricane’s going to miss us and wake up the next day in the middle of a disaster,” Ross, now an associate professor for the College of Marine Sciences and Maritime Studies at Texas A&M University and a researcher for the Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas, said. “Baton Rouge’s population had doubled in size overnight from the people who had to leave New Orleans.”

Within 24 hours, Hotard’s hometown was flooded. Over 70% of the city’s occupied housing units were underwater. Thousands of New Orleanians found themselves stranded and remained displaced months later.

Hotard, who is an assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of South Alabama, said her experiences then and in the years after fostered a sense of resistance spurred by the disconnect between her lived experiences and the conversations taking place at the local and federal levels surrounding those impacted by the storm.

“Not too long after Katrina, I was studying for a college prep exam, and one of the essay prompts was a question on whether the city of New Orleans should be allowed to be rebuilt,” Hotard shared. “It was jarring. I was extremely frustrated that I was being asked to justify the existence of my home.”

It sparked her passion for coastal resilience research that would connect her with Ross 12 years later, just as Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas. Before that meeting could be possible, Ross had to discover disaster science.

From Political Science to Disaster Science

Ross didn’t realize it when she was studying political science at LSU, but her graduate studies were paving the way for her career in disaster relief efforts.

Ross finished her master’s in political science at LSU in 2006 and earned her doctorate from Texas A&M in 2010. She loved the ties between people and democracy, a passion instilled by her patriotic grandmother, who served in the Coast Guard during World War II.

Ross believes that local governments are the key to helping people have a good quality of life. She began studying democracies in Latin America. However, deteriorating field research conditions in Mexico prompted her to redirect her focus domestically toward Gulf Coast communities, just around the time of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.

“Based on what I learned about personal well-being and local governance, I pivoted my focus on how local governments in the U.S. deal with environmental crises and disasters,” Ross said. “That led me to this concept of resiliency, which deeply resembles the nature of democracy – messy, complicated, but incredibly promising.”

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