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NEWS | FEATURES | RESILIENCE

caped to Galveston, Texas, before his own “It was completely gloomy and dark,” she click: Families in the two studies had simi-
house took on a meter of water, didn’t says. “No sound.” But as Tran approached lar economic means and their homes had
know each other. They didn’t know much Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, she heard sustained similar levels of damage. Con-
about disaster research. But both immedi- music from a car radio and saw neighbors ventional wisdom might have predicted
ately recognized that their questionnaires rebuilding the church roof. “We asked them, similar recoveries. But it was “as if they
documenting the health, social networks, ‘Is it safe for people to come back?’ and they had almost suffered two entirely different
and personality traits of Vietnamese said, ‘Well, you know, there’s no electric- events,” Abramson says.
immigrants and mostly poor, black, single ity or water or anything like that. But yes, The neighborhood of Abramson’s mostly
mothers before the hurricane had taken on please do come back!’” black participants, the ones who’d wound up
outsize significance. Tran took their advice. She moved in FEMA housing and whom Abramson was
In the months after Katrina, Waters here and helped set up a charter school. now carefully tracking, was still strewn with
and VanLandingham, along with their col- And she later became a coordinator for debris and abandoned belongings. In a pre-
leagues, began tracking down their dis- VanLandingham’s study, Katrina Impacts liminary analysis, that group was scoring well
placed participants to see how they were on Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans, below VanLandingham’s Vietnamese families
faring. The researchers tried calling the which showed that the optimistic welcome in mental health surveys. Why did such gaps
phone numbers on file and sent exist between those communities
teams to search New Orleans when it came to resilience, the
neighborhoods for participants researchers wondered, and could
or friends who might know anything be done to narrow them?
where to find them.
Meanwhile, Katrina’s devasta- YEARS PASSED, but the socio-
tion also drew Abramson in. He logists didn’t leave. For Waters,
had been exploring the impact of there never seemed to be a good
HIV/AIDS in New York City, but time to stop. “We didn’t set it up Downloaded from
the storm inspired him to lead a to be a study that was going to
caravan of about 30 researchers, last 10 or 15 years,” she says. But
graduate students, and health in each round of interviews, “it
workers to visit temporary hous- was so clear that we were in the
ing sponsored by the Federal middle of the story.”
Emergency Management Agency By 2009, the women in
(FEMA) in Mississippi and Loui- Waters’s Resilience in Survivors
siana. Their goal was to monitor of Katrina (RISK) Project were http://science.sciencemag.org/
those families over the coming scattered across 23 states, and
years as they sought permanent just 16% had returned to their
housing back in their original prehurricane homes. The RISK
neighborhoods or elsewhere, researchers examined mental
and to track how disaster and health trajectories, in particular
displacement affected health. whether those women had re-
In a first round of surveys, turned to their level of psycho-
Abramson’s Gulf Coast Child logical functioning from before on March 1, 2018
and Family Health Study in- the storm. Some had, among
terviewed people from 1079 them “Keanna,” who built a new
displaced households between life in Houston with her husband
6 and 12 months after the storm. and five children. She re-enrolled
As the team’s 12-passenger vans in school and started her own
rolled through FEMA hous- business; she said she had de-
ing sites, they found families veloped a deeper relationship
of six crammed into trailers, Sociologist Mark VanLandingham visits Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in the with God. On the other end of
uncertain whether they’d be New Orleans, Louisiana, community he’s still studying post-Katrina. the spectrum sat “Belinda,” also a
forced to move out on a few days’ mother of five, who spent nearly
notice. Some feared for their safety and kept she received from the rebuilders presaged a year at a friend’s house in Arkansas be-
their children inside. “It made for a very an entire community’s long-term recovery. fore returning to New Orleans. She became
claustrophobic and depressing situation,” In the coming months, VanLandingham estranged from her partner, struggled to
Abramson says. watched members of the community wake support two unemployed sisters, and faced
Abramson would track those families over at daybreak, drive back to their neighbor- depression and weight gain.
time and watch their paths diverge. But in hood, and rebuild—one house at a time. Some of the factors widening that divide
another population, a future colleague of They seemed to embody resilience. were predictable. In the RISK Project, re-
VanLandingham’s saw a different trajectory Two years later, when VanLandingham searchers found that stressors such as go-
from the start. Cam Tran had immigrated and Abramson met for the first time at ing without food or water after the storm or,
from Vietnam as a child, and after Katrina a conference here, they discovered that worse, losing a loved one predicted longer-
she traveled from her home in Texas to New some of their participants hailed from ad- term mental health struggles, as did report- PHOTO: © WILLIAM WIDMER 2018
Orleans to help her in-laws recover. Tran re- jacent neighborhoods. Together, as the pair ing a weak social support network before
members the day she drove into their neigh- drove those streets in VanLandingham’s Katrina. But other findings took Waters by
borhood, about a month after the storm. Subaru Outback, something started to surprise—such as the fact that, controlling

974 2 MARCH 2018 • VOL 359 ISSUE 6379 sciencemag.org SCIENCE
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