Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Children and Families, Post-Disaster

The disasters of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill have exposed the residents of the US Gulf Coast to the largest natural hazard and the largest technological accident the country has experienced in a century. This presentation will use findings from the Gulf Coast Child & Family Health Study, a longitudinal cohort study of over 1,000 randomly sampled residents of Louisiana and Mississippi who were followed for five years after Katrina, and from the Coastal Population Impact Project, which began with a survey of 1,200 coastal residents in the immediate aftermath of the oil spill and has conducted 2,000 household interviews in the Spring of 2012, to reflect upon the vulnerabilities and resilience of coastal residents. Children, in particular, may serve as bellwethers of recovery -- when the formal and informal systems around them are functional, they are more likely to be able to recover from such devastating traumas. When these systems are themselves still disrupted, damaged, or destroyed, the children often languish.