By Chris Estrada
Although the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the people of New Orleans have been widely reported, there has been little discussion of the environmental impacts of the storm.
A group of college faculty and Louisiana state officials joined students from the College of Engineering (COE) Friday to discuss the environmental damage done to the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina.
The workshop, sponsored by the COE, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Henry David Thoreau Foundation, took place in Stearns Hall.
The conference featured teachers from a variety of schools, including Tulane University and Louisiana State University, as well as members from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. The discussion focused on subjects like the public health crisis after Katrina, oil spills that damaged Gulf Coast ecosystems and the destruction of New Orleans’ system of levees and pumps meant to keep the city dry.
“Right after the hurricane, the focus has been on the lack of response and the humanitarian and public impact,” said Ferdi Hellweger, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern.
“You have to remember though that the hurricane had a lot of impact on the environment besides the people.”
The workshop was part of a $25,000 grant that the College of Engineering received this year from the Henry David Thoreau Foundation. The grant has enabled students to go to conferences in Tampa Bay and Washington, D.C., and has provided the funding necessary for this event, which was organized by students from the COE.
The keynote speaker of the event was Dr. Ivor van Heerden from the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, located at Louisiana State University. Van Heerden provided several storm surge animations and models, advisories from the center that detailed when New Orleans would flood and a presentation on how the levees that once protected the Crescent City were so easily broken by Katrina. He also talked about the barrier islands surrounding the Gulf Coast and how they had been left in “extremely sad shape.”
Xingzhi Wu, a graduate student from the College of Engineering, noted that the presentation touched on what survivors of the storm now have to go through in terms of debt relief, as well as the government’s plan to rebuild the levees and restore the wetlands.
“We may be engineers, but we don’t just care about the water quality and the disaster, but also the influence on the human community,” Wu said. “I think we have a problem first with the human life and then the ecosystems … we can’t do both at the same time.”
Colin Ferguson, a senior civil and environmental engineering major, also said he learned several things from the presentation.
“When you’re dealing with the environmental effects, you’re dealing with things that are much, much harder to deal with than just to rebuild what was there,” he said.
