Immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, I was activated with the federal Disaster Mortuary Operations Team and arrived in Gulfport, Miss., in the middle of the night on Sept. 1 as part of a 35-member team from the New England region. As DMORT teams from other parts of the country arrived, we spent the first three days organizing our living arrangements and setting up our portable morgue unit in a secure area at the Gulfport-Biloxi Airport (a joint-use military base). As basic supplies such as water, tents, cots, portable generators, food and portable toilets began to arrive, the real work began. DMORT's main mission is to identify victims of a mass-fatality disaster and speed up the process of repatriation of remains, including personal effects, to victims' families once the identifications are firmly established. A similar morgue unit was set up by DMORT in St. Gabriel, La., to process and identify victims from New Orleans and surrounding areas. I assisted with victim identifications at the forensic anthropology station at our Gulfport morgue facility.
A week later I was redeployed to St. Gabriel and then directly to downtown New Orleans to assist with victim recoveries at Memorial Hospital on St. Charles Avenue, where there was still four feet of standing water. For the rest of the week I was part of a field team that entered devastated neighborhoods, mainly in St. Bernard and Chalmette. We recovered remains of storm victims from nursing homes, schools and private homes and delivered them to St. Gabriel for processing.
After two and a half very intense weeks, I returned to Brown to resume my normal teaching and other academic duties. I then learned about and met with some of the "Katrina students" from universities like Dillard and Tulane who were here to keep up the momentum in their studies. Some of these students either came from or had families in the areas affected by Katrina, and it was immediately apparent that this had been a life-changing experience for them. Many times they asked me how their academic studies could meet the needs of their home communities. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a fellow DMORT worker in the middle of the night shortly after we arrived in Gulfport. We were perched like squirrels on a plywood ramp leading to the back of one of our big refrigerated truck-trailers, and we were chatting about what we did in our "day jobs." When I told him I was an archaeologist, his response - a familiar one - was how fascinating he found the subject and how he watched shows on the History Channel and Discovery Channel and read about archaeology whenever he could. But then he asked me, "It's fascinating, but what can you do with it?"
That, of course, was the question I was asking myself, and out of all this came a realization that while scholarly archaeology mainly addresses the past, there is also a compelling need for us to find ways to use our archaeological skills to help bring what is commonly called "closure" to survivors and families of disaster victims. Katrina reinforced the awareness of this need and what we could do about it, something that we had experienced earlier at the World Trade Center in New York and at The Station nightclub fire scene right here in Rhode Island. For the "Katrina students," the lesson was similar: continue developing your academic abilities, but also look for ways to apply your skills in situations where they may be urgently needed. For example, a Tulane graduate student in environmental sciences asked me what the authorities were doing about the deep layer of toxic mud engulfing most of St. Bernard Parish. I described the cleanup efforts I had seen, but I did not know where the mud was being dumped or how - even if - it was being treated. I suggested to her that this was exactly the kind of challenge that her studies were preparing her to deal with - that is, if she would be willing to do it. She seemed to connect the dots, and I hope that she, like other students who asked similar questions, would be willing to apply their skills in such ways when needed. There are positive lessons to be learned from the Katrina experience, and I think this is one of them.
