About Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston

Like so many others, Hurricane Katrina is the reason I moved to Houston. However, I did not flee from the path of the hurricane itself, I came instead to work alongside Katrina survivors and my colleague, Carl Lindahl at the University of Houston, to orchestrate the first large-scale project, anywhere, in which the survivors of a major disaster have taken the lead in documenting it.

The project was called Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston and its goal was to voice, as intimately as possible, the first person experiences and reflections of those displaced to Houston by the two major hurricanes that pounded the Gulf Coast in August and September of 2005. Hurricane survivors were recruited, trained and compensated for collecting the stories of their fellow survivors

In the course of several years, the project collected over 400 narratives and many of them now reside in the collections of the Library of Congress and the University of Houston. Overtime, several auxiliary projects grew out of the effort. One was an exhibition on view at Art League Houston, entitled Who We Are, which combined portraits of survivors with audio excerpts from their interviews. Participants talked about a wide range of things – from memories of the life they left or their direct experience of the storm. The stunning large scale photographic portraits were created by Dallas McNamara, herself a resident of New Orleans at the time of Katrina. The exhibit was curated by McNamara, Lindahl and myself.

The special program Storm Songs and Stories seemed even then to address the world of climate change that we are all living in. 

– Pat Jasper