The Log | School News

Coburn Documents Hurricane Damage Along the Gulf Coast

When the winds of Hurricane Katrina had barely died down, the Nicholas School’s Andrew S.Coburn chartered a plane and flew over devastated portions of Alabama and Mississippi, taking hundreds of digital photos. Coburn MEM’93, associate director of the Duke University Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines (PSDS), traveled to the Gulf Coast with Robert S. Young PhD’95, an associate professor of geology at Western Carolina University.

The photos show entire neighborhoods of houses that have been stripped to their foundations. A bridge that has been reduced to a series of pylons jutting from the water, without a roadbed. Cars piled up like toys. Trees denuded of leaves. Highways choked with sand. And occasionally, entire stretches in which buildings survived, seemingly unscathed.

According to Coburn, it was critically important to get the photographs as soon as possible after the storm.“Impacts are ephemeral, and we feel it is critical to have a permanent record of what actually occurred on the ground,” he said .“We try to get out and document post-storm impacts before people go in and start cleaning up and putting things back the way they were.”

The photos propelled Coburn and Young into the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Houston Chronicle, and numerous broadcast programs, and Coburn was featured as Tar Heel of the Week in a Raleigh News and Observer story that focused largely on the Katrina photographs.

Coburn and his colleagues will use the images to assess patterns of property damage, identify beach and shoreline impacts and monitor what happens to a beach and shoreline during the months and years after the storm. While the photos document horrific destruction, one thing Coburn looks for is those places where little damage occurred. One of his aims is to discover what might be protecting some parts of the developed coastline from hurricanes’effects.

The PSDS was established by Orrin H. Pilkey, James B.Duke Professor Emeritus of Geology, who serves as its director.

Check out the photos online at www.nicholas.duke.edu/psds/katrina.htm.

—Lisa M. Dellwo