Students compare notes about Katrina and Sandy

Last week was the second anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Sandy, the Frankenstorm.  To mark the occasion, Colorado State University in collaboration with Columbia University issued a press release accompanied by a video.  CSU goes first with NYC, Gulf Coast students compare notes on disastersby Jeff Dodge on October 31, 2014.

A program affiliated with Colorado State University marked the two-year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy in a special way: On Oct. 29, high school students in New York City posed questions about life during and after a catastrophe to a very particular group of experts – high school students in the Gulf Coast who experienced the BP Oil Spill and lived through as many as six hurricanes in the past decade, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Their youth-led rapid video project, “The Katrina/Sandy Youth Dialogue, Part 1,” is a product of the SHOREline program, a national youth-empowerment project developed at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute and at the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University.

Here's the video from Columbia University on Vimeo: Shoreline - Katrina/Sandy Youth Dialogue Part I.

It has been two years since Superstorm Sandy struck the East Coast and nearly ten years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. At SHOREline, we took this moment to reflect upon the issues of response and recovery it raised among the members of our SHOREline network – high school students at five Gulf Coast schools and one New York City school.

How are Katrina and Sandy similar? From the perspective of young people, what can they learn from one another about such catastrophic events? Ninth and tenth graders at NYC’s Urban Assembly School for Emergency Management developed questions that they posed to their Gulf Coast counterparts in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

For last year's retrospective, see PBS NewsHour on Hurricane Sandy one year later, then be happy that, as predicted, the U.S. didn't have a severe Atlantic hurricane season this year.