Today we started the day off with a guest lecture from Sue Mobley about the effort to take down certain confederate monuments in New Orleans several years ago. This lecture was followed by a tour around the city to see the sites of the former monuments. Dr. Cheek helped the students think through the risks of having groups of people with opposing opinions gather at these particular sites from an emergency management perspective.

We also went out to Caernarvon, Louisiana which is the site of the 1927 dynamiting of the Mississippi River levee under the guise of saving the city from flooding. There also happen to be a lot of alligators there!

Our final stop was in New Orleans to talk about the response from the predominantly Vietnamese community following Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure. We discussed how research has found communities with strong pre-disaster social ties are able to leverage those during and post-disaster to have more effective responses and recoveries.