COVER STORY
CHAIRMEN'S CHALLENGE After harrowing escape, chemists Ed and Cheryl Stevens struggle to hold their departments together
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HEMISTS ED AND CHERYL STEVENS
and their two youngest sons were in their backyard raking leaves and picking up sticks the day after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Then water began to fill the street and creep up the front lawn toward their two-story white brick house, sending them scrambling to move as many of their possessions as possible upstairs. It wasn't until that evening that they found out where the water was coming from: The levees holding back the nearby London Avenue Canal had broken. They had dragged their grill up to their house's second-story roof to make dinner and turned on their sole battery-powered radio to find out what was going on. "We heard New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin say that efforts to repair the levees had failed," Cheryl says. Nagin warned that water levels in the city could soon rise another 15 feet and ordered
and some houses sat in roof-deep water. At lunchtime, the family regrouped on the roof. Nagin was now reporting on the radio that it would take months to repair the levees and drain the city. "That's when we decided to leave," Cheryl says. "With the city shut down for that long, where would we buy groceries or propane? Where would we send our boys to school?" Less than an hour and a half later, Ed, Cheryl, Michael, nine-year old Ricky, two dogs, and three cats left their home in the boat with two changes of clothes, snacks, water, and pet food. "Leaving the house was scary—because once we left, I knew we were no longer in control," Cheryl says. When the family reached the banks of the London Avenue Canal, an Army helicopter picked them up and flew them to a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) evacuation center on Interstate Highway 10. That the place was called a
in with FEMA officials. "We had been in the system long enough," Cheryl says. They slipped out of the bus during a smoking break, took their meager luggage from the cargo hold, grabbed a taxi, and checked into a hotel. The next day they rented a car and drove to Baton Rouge, where they reunited with their pets. (The cats and dogs had been trucked to a shelter from the evacuation center.) After spending three days unsuccessfully trying to buy a house, the family fled to Ed's family summer home outside Charlottesville, Va. Ed and Cheryl—who chair the chemistry departments at the University of New Orleans (UNO) and Xavier University of Louisiana, respectively—now spend their days trying to hold their departments together. Through e-mail and phone calls, both Ed and Cheryl are doing their best to entice their students back and keep up morale among their faculty and staff. Both UNO, on the southern banks of Lake Pontchartrain, and Xavier, in uptown New Orleans near the Superdome, suffered water damage. UNO's main chemistry building had only a few broken windows, but its science classrooms and teaching labs "will be out of power for months," Ed says.
SEA CHANGE Ed Stevens (left photo, right) and his sons Ricky (in front) and Michael measure the depth of the water in front of their house from the boat they used to escape. Cheryl Stevens (right photo) is now on sabbatical at the University of Virginia as part of an HHMI-sponsored program to help Xavier retain its faculty in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. everyone still left to get out. "When he said 15 feet ofwater, that scared me," Cheryl says. But they still wanted to stick it out. "This is our home," she explains. By the time they woke the next morning, there was 2 feet of water on the first floor. Ed and his 16-year-old son Michael waded in chest-deep water to free a neighbor's sunken fishing boat from its trailer. They bailed it and set off to reconnoiter the flood damage in their Lake Terrace neighborhood, on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. There was nearly 6 feet ofwater in the street, WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
FEMA center "was something of a misnomer. No one from FEMA was there. It was total chaos," Ed says. "They were bringing in people by helicopter quicker than buses could take them away. There was no food, no water, and no toilets." The Stevens waited for nearly 24 hours in the sweltering heat at the center—which Ricky had soon nicknamed "the pit of doom"—before finding seats on a Houston-bound bus. When they arrived in Houston, tired, hungry, and dirty, the Stevens were told that they'd have to wait their turn to check
The first floor of Xavier's chemistry building, including all of the department's lecture halls, stood in 5 feet of water for weeks. Ed and Cheryl's concerns go beyond their departments' physical damage: Both are worried that some displaced students will choose not to return to New Orleans. UNO's chemistry department has increased its online course offerings and boosted enrollment at its suburban campuses to entice students to remain at UNO, Ed notes. Nevertheless, the university estimates that only two-thirds of UNO's chemistry students C&EN
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COVER STORY will come back when the university reopens its New Orleans campus inJanuary, he adds. The drop in enrollment is likely to cause a financial pinch on UNO, which is part of the Louisiana State University system. Xavier's financial picture is bleaker: The historically black, Catholic school is projecting that only about half of its 4,500 undergraduate students will return when it reopens in January. The chemistry department is trying to survey students to figure out what courses they should offer in the spring semester, but nearly half of the department's majors haven't responded, Cheryl says. In the face of campus reconstruction costs and the expected plunge in enrollment, Xavier has been forced to lay off approximately one-third of its faculty. Twelve of the chemistry department's 28 faculty members have lost their jobs, she says. Both Ed and Cheryl also worry that some of their faculty members may be tempted to take other jobs. Many faculty members have lost their homes, so even when U N O and Xavier open for the spring semester, housing remains a big concern. "Where do you live when your house isn't livable?" Cheryl wonders. U N O plans to open a trailer park on campus to temporarily house its faculty and staff, "but this may not be sufficient," Ed notes. Cheryl credits the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for its efforts to help Xavier retain its faculty. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, H H M I created an emergency program to put displaced Xavier faculty members in paid sabbatical positions at H H M I labs across the country. Nearly 60 faculty members have accepted the institute's generous offer, including Cheryl, who is working in chemist Milton L. Brown's lab at the University of Virginia three days a week. "Coming from an environment focused on educating undergraduates, I've been refreshed by the intellectual exchange in Milt's lab," she says.
LOUISIANA STATE STRETCHED THIN Overcrowding, instability, and anxiety tax students and faculty at Baton Rouge campus
Since Katrina hit, it has been overwhelmed. The center tends to see 5,000 to 6,000 students per semester, but this fall that number is up about 30% because of Katrina, McGuire says. Time management and stress management skills have been in high demand among students who have been displaced or affected in some other way by Katrina. After the hurricane struck, LSU's students were living in unsettled circumstances, to say the least. Many did not know where family members were. Some who had had a quiet room where they could study at home found themselves living with eight or 10 relatives. "I was talking to a student last week who was having some difficulty in one of her analytical chemistry courses because she had to give up her study at home where she normally did most of her work," McGuire says. "The student had been very organized. Suddenly, everything was very chaotic at home." Overall, McGuire has found her work more challenging than usual this semester because "it's much more difficult for the students to remain focused." Faculty members also IT'S ACADEMIC McGuire working with one of her are having trouble THE STEYENSES hope to return to New students, Michael Sims. c o n c e n t r a t i n g on Orleans after Christmas. Their eldest son, their work. "I went to a workshop for facGeoffrey, an 18-year-old U N O undergraduAt first, many displaced families moved ulty, and everybody was saying it was really ate, is now repairing the damage caused to into campus residence halls with their sons hard, not just to get the students back on their home while taking online courses at or daughters. Even now, the population of track, but they found they were not able to UNO. He's Irving on the second floor while Baton Rouge is up 50% from the pre-Kafocus," McGuire says. stripping the first floor down to its wooden trina level, reports Saundra Y. McGuire, skeleton. The furniture and appliances they dean of the University College, adjunct Faculty members Isiah M. Warner and were not able to rescue from the first floor professor of chemistry, and director of the Luigi G. Marzilli have known hurricanes are now headed for the dump, as are the two university's Center for Academic Success. since youth. Warner, a Louisiana native, is cars they left behind in the driveway. a professor of analytical and environmental The center, which in 2 0 0 4 received chemistry. In the house next door to him the Frank L. Christ Outstanding LearnDespite their traumatic escape and huge lives Marzilli, an inorganic medicinal cheming Center Award of the National Colpersonal and financial losses, the Stevens are ist who grew up in Rhode Island and chairs lege Learning Center Association, helps refusing to focus on their hardships, Cheryl LSU's chemistry department. says. "We simply decided that we had to ap- students learn study skills and tutors them proach it as an adventure."—AM AN DA YARNELL in challenging subjects, such as chemistry. The day Marzilli and his wife moved to 20
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State University, Baton Rouge, on Aug. 18, and Hurricane Katrina made landfall after classes had been in session for only five days. In contrast to New Orleans just 70 miles away, Baton Rouge missed direct hits from Katrina and Rita. Downed tree limbs and power outages were the only blemishes to the campus, ranked as one of the 10 most beautiful in the country. But the population of Baton Rouge, normally about 300,000, suddenly doubled with evacuees from New Orleans and surrounding Gulf Coast areas. And LSU has had to deal with cascading effects, including stressed students and faculty and potential cuts to university funding.
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