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Door-to-Door Mapmaking

Tuck professor and students chart status of New Orleans recovery

More than a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and ravaged New Orleans, good news about recovery efforts in the Crescent City is still hard to come by, but in one small corner of the city, a Dartmouth professor and his students are making progress using an unusual tool: mapping.

Quintus Jett (far right) with the group of Dartmouth students who traveled to New Orleans in March. Jett and the students mapped the progress of post-Katrina recovery in the Gentilly neighborhood. (Photo courtesy Quintus Jett)

Quintus Jett, senior research fellow at the Tuck School of Business, is studying disaster recovery and working to develop practical, locally based solutions to the task of rebuilding in New Orleans. He and 13 Dartmouth students spent their spring break walking the entire Gentilly district of New Orleans. Gentilly is a severely flood-damaged area that was home to over 40,000 residents pre-Katrina.

The Dartmouth students walked every street in Gentilly to perform a "local census" and indicated the rebuilding status of each property by color code. (The effort was the second complete survey of the area conducted by Jett and other volunteers.) With help from ad hoc volunteers, the students mapped over 14,000 addresses—roughly the entire neighborhood—in just 10 days. That data has been added to an interactive, online map that was designed by Jett and Assistant Professor of Geography Xun Shi.

The map—and the data it represents—serves as a resource for New Orleanians trying to make decisions about allocating rebuilding resources. Says Jett, "I foresee the data being used by planners. However, my hope is that residents and small business users can also use this local recovery data."

Rashmi Agarwal '09 was among the student volunteers. "While we were working, we met someone who needed their house gutted, and we connected that person to a group that could help. Since the mapping data is being put online, the information gets to neighborhood presidents and gives them a sense of the progress," says Agarwal.

Jett praises the volunteers' efforts and what they accomplished in such a brief period. "Completing so much mapping required significant effort, preparation, and analysis of data," he says. "The team exhibited more results than is commonly expected of student volunteers, and I believe that more of this kind of volunteerism is needed in New Orleans."

By GENEVIEVE HAAS

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