|
 | | In this 1965 photo, above, taken after Hurricane Betsy, tree damage is evident around Gibson Hall on the uptown campus of Tulane. Below, faculty member Stuart Capper was just a 17-year-old freshman at Tulane that year, but he remembers his "Betsy" experience well. |  | Stuart Capper's story will sound familiar to the first-year students who returned to Tulane this spring. He arrived at Tulane as a newly minted freshman, eager to get started on his college career. Instead, a hurricane delayed the first day of school. But there is a twist - the year was 1965, not 2005, and it was Betsy, not Katrina, ripping down tree limbs and taking out power.
Capper, now a professor of health systems management at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, shrugs when he is asked about worry in the face of disaster.
Then 17, Capper was on the train from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans when Betsy shut down the city. He spent a "boisterous, grungy" night on the train at the train depot in Slidell, La., while the hurricane passed over, moving the entire train off the tracks in the process. The next day, buses arrived to take the passengers around Lake Pontchartrain to the train station in New Orleans.
Somehow, the young freshman found his way with his trunk to the St. Charles campus and was soon living in Phelps House without electricity or drinking water. He volunteered at one point to go to the flooded part of the city by boat--"I didn't know anything about New Orleans, so I couldn't tell you where we were, but it was probably the Ninth Ward"--to shovel mud in the hopes of rescuing survivors.
"I always say I grew up in New Orleans, and that's very true, in many ways," the Maryland native says.
But worry?
"I remember walking out of my dorm for the first time and thinking, I don't have to tell anyone where I am going or when I am coming back. There was nowhere to walk to, and you couldn't even walk in a straight line because of the debris, but I was just excited to be on my own," Capper reminisces.
The city was different, Capper says. The lack of long-range weather forecasting meant no one evacuated, so residents were here to begin repairs the day after the storm. It was also a smaller city. The tallest building then was 15 stories, restaurants catered mostly to a local crowd, the French Quarter was mainly residential with many small family businesses, air conditioning didn't exist in Phelps House so no one missed it when the power went out, and there was no development in New Orleans East. Because people still relied on paper, not computer systems, to do business, the students were registered and in class very soon after the storm.
Since Hurricane Katrina, Capper has taken on a project to help create cooperative medical records systems between healthcare providers so that people don't have to face losing important medical information, as many did after Katrina. He is also watching the changes in the healthcare infrastructure in the city, which he says will be determined, in part, by returning population and the patterns of disease.
Capper and his wife, Barbara, also a Tulane grad, have multiple Tulane degrees between them. Their son is currently finishing his senior year at Tulane.
"It would be hard to find a family that is more Tulane than we are," he jokes. This semester, Capper is teaching the first undergraduate public health course at Tulane: "Epidemics, Revolutions and Response." Forty students are taking the class, many more than had registered for it before the hurricane.
|
