This week, we read Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore, by Abigail Perkiss. Drawn from more than sixty oral history interviews conducted as part of the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project, Perkiss’s book tells the complex story of how residents of New Jersey’s Bayshore area survived Hurricane Sandy. With the hurricane itself present only within the first two chapters, Perkiss focuses more on the storm’s aftermath. Some of the interviews give the impression that surviving Hurricane Sandy was easier than dealing with insurance companies in the months and years to follow. Perkiss shows how “neighborhood pride, the impulse to keep busy, and the slow pace of bureaucracy” prompted communities to rally and support each other without waiting for the government to catch up.
In her analysis of why the storm impacted the Bayshore area so horrendously, Perkiss turns to both political and environmental history. “The environmental history of the state [of New Jersey] is at once a story of industrial growth and shoreline development and one of vast green space and fierce coastal protection,” argues Perkiss. The absence of environmental alongside the economic considerations of shoreline development has resulted in what Neil Maher has coined “ecological schizophrenia.” Wetlands are natural “sponges,” possessing the ability to absorb and store stormwater. When wetlands are destroyed and replaced with beach houses, boardwalks, and other development, the coastline loses its ability to absorb water, resulting in the kind of flooding experienced during Hurricane Sandy. Even the plans to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy demonstrated “ecological schizophrenia” by failing to meaningfully address the need to protect wetlands and opting instead to simply continue building and rebuilding new structures on flood plains.
Politically, Perkiss indicts the disaster response after Hurricane Sandy as suffering “from a federal emergency-management system that privileged homeland security over natural hazards.” FEMA, ever since it was gobbled up by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, gradually became more equipped to respond to terrorist attacks instead of natural disasters, resulting in the Bush Administration’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most of Perkiss’s narrators felt FEMA under the Obama Administration had learned from its mistakes in New Orleans, but these sentiments soured when the recovery stalled.
I’m not sure how effectively undergraduate students (or graduate students, to be frank) can be prepared for interviewing traumatized people who describe traumatic events, unless the student has already experienced and passed through something similar. Exposing undergraduate students to trauma with minimal training just for the sake of applying theory, gaining practical experience, or furthering education seems unethical. What strikes me as a mitigating factor in this case is the personal connection Perkiss’s student interviewers shared with the storm. The Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project was based out of Kean University, located not far away from the Bayshore area. The students who participated in the project experienced the storm firsthand. Kean University students experienced significant disruption from the storm. For at least two of the student interviewers, Hurricane Sandy “had brought terror to their homes and families.” I think the interviewers’ personal connection to the storm went a long way towards helping the students conduct interviews sensitively while remaining sensitive to the narrators’ traumas.
Question: Should oral historians offer professional support to survivor-narrators who are being interviewed about traumatic events? Was any offered to the Hurricane Sandy narrators?
Question: How did the interviewers deal with transference? The transference of intensity/wounding from a trauma survivor to a listener?
Question: “If the subject benefits from the process” of oral history, writes Lynn Abrams, “this is a happy but unintended outcome.” How did the subjects benefit from this project?