Ronald L. Schumann, assistant professor in the University of North Texas' emergency administration and planning program, is available for media interviews on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane, the costliest natural disaster and one of the five deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history, caused severe property damage in Mississippi beachfront towns after it made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and resulted in hundreds of deaths in New Orleans after the city's levee system failed.

Schumann may be reached at 940-565-2996 or at Ronald.schumann@unt.edu.

He can discuss long-term recovery of the Mississippi coast, including in Hancock, Harrison and Jackson Counties and the cities of Biloxi, Pass Christian and Waveland. In 2013, he received National Science Foundation funding to identify recovery issues in those municipalities and among people in different racial and ethnic groups by having volunteers take photos of what they considered to be recovery from the storm, including home repairs, new construction, civic improvement and significant landmarks. Schumann also mapped recovery successes and failures.

"For maybe a mile off of the beaches, you could still see concrete slabs, chimneys and driveways where houses once stood, and abandoned construction," says Schumann, a New Orleans native who was in Mobile, Alabama, when Katrina approached, and evacuated to Montgomery, Alabama, to ride out the storm with family who came from New Orleans. Schumann was able to return to Mobile within a week, but his family could not return to New Orleans for a month.

Noting that recovery from natural disasters five years after the disasters is very "understudied," Schumann said urban social geography may play a role in how fast a region recovers. The widespread destruction on Mississippi's coast, a lower-income area relative to other coastal regions, has led to slower recovery than New Jersey's recovery from Hurricane Sandy, which Schumann also studied.

Schumann can also discuss resilience following Katrina and other natural disasters, which includes changes in infrastructure that could negatively impact residents. He says the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 led to significant increases in flood insurance premiums and required homeowners to rebuild at higher elevations, which many could not afford to do. As a result, many people who left a neighborhood following a disaster do not move back, changing the population.

"We saw this in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, which had a high rate of home ownership going back five or six generations within the same family. Many of the homeowners were uninsured and didn't have the financial means to replace their homes up to code," Schumann says. "Likewise, East Biloxi was an enclave for Vietnamese immigrants working in the seafood industry, but many of them were living in rental homes that have not been replaced and they haven't moved back."

The Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 delayed the increases in flood insurance premiums that were part of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act. Still, "the real question to be asked about recovery is what happens to social networks and neighborhoods when people are forced to move inland," Schumann says.