 Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005 and it still stands today as one of the worst disasters in our nation's history. Over 80% of the city of New Orleans received some water in the flooding. About 1,800 people died in Katrina, thousands were injured and over a million were displaced. Hurricane Katrina had profound effects on children and their families. We know that approximately 400,000 children left the city and were displaced and years later 160,000 children were still displaced. Alice and I conducted a study on children after Hurricane Katrina and we spent seven years after the storm from 2005 to 2012 following a group of children between the ages of three and 18 and all of these children lived in New Orleans or in nearby surrounding areas at the time of Katrina and all of them were displaced after the storm somewhere else. Some of them returned in the years after Katrina or the months after Katrina. Some of them never returned. We chose to focus on children and youth in our study because there has been so little research done on this area and we felt it was a very important topic. We also knew there were misconceptions about children and disasters. So one misconception is that children are like rubber balls. They just bounce back, they're super resilient, nothing will get them down. And the next myth was that they had no capacities. They were helpless victims that they could not do anything for themselves. And the third was that disasters hit randomly, indiscriminately, everyone is affected and yet we know from all past research that that's not true, that there is a lot of inequality in disasters and disasters hit populations in different ways. I think one of the most important findings of our study is that we introduce three recovery trajectories in the book, a declining trajectory, a finding equilibrium trajectory and a fluctuating trajectory. We found that social location or structural disadvantage was key. And that doesn't sound surprising that children who are in families with very few resources fared the worst afterwards. But it was very important to see how that played out, to really learn, to see what was happening. Why is it, why is it that a lack of resources makes such an enormous difference after a disaster? Another really important contribution of the book is that we actually also track things that children did after Katrina in terms of how children helped other children, how children helped adults in their lives and how children helped themselves. And we offer our findings around this so that we can actually shed more light on children's capacities, their strengths and their potential to assist in disaster preparedness, response and recovery efforts. One thing that we found was that children need assistance and we need to think about recovery in a much longer term. So we need to be aware that there are services and resources that we need to have available for children and families. Not just six months, not just a year, but years after a disaster. So that, how long, that length of time is very important. What forces and factors did help children to recover? So we know that children who were embedded in families and schools and neighborhoods that were prepared for the disaster, that were able to evacuate before Katrina, all of that pre-storm activity mattered a lot. After Katrina made landfall, there were many other things that also helped children to recover and so this included helping children to regain a routine, even when they were displaced from their homes or their neighborhoods, to get a routine back in their lives, to get back into school as soon as possible, to make sure that the children felt safe and protected and had the information that they needed and wanted. So sometimes it was larger, it was organizations, it was the necessities of getting nutrition and food and sometimes what happened is there was an individual who was able to serve as that advocate or that anchor. Both things were very important and we were finding that really exploring what worked well is important because we know there are going to be more disasters. There are disasters every day and there are going to be more intense storms and there are going to be things that we have to deal with in terms of preparing for all sorts of crises that children will face and so it becomes important to say what led to the positive outcomes, how can we make sure those things happen in the future?