Katrina's Legacy Will Be Deep Psychological Scars

by Paul Weinberg

(IPS) -- Public anger over the failures of U.S. federal, state and local authorities to respond quickly after Hurricane Katrina can only deepen the survivors' lasting psychological trauma, says a Yale University sociologist.

"I don't want to be too political about this, but the government that brought us that response is still the government in charge of the restoration process. And that doesn't give me a lot of confidence," said Kai Erikson, who studies the human toll of natural and other kinds of disasters.

He says that separation from children, friends and family and the inability to find work related to one's immediate skills give the sense that "all the things that the disaster did to you are still in effect."

Hundreds of thousands of people evacuated to other parts of the U.S. may not be able to return to New Orleans for a long time, which will be an additional hardship, suggests Erikson.

"You can't underestimate the degree to which the fact of having lost a familiar home or a familiar neighborhood or a familiar street corner is going to add to their distress," he said.

Evidence from past disasters indicates that social adjustment is more difficult if the person affected is forced out of the community and has no choice in where to resettle -- which is what occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Erikson said that the affected person might have difficulty getting on with life until these issues are resolved. "What that means for them is a high level of disorientation, a high level of depression, a high level of anxiety and a kind of short attention span. These are all sorts of things that have been discovered about traumatized people before," he noted.

The sociologist is also concerned that the communities asked to absorb the evacuees have been told that this is a "temporary" situation, even though "the odds are for many this is not going to be a temporary thing."

"When schools test all of their resources to take on 2,000 new children, it is an act of immense generosity and it is very touching. But if the [evacuees] are still there three years from now, and there hasn't been an addition to the funding [in education], it is going to be a problem to people," he said.

During research for his book "Everything in its Path, Destruction of Community in Buffalo Creek Flood," Erikson found that victims can recover if there are strong social ties in the community and they can return to familiar surroundings.

For the first few days, the residents in the narrow rural valley along Buffalo Creek in West Virginia who suffered a roughly similar but smaller disaster in 1972 were mostly on their own in terms of saving family members, friends and neighbors. The Red Cross arrived four days later and the National Guard a week later, recalls Kerry Chad Albright, who now lives in New York.

"It was still a huge impact for all of us, which we have never forgotten. They dealt with that tragedy like they dealt with any other tragedy, by pulling together as a community," he told IPS.

Albright was dubbed the "miracle baby" in the press after being flung to safety by his mother, who drowned while trying to escape the floodwaters following the bursting of a coal mine dam.

"This was because the chemicals [in the water] were so strong and eating the clothes off people. I was under the water and mud for over a half an hour and even when they pulled me out, my mouth was still packed with mud," he said.

More than 100 people died, and four out of five of the 5,000 residents lost their homes and had to be put in trailers provided by a U.S. government agency, says Erikson.

"A number of people decided later to take off, and quite a number went to families somewhere else. But this was not the kind of disaster that required a complete evacuation," he explained.

What helped the people Buffalo Creek get through the crisis was the fact that as a closely knit working-class community living in a thriving coal mining region, they were on a firmer economic footing than their parents or grandparents, he added.

The same can be said for the victims of Hurricane Hazel in 1954 in Toronto, where a storm technically classified as an extra-tropical cyclone caused the Humber River to overflow its banks in the floodplain and beyond, leading to the loss of 4,000 homes and 81 deaths.

The fact that Toronto, a city of 1 million in the post-war period, was made up of a string of strong communities, municipalities and farms along Lake Ontario made a difference in terms of finding volunteers for the restoration and the social recovery process, says Jim Gifford, the author of "Hurricane Hazel: Canada's Storm of the Century."

"I think people [in Toronto] in the long run were just happy to be alive. They didn't have to relocate hundreds of thousands of miles away. They could move 10 miles away," said Gifford.

Toronto's Hurricane Hazel was, in Erikson's words, "a wound on the flank of an otherwise live animal," in contrast to what has happened to New Orleans after Katrina, where, he says, "this animal [is] pretty much dead and so the other resources of the body are not available to help out the people who got caught in the wound."