AFTER THE STORM
HURRICANE ANDREW, A REPORTER'S DISPATCH: THE STORY OF THREE
FAMILIES
In the wake of the storm, how are people doing
psychologically?
When Hurricane Andrew ripped into southern Florida with Force 5
ferocity in the early hours of August 24, Diane Lacey Allen was already
on her way to cover the devastation 250 miles south of her central
Florida home. A senior writer for The Ledger in Lakeland, part of the New
York Times newspaper chain, she had kissed her husband and young sons
goodbye to report for duty. She was one of a three-person team assigned
to bring the story home.
What began as a tale of destruction has become a much larger story,
Allen reports. Houses, possessions, livelihoods, whole communities fell
to the wind in the flat stretch south from Miami to the Everglades, where
a mobile home looks like a high rise. The many folks who were barely
scratching out a life before the storm lost just about everything.
Perhaps even hope, although it's too early to tell; shock still
abounds.
What the storm didn't take, its aftermath has laid siege to. For
many, dignity has succumbed to the handouts-of necessities from Gatorade
to used underwear on which they now subsist in muddy, mildew-ridden tent
cities that may wind up sheltering them for years to come. "No matter
what direction their lives were headed, they were thrown into reverse,"
Allen tells us. "It has gone beyond the calculators of insurance
adjusters. It is now about the human condition and how people cope with a
modern-day Armageddon."
When PSYCHOLOGY TODAY caught up with Allen, she was immersed in
three sets of lives that tell as much about loss as there is to tell. Her
dispatch follows.
The stories poured out from people that first day. But no matter
how dramatic the experience, the descriptions almost always seemed to
include a disclaimer.
"I'd ask people what was left of their homes and they'd tell me,"
says Barbara Barham, a psychiatric nurse therapist from South Carolina
working as a postAndrew volunteer. "But with so many there was almost a
click-they'd realize they were complaining. Then they'd immediately say,
'But things could have been so much worse. So many people had it far
worse' 'They felt guilty acknowledging their losses because they were
alive. They were trying to be positive." They could not yet take in the
magnitude of their loss.
About 250,000 people were displaced by Hurricane Andrew. Some fled
north, filling hotels along the way. Those who were able to patch their
homes put tarpaper and plastic Band-Aids on their roofs and dried out the
mess. Those who were left with no place to go made their way to one of
several tent cities, the biggest of which is in Homestead, on the grounds
of what, before Andrew, was Harris Field, an Air Force base. It will not
be returned to active duty.
"What people don't understand," explains Patricia Regester,
director of the Mental Health Association of Dade County, "is we've got
years and years of rebuilding people. Not just the buildings. We've got
to deal with the people damage. We've got to put the people back
together, not just the infrastructure.'
Weeks after the storm, people were still telling their Andrew
stories, but the wild look in their eyes was gone, replaced by weariness.
They were beaten down by uninhabitable housing, unimaginable destruction,
and the inability to do simple things, like go to the dry cleaners or out
to pizza.
April Counts kept waiting to hear where the hurricane shelters
were. The announcement never came. Later she learned there were none. She
was supposed to have evacuated her home in Homestead, a small
agricultural city a half hour's drive south of Miami on US 1.
The 30-year-old divorcee stayed with the disabled veteran she has
lived with, platonically, and cared for while going to school. It was too
late to leave when Andrew began banging the $2,500 trailer. When the
trailer started blowing apart, she got out, helping her friend to the car
outside. They crunched down in the back seat of her '85
Oldsmobile.
A half hour later everything was gone. Except the car. Her greatest
fear was a tree might fall and crush it.
She's resolved she had no control over the hurricane. She doesn't
even think anyone could have stopped the looters who took first her
sewing machine, then her vacuum cleaner. That's not to say it hasn't
hurt. She felt violated. "Very angry, extremely angry. You've already
lost what you had. And they steal what you have left.' Counts remains a
firm believer that there's good and bad. She has faith in humanity. Tent
city is here in Homestead, people are trying to help. "Even though at
times it's irritating, I'm just thankful to have a place to sleep and a
place to eat and a place to get my thoughts together."
"I think I'm more fortunate than others because I have a car," she
says, voicing the stoic, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps disclaimer.
She goes from social-service center to social-service center trying to
find what aid is available.
Some days she doesn't try to do anything because it's just too
stressful to stand in line, fill out paperwork, and wonder when the
assistance is going to come.
She isn't sleeping well, tossing and turning, pondering "where am I
going to go, what am I going to do. But she "can't afford the luxury of a
negative thought. If I allow this disaster to destroy me, then there
won't be any need for me to go on," she says of a life that's been going
pretty much downhill since her divorce.
Tags:
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central florida,
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diane lacey,
disaster,
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hope,
hurricane andrew,
insurance adjusters,
lakeland,
loss,
mildew,
necessities,
new york times newspaper,
person team,
Possessions,
southern florida,
Survivor,
tent cities,
wake of the storm
