Page 157 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

126 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

what unites psychiatrists and providers of spiritual care—the desire to use
our skills to provide support, comfort, and healing to disaster survivors—
seems on the face of it to be stronger than what divides us.

Background

Some general consideration of the specific characteristics of the disaster
of Hurricane Katrina and the affected population is instructive. After
the hurricane made landfall on August 28, 2005, an area of the Gulf
Coast the size of Great Britain (90,000 square miles) was declared a
federal disaster area. More than 1,800 people were killed (Federal
Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], 2005). The intensity of the
hurricane was much discussed in the media, but actually the major-
ity of hurricane-related casualties, evacuations, and morbidity resulted
from the post-Katrina flooding of the city of New Orleans, when the
city’s levees were overwhelmed, rather than from the direct effects of
the hurricane itself. Of the 1,800 people who were killed, 1,400 were
from Louisiana. In a sense, therefore, Hurricane Katrina was less a nat-
ural disaster than a social and political one. The failure of the levees
was a failure of human systems, which had long been anticipated by
policymakers and communities. The population of New Orleans was
knowingly, and in advance of the disaster, placed at risk. A community
with significant unmet social and economic needs before the disaster
was sent into a forced migration.
In one study of over 1,000 evacuees, low-income people were five times
more likely to report being unable to leave (40.2%) as were people with
higher incomes (6.4%). Over half (57.8%) of those with lower income who
did not evacuate reported that it was due to their lack of money compared
to only 1.8 to 5.1% of those with above-average income. The resulting
population of evacuees suffered from preexisting chronic illness as well as
postdisaster bereavement. Within one week of the hurricane, in a sample
of 343 New Orleanian evacuees, 56% of adults had at least one chronic ill-
ness, 63% had at least one missing household member, and 50% suffered at
least one symptom of acute stress disorder (Rodriguez et al., 2006).
For more than a month after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, an
unknown number of small rural chapels were still operating in Louisiana
as shelters for survivors of Hurricane Katrina who had evacuated from
New Orleans.