Showing posts with label flood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flood. Show all posts
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Now that Japan Has Your Attention, Let's Talk Preparedness
Depending on where you live, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan may or may not seem like something that can happen to you. Here in Michigan, our chances of an 8.9 earthquake are pretty low. Even a tsunami on Lake Michigan wouldn't reach my house. But a nuclear reactor accident? Before today I didn't even know where the nearest nuclear power plant to my house was (it's about 40 miles). Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, chemical spills . . . there are a lot of reasons why you might, someday, need to either evacuate your house or shelter in place.
FEMA has been on us for years to get ready. Most of us aren't. At a recent meeting of CISM providers, the FEMA director asked for a show of hands of how many people had an emergency bag for evacuations. Less than half of us raised our hands. Then he asked how many had a plan for evacuating their family. In a room of 800 people, I was one of two.
Make no mistake about it. When the time comes to leave your house, you will not necessarily have any time to get ready. Depending on what the disaster is, you might have a day and you might have less than 5 minutes. That's not the time to be thinking about this for the first time.
So, let's get practical. Here is a list of things you can do, roughly in order of the ease of doing them. This list is not exhaustive, nor does it take into consideration every possible catastrophe that could befall you. But it's a start. Find something on this list you haven't done yet, and do it.
- Talk. Seriously. Have a conversation with the other people in your house and make the following decisions:
- Where would you meet in the event of an evacuation at a time you weren't together. Pick someplace out of the immediate area.
- Where would you meet if that place was also evacuating.
- Who are two people outside your area who you will call in an emergency if you can't reach each other, so they can relay messages to the others when they call.
- If you have children and you have to evacuate during the school day, who is responsible for picking them up (if possible -- they may have to go with school personnel, keep in mind).
- If your children are home alone, where should they go? Who is a safe person who is nearby who can help them?
- Find out what the official evacuation route or procedure is, if there is one, for the catastrophe most likely to happen in your area.
- Educate yourself about that catastrophe. Find out what the dos and don'ts of surviving it are. Do this even if you think you already know. Conventional wisdom may well be wrong.
- Make sure you have a battery operated radio
and a flashlight
, and that everyone in the house knows how to use them. Also make sure everyone in the house knows where in the house is safest in the event of an earthquake or tornado, if applicable.
- Make a list of the medications everyone in the house takes, both so you can grab them on your way out and so you can tell people at the shelter if you don't have your meds.
- Make sure you keep 3 days worth of food in your house at all times. It doesn't have to be 3 days of great food, but don't let your cupboards get bare.
- Stock up on clean water. You should have one gallon per person per day for 3 days. If you have a chest freezer, you can stick a gallon or two in the freezer, which will also save electricity.
- Create a bag with the things you would need if absolutely everything else in the world were destroyed. This probably includes medications, vital documents, a first aide kit, and at least a little non-perishable food. Put a list in the bag of anything that isn't in there that you need to remember (e.g. your child's asthma nebulizer).
Thursday, September 2, 2010
We Are the World, Except for Pakistan
Frequent Quarterbacker Edwin dropped me a note earlier this week to suggest that I might like to write about the flooding in Pakistan, seeing as how it is being branded one of the worst natural disasters ever. In case you missed it, 20 million people have lost their homes and an estimated two thousand have died. Those surviving are, aside from being homeless, at tremendous risk for disease and starvation.
This is certainly a crisis, and certainly the sort of thing I write about. So why haven't I? My reasons are somewhat specific to me. The flooding in Pakistan hit the news in this country during the second week in August. It may have gotten coverage before that, but certainly not a lot. My regular readers know that during the second week in August I was in Haiti, doing crisis intervention following their earthquake in January. I first heard about the flooding the day I returned and, to be perfectly honest, I was resentful that there was another natural disaster. My gut, emotional reaction was that Pakistan was stealing the spotlight from Haiti, and they should wait their turn. That was not a rational reaction, of course, but it was real.
I shared that reflection with Edwin when he asked, and he said that, in some ways, he had a similar reaction. The floods were too much, too soon after the Haiti earthquake (not to mention the Chile earthquake, the gulf oil spill, etc.). It's interesting that he described it as being too much, as though he (and by extension, we) couldn't absorb it all. Others would say that the rapid succession of disasters has made us numb.
Edwin and I are no alone, however, in not really focusing attention or assistance on Pakistan. In contrast to the reaction to Pakistan, international aid has been very slow in funneling to Pakistan. I haven't seen any cell phone text message fundraising campaigns, and there is no "We Are the World
for Pakistan." I'm absorbed with Haiti. Edwin feels like it's too much too soon. What's up with the rest of the world?I think there are a number of factors in play here, and any one of them may play more or less of a role for one person or another. If one doesn't resonate with you, keep going down the list. Something will. In addition to what I'll call the "natural disaster overload" described above, here are some things I think are going on:
- Floods are calamities in slow motion. Unlike an earthquake, there is no shocking breaking news that shakes us all out of complacency. The moment when a flood goes from a problem to a catastrophe is not clear, and the more time we have to get used to something the less likely we are to feel like it requires action.
- The impact is measured in lives displaced, not lives lost. Two thousand people is a very large number, but the death toll from the Haitian earthquake was more than one hundred times as great. Death gets our attention.
- It's Pakistan
. Americans, at least, don't particularly like the Pakistani government, despite the fact that they are technically our allies.
- It's Pakistan. The Pakistani government is notoriously corrupt, and the country has a significant Taliban
presence which makes operating there very difficult.
- It's Pakistan. There is a tremendous anti-Islamic sentiment in this country right now. While relatively few Americans would consciously decide not to help because these are Muslims, the anti-Muslim
rhetoric makes it much easier to not notice that these are people.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
The Incomprehensible Arkansas Flash Flood Deaths
Nineteen people are known dead and at least one is still missing from a flash flood that hit a remote Arkansas campground last week. The Missouri river flooded in the middle of the night, meaning that many of the campers did not get word of the flood warnings until it was too late. Reports indicate there were 4 feet of water at the campsite at 2 AM and more than 23 feet by 5 AM. Bodies have been found as far as 8 miles away. The reason no one is absolutely certain how many are missing is that no one is absolutely certain who was camping there when the floods came, and many folks are still on camping trips and can't be reached.
Today, about twenty members of families of the dead and missing were brought to the campsite to see for themselves where this happened, and to look through the debris for personal items belonging to their loved ones. The damage is horrific. The water literally peeled up paved roads and sent campers floating down the river. Everything that was in its path and couldn't move out of the way is moved or destroyed.
I have always found flash floods
difficult to wrap my mind around. I grew up in a hilly part of New England where the nearest rivers flooded, but didn't come anywhere near my house. When flooding was really bad the river behind my uncle's house would swell through his backyard and into his basement, and local roads would close. Flash floods, however, were not something I was familiar with. The terrain where I lived was not conducive to large amounts of water pouring into the rivers and streams all at once, causing the water to rise by feet at a time. If you went to bed dry, you would wake up dry -- that's how the world worked.I think even to those of us who live (as I do now) where flash flooding does happen, we still generally believe that to be true. Floods happen, sure. But they come with warning and time to get away. Flooding that comes fast and furious is the stuff of broken levees, not of campgrounds on hillsides. In our connected world, we expect that, with the exception of earthquakes, natural disasters have some warning
. If bad stuff is coming, we will know.Nineteen people, including at least 6 children, went camping last week, one presumes for fun, and are not coming home. They were in their campers or trailers or tents, and the water came faster than they could run. No one went camping last week thinking they were going to die. Even the most nervous among us think the dangers of camping involve bears and wolves, or maybe the bogey man hiding in the bushes. If we imagined that you could drown in your sleep while camping, no one would ever go. This isn't supposed to happen. It's incomprehensible.
image: Reuters
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Aiding Indonesia: Why Tents and Food are Not Enough
An estimated 1,100 people have died in Indonesia in the last few days, following an earthquake that measured 7.6 on the Richter scale and another today that measured 6.6. The number of dead is really more than we can truly wrap our minds around. After a certain number, it just registers as "many." Too many.
Many people, at this moment, feel an urge or an obligation to help the survivors. Money is pouring in to international rescue organizations to help people in Indonesia, Samoa, the Philippines and other countries recently hit by natural disasters. Survivors' most urgent needs right now are food, water, shelter and, to the extent possible, safety from further damage caused by aftershocks and the like. Most of us, if we can afford it, will chip in ten or twenty dollars for a blanket for a child in Indonesia without much hesitation.
Once the physical needs of people in Indonesia are met, which will take quite some time when you consider all the rebuilding that needs to happen, attention should turn to the psychological needs of survivors. Studies have indicated that between 40% and 50% of survivors of mass disasters will experience significant psychological impairment of their ability to function, including (but not limited to) PTSD or depression. When a disaster affects such a large swath of a country, as these earthquakes do, that is a significant reduction in the productivity and stability of the country.
So what are they going to do? I don't know about this particular disaster. The Red Cross and the United Nations, to name two organizations, do have mental health disaster response personnel, and at some point I would hope they will deploy. Teams from other countries may be brought in, although language barriers make that difficult. Still, this is work that has to be done.
So here is my question to you. If you would donate $20 for a blanket for a child in Indonesia, would you donate $20 for some mental health assistance for her? One might save her life. The other might make her believe that her life is worth living.
Look here for a partial list of relief organizations accepting donations for those affected by the recent flooding, earthquakes and tsunamis.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Typhoons, Oh My!
My husband and I have a theory. It posits that any given person, when contemplating earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, is ok with one, has a healthy fear of another and is absolutely terrified of the third. Growing up, as he did, in the midwest, earthquakes are not such a big deal to him, but hurricanes scare him to death. I, on the other hand, grew up in New England, where hurricanes hit but not hard. What scares the daylights out of me is tornadoes.
To be fair, however, our theory is incomplete. While it is true that I have recurring nightmares about tornadoes, I also have recurring nightmares about being covered by waves of water. My husband points out that, when I have these, it probably means I need to go to the bathroom. My worst nightmares involve water spouts -- tornadoes over water. I don't have them very often, but they are very consistent and consistently scary.
You might think, then, that the tsunamis that hit Samoa yesterday and the typhoons in the Philippines and Vietnam, with all of their flooding, would be very scary for me to contemplate. In fact, they probably would be, if I could bring myself to contemplate them, but I can't. And this is how I know that my fear of giant waves and of unrestrained water is actually not pathological.
If this were truly a dangerous phobia, I would hear about a tsunami and find myself thinking about it all the time. I would "live" it in my mind. It would trigger more nightmares. But in fact, I know my fears and have control of them sufficiently that I know not to do that. I can bring myself to imagine what the earthquakes in Indonesia and Samoa must have felt like, or the rain and winds from the typhoon in the Philippines and Vietnam. I can contemplate the death and destruction in all three places. But when it comes to the flooding and the tsunamis, I simply cannot see them happening in my mind's eye. I cannot put myself there. My mind is very good at protecting itself.
I was recently involved in a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) where some of the participants kept talking about how awful the incident must be for others. They were saying things like, "I just keep thinking what he must be going through" and "I imagine how awful it is for her and I just cry all the time." My partner for the CISD had what I thought was a terrific way of responding to this. During the teaching phase, he said, "Let me suggest to you that you do not have to try on other people's trauma."
I am horrified and yes, a little terrified by what I see on the news today. But I know enough to know that I don't have to try it on to care.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
What Makes Something Important?
Generally speaking, I blog about whatever heinous situation is dominating the news at the moment. Sometimes, that's a very easy event to spot. Generally speaking if it gets several columns on the front page of the New York Times, or more than one story on the splash page at CNN, you know it's "big." And if it's "big" and traumatic, it's stuff for the Quarterback.
Sometimes, however, it's not as obvious what is "big" in American media. Finding traumatic events is not much of a problem. Finding ones that seem compelling (and that I have something to say about) is sometimes harder. Today I had a particularly difficult time finding a story I wanted to blog about, so I started to reflect on what makes me think a story is "compelling." Sometimes the reflection isn't so pretty.
By my gut level definition, a story is compelling if it meets one or more of the following criteria, the more the better:
- the event is unusual
- the event affects people in an unusual way
- the event affects a group of people you might not think of as being affected
- the news coverage of the event raises a particularly interesting point
- the event affects people who I believe most people will identify with
There are two examples of this that became clear to me as I was desperately searching for a topic today. The first has to do with natural disasters. In my searching, I had skimmed over the deaths of hundreds of people in the Philippines during recent flooding, and decided I didn't have much to say. Somewhat later, a breaking news headline appeared detailing a very large earthquake near Samoa and a tsunami warning in New Zealand, and I caught myself thinking, "If there's a tsunami in New Zealand, then I'll have something to write about." Really? Deaths from natural disasters in the Philippines aren't compelling, but those in New Zealand are? How can I possibly assume that somehow people in the Philippines are "used" to this sort of thing?
Which brings me to my second example. Derrion Albert, 16, was beaten to death when he got caught in the conflict between two groups of students on his way home from school on Thursday. He was an honor student, a church-goer, and an innocent bystander. If this had happened in my hometown, it would be national news. But it happened in Chicago, and Derrion was black, and so it didn't make the news until a video of the beating surfaced, and we white folks could see that this is not a sort of violence you can ever "expect" or "get used to." But let's face it, privileged, suburban, white folks, of which I am one, still think of it that way.
All life is precious. We know that intellectually, but we can't seem to act like it. We distance ourselves a hundred different ways from trauma, whether to protect ourselves from the idea that it could happen to us or for more sinister reasons of racism, classism or xenophobia. If trauma happens to "those people," it doesn't happen to "us." But we are all those people, and they are all us. We probably won't make much progress in this world until we really believe that.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Dying on the Phone: The Georgia Floods
Nine people thus far have died in flooding in Georgia. That is truly awful, and it certainly has made the news. These are nine human beings who are not going home to their families. That is worthy of our attention. But does it always get it?
If nine people died in a random shooting at a mall, it would be all over the news. We would be interrupting our regularly scheduled program for round the clock coverage. If they died in a terrorist bombing in an American city, there would be nothing else in the news. If they died in a bombing in an Iraqi market, it would be a passing mention.
I am as guilty of making these distinctions as anyone else. We care most about things closest to us and most violating of our expectations and world view. The idea that flooding is dangerous is easier to accept than the idea that shopping in the United States is dangerous. We already knew that shopping in Iraq was dangerous. So I, like most of you, greeted the news out of Georgia with a click of my tongue.
Then, however, I read a story about one of the women who drowned. She was literally on the phone with 911 as the water came into her car, which had been swept away in a flash flood and stuck in some trees. She was on the phone when she died. You can read about it online, and you can listen to the 911 call.
Maybe you shouldn't.
First of all, our society usually accepts that someone's death is a private thing, or at least a family thing. There is a voyeuristic feeling to listening to someone dying, and I'm saddened that the authorities chose to release the call.
Second, 911 dispatchers will tell you that listening to someone in great distress is traumatic. You know they need your help and you are powerless to help them. While listening to the tapes after the fact is less distressing because we know how it is going to end and we don't expect that we will help the caller, it is still the witnessing of a traumatic death, just as surely as watching it would be. None of us need that exposure. Some of us will truly be disturbed by it.
The 911 call brings this victim out of the expected and into the unexpected. We know that people die in floods. We don't like to think about how exactly that happens. We allow ourselves to think that it's just "one of those things." But in reality, this week it was nine of those things, each one with its own story and its own traumatic truth.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Hurricane Katrina and the Help That Never Came
Where were you four years ago? This is an easy one for me, since I was home with a three month-old baby watching "overblown" news coverage about this hurricane that was heading straight for New Orleans. The predictions seemed outlandish. Flooding of an entire city? Don't be silly. In the days that came, my son and I continued to watch as the Convention Center in New Orleans where I had given a talk just a year before filled with people and the spokespeople in Washington incredibly said they were unaware that anyone was there, because they had been told not to go there.
The delay in rescuing the people of New Orleans was a national shame. The delay in restoring essential services got less attention, but was no less appalling and no less a failure of our society to care for those in need. There was another delay, though, that is more understandable. That is the delay -- or absence -- of mental health assistance for those whose lives were demolished by the storm and by the lack of help that followed.
In the days directly after the storm, people's basic physiological needs were not being met. It would have been totally inappropriate to go talk to people who are crammed into the Superdome or the Convention Center without basic food and sanitation about how they are feeling. Anyone who had the time and ability to do that should have been, and mostly was, getting people to safety, feeding them, and finding them someplace to stay.
The rule of thumb is to provide early crisis intervention services when the situation is stable and the incident itself is over, as close as possible in time and location to where it happened. But because of the way this disaster played out and the delays in assistance for physical needs, there was never an obvious opportunity to do that. It took many months, if not years, for many who had weathered the storm to be in a physically stable situation. By the time they were, they were literally scattered all over the country. CISM is designed for people who have been through hell and are now returning to a world that is basically still normal, but they don't feel normal. The world was never "still normal" for many Katrina survivors.
That is not to say that no one ever got help. Those with the most extreme manifestations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are still being served by the mental health system. CISM is not designed to prevent PTSD, so I won't argue that earlier intervention would have made a difference. However, studies of PTSD in Katrina victims show that increased watching of news coverage following the storm was associated with risk of PTSD symptoms, and between 38% and 50% of people who lived in New Orleans when Katrina hit have or had symptoms of PTSD. The only thing I can imagine might have been done early is to advise people not to watch TV. That probably wouldn't have worked.
By the way, it's not that no one got CISM services after Katrina. Teams from around the country were mobilized to work with rescue workers following the storm. They had the possibility of coping with this as a discrete incident. Most of the residents never did.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Noah's CISM Needs
On Wednesday evening, a massive bank of thunderstorms rolled through the Quarterback's former stomping grounds in Pittsburgh, PA. Some reports indicate that up to 3 inches of rain fell in an hour. The damage was massive: there were flash floods, downed power lines, uprooted trees and lots and lots of water damage. The roof of my former synagogue partially collapsed.I bring this up for two reasons. First, because last night in Ann Arbor, MI we had quite the storm system ourselves and the Quarterback's basement is flooded. Second, and hopefully more relevant to what brings all of you here, is that it raises some interesting issues about crisis response.
Natural disasters that affect large numbers of people are one of the "Big 5" in Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) [the other four are suicide of a colleague, death on the job, multiple incidents in rapid succession and response after a substantial delay]. These are the ones they teach you about in the Advanced Group Crisis Response class. These are the "don't try this at home" responses.
What makes disasters so complicated? There are a number of issues. First, one of the basic principles of CISM is to remember Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you're not familiar, here's the pyramid. Basically, what Maslow said is that everyone strives for self-actualization, but there are layers that support that and you can't deal with a higher level unless you've dealt with the one below it. People who have been through a disaster are very much rooted in the lowest level. Their physiological needs are threatened. They may not have food or clean water and their shelter is unstable or non-existent.
But CISM works fundamentally at the second and somewhat the third level. We are dealing with the fact that people's sense of safety and security has been damaged, and trying to return them to a sense of love and belongingness. We can't do that work until people's physiological needs are taken care of. People are not ready to deal with their critical incident stress until they are sure they and their family are going to live, they've had a good meal, they have a reasonably long-term place to stay and they've gotten a good night's sleep. Only the first two of those can reasonably be accomplished in a Red Cross shelter.
The second problem with disaster response is that chances are good that if a community is heavily impacted by a storm or an earthquake, most of the crisis responders are affected too. And another of the basic principles of CISM is that you don't respond if you yourself are impacted by the event. Sometimes, the helpers need help.
This is where mutual aid agreements are so important. Those agreements are what will enable members of the Pittsburgh-area teams to combine forces to create whole teams from the bits and pieces of each one that are not personally affected. They will also allow Pittsburgh to call for help from other Pennsylvania teams or teams in other states.
This is also where consistent becomes crucial. If you're going to show up in another town or another state to help out, you have to know that everyone, regardless of where they come from, speaks the same language and is using the same techniques. This is exactly when you don't want some well-meaning therapist or counselor self-deploying and trying to help. Unless they've had specialized coursework, most social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and counselors -- even those who specialize in treating PTSD -- don't have training in early trauma intervention. And doing it wrong is worse than not doing it at all.
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Meet the Quarterback
- Naomi Zikmund-Fisher
- is a clinical social worker, former school Principal and a Crisis Consultant for schools and community organizations. You can learn more about her at www.SchoolCrisisConsultant.com
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