Vol. 3 No. 1 Specials

In the weeks after the levees broke, it seemed to many in New Orleans, including Mayor Ray Nagin, that thousands and thousands of their fellows must be dead, caught in undiscovered crawl spaces and flooded attics, or floating as corpses down the street. Now that the process of actually counting the bodies has begun, it seems that the toll will not be quite so heavy. Mercifully, most seem to expect hundreds rather than thousands of deaths.

We tend to judge and to remember disasters according to the mortality they produce, to the number of bodies they leave in their wake. But, in fact, tallying deaths is not a good way to approximate the suffering that a population experiences when a catastrophe sends them fleeing from homes. Although the vast majority of the people trapped in the Convention Center or the Superdome emerged alive, the real trauma of this ordeal is written not in the number of bodies but in the gruesome series of events that forced the citizens of New Orleans to flee the destruction of their city, only to find themselves without support or protection, just as if they had been left for dead.

An alternative method of understanding the scale of disasters (if there is a need to do so, in the first place), relates precisely to the mental “scarring” that victims of disaster suffer. An example of this form of measurement can be found in much of the literature published by humanitarian organizations regarding third world conflicts, particularly those involving child soldiers. Populations of militarized children are found to suffer from high rates of traumatic illnesses, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a term we use to refer to a constellation of symptoms including emotional numbing, nervousness, and repressive repetitive traumatic memories.

No one has yet conducted a trauma survey of the Gulf Coast region, but there is little doubt about what such a survey would find regarding the people who survived this massive storm. Residents of New Orleans who witnessed the storm have had their entire world turned upside down: they are shocked in disbelief at the chaos that has erupted in their city since the water came in; they are feeling vulnerable and afraid, and with good reason. Kai Erikson’s important study of a 1972 West Virginia flood, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood, is important reading these days. The book describes in physical detail the reactions of the traumatized survivors a flood that descended when a mining dam burst near the town.