Rosa O'Hara
In early October when Hurricane Joaquin struck the Bahamas, there was an eerie atmosphere in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook. The temperature dropped to the low 60s, the wind picked up and the rain cascaded down, and the Hudson lashed against the ferry docks near the Fairway supermarket. The coming of Joaquin felt unnervingly like the days before Hurricane Sandy struck in September 2012, devastating the city, especially the low-lying neighborhoods.
So as Joaquin began moving up the east coast, its destructive path still unclear, the people of Red Hook began to prepare for the worst. They took their flashlights off the shelf, moved valuables from the first floor, and called relatives in other neighborhoods to arrange accommodation if Joaquin were to strike as Sandy had.
On the City of New York’s map of evacuation zones for potential hurricanes, Red Hook is categorized as Zone 1, bar a few blocks to the north. This means nearly the whole population needs to move out if a major hurricane threatens the city. The public housing communities – in which thousands live – have run multiple workshops on disaster preparedness, and the president of the Red Hook East Tenants’ Association, Frances Brown, says that everyone in the community had a plan if Joaquin were to strike with Sandy’s ferocity.
“If you hear about a hurricane you go get milk, eggs, bread, essentials that you need. You go and you get a good can opener, canned goods, batteries. You don’t wait until the last minute,” says Brown. “[Hurricane Sandy] was a learning experience.”
The atmosphere during these brief few days in October was tense. Residents of Red Hook East public housing stocked up on bottle water and stashes of ramen noodles, ready for a repeat of the devastating floods in 2012 that left residents without power, water, or working toilets for weeks.
Other New York neighborhoods can prepare for natural disasters by storm proofing. But Red Hook is unique in that it’s surrounded water on three sides, and only seven or eight feet above sea level. There’s no way to stop a flood, so all Red Hook can do is prepare to evacuate.
Equon Sanders, a line cook at The Brooklyn Crab, says he thinks of his experience during Sandy whenever the weather takes a turn for the worst.
“When it rains now, you would think about Sandy,” he says. “[It was] freezing, no electricity, no lights, no nothing.”
The services available after Sandy were – at first glance – comprehensive. Residents had fair warning to leave. But most people in Red Hook chose to stay. When the rain ended and floodwaters began to recede Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trucks with blankets and food came rolling down Clinton Street.
But even after the streets were cleared, damage assessed and power restored, the people of Red Hook were left on their own to make sense of what had happened to them.
While FEMA has employees trained in crisis counseling, in time they departed. Mental health support was left to the Good Shepherd Services, a small community center located on Huntington Street.
“In the aftermath of Sandy, Good Shepherd Services reached out to the Red Hook families, to address any immediate needs they had,” says Red Hook Family Counseling Director Shalini Schaffer. “The services we were able to provide during Sandy were comprehensive in terms of being able to check in with our families in a face-to-face way in their home.”
Schaffer talks in the past tense for a reason – Good Shepherd Services staffs only a small number of people to cover the population of over ten thousand. Most of the people who can be found at Good Shepherd on a normal day are children, teenagers and the elderly. And though there were some FEMA grants that went to New York University and New Jersey – among others – to fund projects targeting individuals suffering emotional distress after Sandy, none went to Red Hook.
The idea that mental health affects the rich and poor equally might be an admirable thought on equality. But, in the view of those who’ve studied the phenomenon after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, this is not the case.
Researchers who spoke with low-income single mothers in New Orleans after Katrina found that they were twice as likely to develop mental illness and more than half displayed symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Anxiety, depression, substance abuse were also found to affect the respondents in the long term. The researchers concluded that vulnerabilities to mental illness increased in low-income, younger demographics – particularly if they were single, African-American and female with small children.
This demographic is almost identical Red Hook’s large population of young, single mothers. About a quarter of the families in Red Hook are single-mother households with children under the age of 18, and over a third of families have a woman as head of the house. This is a staggering statistic when compared other neighborhoods in New York City.
“What one little girl [after Sandy] wrote stays in my mind” Brown said. “She was so scared until her father came home. A lot of kids out here can’t say ‘When my daddy comes home.’ People were stunned at how this young kid expressed her feelings, then they were stunned that she was in a two-parent household.”
The lessons learned after Katrina, however, were never accommodated in Red Hook. Poor people find it harder to find, let alone pay, for mental health services. Appointments with psychologists can cost upwards of $100 for a 45-minute session, a financial strain in a neighborhood where 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and only 37 percent of the population has private health insurance.
Brown, for one, would like to see more attention paid to the emotional needs of Red Hook’s younger residents. . “We really need to do a focus group to find out their feelings on the devastation. See, we always assume we know how they feel,” says Brown. “We need to have a group sit down and ask them how they feel about Sandy.
That need, she adds, does not stop with the young.
“We need more focus groups for people to sit down and talk about their experiences. Because a lot of time when you hold things in, it frightens you more,” says Brown. “But when you can sit down with other people and exchange how they felt, how you felt, then you can see you’re not along. Someone felt the same way. Some people might still be holding it in.”
Still, help may not always be welcome for those who see a stigma in emotional problems.
“I think people still identify trauma with weakness, and eventually shame,” says Dr. Yuval Neria, Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University Medical Center. “They feel shameful. They feel as if they are not heroic enough. New York City has all sorts of emergency offices and resources, especially for the physical aspect of disasters and emergencies. I think that we don’t integrate mental health well enough into the system.
“Mental health should be a natural part of a response to any disaster really. The fact that it’s yet to be clear to either the victims or the authorities is unfortunate,”
Now, in Red Hook, people say they wouldn’t hesitate to evacuate the next time a big storm hits.
