Storm Survivors Turn to Healing Psychic Scars

Homes will be repaired or built anew, jobs are being created and in South Florida’s year-round growing season, the regreening of this storm-savaged area is already under way. But two weeks after Hurricane Andrew forever altered the physical landscape here, survivors only now are beginning to deal with the storm’s psychic legacy.

“I go from having bursts of energy to just shutting down--not wanting to deal with the kids or anything,” says Leslie Brown, 35, who huddled in a hallway with her husband and two young children in the Aug. 24 darkness as the storm blew off the roof and left three inches of water in her South Dade house. “Something deep down says that life will get back to normal, and I want to believe it. But I just can’t see when.”

Forget normal. In Dade County, Fla., there is no normal; there are only concentric circles of hellish privation and inconvenience radiating out of Ground Zero. In Homestead and Florida City, the hardest hit communities, it’s a Mad Max world, way beyond Thunderdome. People who once spent Saturdays edging the lawn with a Weed Eater now live on the edge, like scavengers, lining up for food, sleeping in cars. Many stay up all night with a shotgun to protect the rubble of their homes from looters.

Go north 25 miles from Homestead, to Coral Gables and South Miami, and even here everything has changed. Most houses are intact, but thousands remain without electricity. In $300,000 homes, people are cooking dinner over cans of Sterno.

Andrew is Miami’s new touchstone, the event from which survivors will date their lives, a scar that won’t fade. For most, the storm overshadows the Mariel boat lift of 1980, a decade-worth of riots and years of random ethnic or drug-fueled violence. The hurricane was violence.

“In severity and number of persons affected, this is the worst event I know of in the last 20 years,” said Raquel Cohen, a psychiatrist working with victims on behalf of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institute of Mental Health and the state of Florida. “When a whole community has been disorganized like this, the psychological repercussions run deep. People are mourning their lives and their cities. We expect to be working on this for a year.”

Rarely in modern times have so many been terrorized by a single event. Of the 4 million residents of South Florida, perhaps as many as 1 million came under direct attack from Hurricane Andrew. Seventeen people were killed, but tens of thousands felt their lives were in danger.

PTSD--post-traumatic stress disorder--hasn’t been so widely diagnosed since Vietnam.

“A significant minority, maybe 10% to 15%, are experiencing PTSD now,” said Thomas Mellman, a psychiatrist who has been counseling victims. “But I think that almost everyone has felt some times of depression.”

“Every person who felt the blow of that wind was forever affected,” says Paul Dee, 45, general counsel for the University of Miami. His house, near Biscayne Bay, took seven feet of water. “We all share the loss.”

Anxiety, anger and irritability are up. Police report a surge in domestic violence. “The storm made us feel powerless. It was an overwhelming event over which we had no control,” says Eric Vernberg, a psychologist at the University of Miami who specializes in the effects of disaster on children. “We were all vulnerable.”

Medical psychotherapist Tobi Mansfield, who spent last week counseling storm victims in a Homestead field hospital, said: “Most of Dade County felt--whether real or imagined--they were in a life-threatening situation. That’s a lot of people confronting their mortality.

“Everybody lost here, and we haven’t seen the worst yet. We’ve been in a survival mode, very task-oriented. I think we’ll see more depression when people come up for a breath of air.”

Mansfield added that Andrew left Dade County with “what is being called a Category 6 disaster, like nuclear war, or what we’d expect if hit by a missile. You can’t be prepared for a disaster of this scope.”

Everyone has a story, and counselors urge people to tell it as a way of coping. “People are getting fatigued right now,” says Mellman, “and talking is a way to validate feelings of anger and loss and uncertainty. I tell people it’s important to find a way to chill out.”

Chilling is tough. The temperature hits 90 degrees early in the day. The shade is gone. Huge ficus and banyan trees, and even some live oaks, are on their sides in the roadways, roots in the air like overturned beetles. To escape the sun, people whose only job is waiting take refuge under Army canvas, or beside a supply truck, or beneath a tarpaulin strung between piles of debris.

Survivors’ guilt is as common as dangling wires. Those who aren’t asking “Why me, Lord?” are asking, “Lord, why not me?” and feeling ashamed for not knowing the answer. It is survivors’ guilt that powers the convoys of relief supplies from Ft. Lauderdale churches, moves young men from South Carolina to drive 600 miles to Homestead so they can pass out diapers and baby formula, and motivates those with watertight roofs to take in strangers whom weeks ago they would not even have waved to.

The hurricane was a great leveler. While making victims of everyone, the storm knocked down walls and hedges and trees that cloistered one person’s back yard from another. Neighbors who were never neighborly can now look into each other’s yards and have begun to talk, over the boundary where the fence was or in line at the Red Cross clinic set up in the school where their children were to be in class.

Ironically, everyone feels lucky. At the Everglades Labor Camp in Florida City, farm worker and onetime trailer occupant Robert Torres says he’s lucky to be alive. Paul Dee feels lucky that his Cutler Ridge house is repairable. In Coconut Grove, writer Rosemary Sullivant feels lucky to have lost only three trees and electricity for four days.

Some have already moved from South Florida, either because their house was destroyed or because they cannot live with the anxiety and dread Andrew has left them. Many others swear they will never go through a hurricane again. “Next time,” says Leslie Brown, “I’m getting the hell out.”

Longtime South Floridians like to say they were not surprised by the hurricane, or its fury. “Hurricanes go with the territory,” says Helen Muir, 81, author of one of the definitive books on South Florida history. “What amazes me is that it was so hard to get the message across to people like developers, builders and politicians. People live as though nature didn’t exist.”

Thirty-four years ago, Muir’s good friend, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the grand dame of the Everglades, wrote a book called “Hurricane” in which she said: “There is no hurricane but the hurricane one had lived through.” Douglas, now 102 years old, survived this storm, as did the Coconut Grove cottage in which she has lived for 66 years.

But her point has been made. Andrew was South Florida’s hurricane. And it will be until the next one.

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