EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Special Help Needed for Elderly, the Hidden Victims of Quake

Late on Monday afternoon, an elderly woman collapsed while applying for help at the Crenshaw Boulevard earthquake relief center.

There was a moment of confusion. People shouted, “Call 911!” Across the room, at the crisis counseling desk, Barbara McNeil Thompson, a registered nurse and county mental department worker, excused herself from our interview, hurried to the woman’s side and bathed her brow with a wet paper towel until the paramedics arrived.

“That lady had not eaten in three days,” Thompson told me later. “It was a minimum starvation type situation, coupled with not having a place to stay, coupled with going to a place where there is no organization.”

Navigating the relief mechanisms that government has thrown together is proving to be too complicated, too exhausting for many elderly people, such as the woman at the shelter.

That’s not just my opinion. It’s the view of the relief workers who have been watching men and women in their late 70s and 80s struggle to obtain aid. “They live alone, they have anxiety attacks, there ought to be mobile units set up for them (near their homes),” said Paula Cook, who works with Thompson at the center. “I hope you can highlight the plight of the seniors. This is a serious plight we are not addressing.”

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I had gone to the center to check on the situation in South-Central Los Angeles, still staggering from the 1992 riots.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the state and the city all had representatives in the building, which, in normal times, serves as a Department of Water and Power office.

From the looks of it, South-Central has suffered plenty.

Outside, a line of tired and worried-looking people extended along the side of the building, past the National Guard’s water tank and the Red Cross van carrying bottled water and snacks. They told of four- and five-hour waits. A few portable toilets were on the sidewalk. Several women were pregnant. Others were holding babies. There was no place to sit.

After stepping inside from the late afternoon chill, the big interviewing room seemed especially hot and stuffy. Along the wall and in the center were tables put up by the city housing department, FEMA and state agencies. Everyone had questions, and their anxiety made their voices loud and sharp. The steady noise of voices was punctuated by babies crying, and by the occasional shout of an angry earthquake victim.

Each of them had to fill out fairly long forms to apply for various forms of aid. For FEMA disaster assistance, for example, there were more than 40 questions. None of them were especially hard, although I was stumped when I got to question 29, which said “If any of questions 23-28 are marked yes, go to matrix A.” I looked on both sides of the form and couldn’t find anything marked matrix A.

The collapse of the elderly woman brought home how the elderly are affected by the lines, the crowds, the noise, the paperwork. I thought about my parents’ last years, when they were in their 80s. They were intelligent, sophisticated people, he a lawyer, she a teacher, who had overcome life’s complications. My father, with his analytical, mathematical mind, was particularly good at it. But when the infirmities of old age hit, simple procedures--banking by mail, dealing with the utilities company--became difficult.

There are many such people in Los Angeles, women and men in their 80s who live in apartments or in houses they had bought 40 years ago. Many of their homes had been damaged or destroyed Jan. 17.

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Ann Smith, acting general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Aging, said she thought the problem was widespread.

“People are phoning in, asking how they can get services,” she said. “FEMA is telling seniors to phone our department. We did not find a lot of seniors in the shelters. We suspect that a lot of seniors are sitting in their homes. We know there is a problem. We are going to deal with the problem.”

Smith is planning to add temporary staff to help the elderly. Teams will be sent into neighborhoods to find them. The volunteers at the Crenshaw relief center are trying to deal with the problem, too. Barbara Rigali of the Red Cross said center personnel try to seek out the elderly in lines, and bring them inside for special treatment.

But they are overwhelmed with all kinds of cases. Disaster has many variations, each one throwing a new curve to the volunteers, requiring more time and effort to answer questions and fill out forms.

Smith expects the problem to grow worse as outreach teams discover more elderly victims too confused to have sought assistance. They shouldn’t be forgotten amid the many stronger and louder voices demanding help.