Elderly Struggle to Recover From Earthquake : Valley: For seniors whose lives were uprooted, the process is tedious and baffling. Service agencies are also taxed.

Disaster was no less painful when they were younger. But when the hurricane passed, the war ended, and the Great Depression finally gave way to prosperity, they picked up the pieces and built their lives again.

Those survivors are different now--older, sometimes fragile, often alone--and putting their lives together after a disaster takes more help and more time than ever before.

For older people who lived through the Northridge quake, recovery has been a tedious struggle, one that baffles many and has taxed the public and private agencies that provide them services.

Months later, they still must be hand-held through the confusing labyrinth of disaster aid--coaxed into applying for assistance they are eligible to receive, convinced that there is no shame in accepting help.

“This time I’m giving up and allowing people to help me,” said Anne Wadler, 76, looking down at a stack of papers piled on her kitchen table in Canoga Park. “I can’t cope with any more problems. I wasn’t like this before. I wonder, what is happening to me?”

There are no comprehensive statistics on how many quake victims are 60 and over. But between Jan. 17 and June 17, the city’s Department of Aging provided services to 12,021 older people who lost homes or property in the quake, or who need emotional or financial support. Through 16 senior citizen multipurpose centers and nine other agencies serving the elderly, the city provided services such as disaster advocacy, information and assistance, transportation, home meals, relocation and handyman services, according to statistics provided by the department.

Los Angeles County’s Area Agency on Aging, has served at least 35,000 older people with similar services, county officials said. In Ventura County, the Area Agency on Aging served 10,320 older people between Jan. 17 and May 2.

Public and private agencies that assist older people have had to hire extra staff, as thousands of older people in post-quake Southern California have sought help with everything from finding new homes to finding counseling.

Last month, in acknowledgment of the special long-term needs of older people during times of disaster, the federal Department of Health and Human Services granted local agencies nearly $7 million to pay for recovery assistance to older quake victims.

These agencies have discovered what relief and social workers in Florida learned after Hurricane Andrew: Disaster strikes at any age, but recovery comes quickest to the young.

“How do you, if you’re in your 80s, start from scratch?” said Lynn W. Bayer, director of the Los Angeles County Area Agency on Aging. “People are experiencing a tremendous sense of loss and an identity crisis.”

Familiar communities and homes that once formed the core of their lives have been suddenly snatched away and with them a comfort and certainty about the world around them. Some do not sleep at night. Some experience a decline in health. Some call for spouses and family members buried years ago.

Frances Fariola did not want to leave the house on Rimpau Street that she shared with her husband before he died.

The quake threw the wood-frame house off its foundation and tilted it precariously. The chimney fell down, leaving a huge hole, and the porch was torn away from the rest of the house. City inspectors red-tagged the building.

But Fariola kept living there, feeding her cats and her dog, Bingo, taking walks through the West Adams neighborhood she has lived in for years.

Social worker John G. Merrill of Adult Protective Services learned about Fariola two weeks after the Northridge quake through an anonymous call. Merrill visited Fariola, took one look at the leaning house and informed her that she could not stay there--not even for one more night. He began making arrangements to find her temporary housing.

When concerned neighbors learned of her dilemma, they volunteered to put Fariola up for the night. She accepted the offer. The next day they took her to the disaster center where a Red Cross worker found a senior apartment complex in Monrovia that would accept Fariola and her dog.

The night of her departure, Merrill and the neighbors gathered at the house--the stranger who came to help and longtime neighbors she had learned to trust.

They packed some of her clothes, her dolls and some photographs, while a tearful Fariola wavered between the certainty of her past and an unknown future.

As the group waited outside for the van that would take her to Monrovia, Fariola quietly slipped back into the house and locked the door.

“I’m not coming out,” she told them through the locked door. “I’m staying here.”

“Frances, you have to go,” Merrill told her.

Even as Merrill stood in front of the house trying to coax Fariola out, he understood her resistance.

“All of her attachment to the past was lost with just that shake of the earth,” Merrill said. “There’s a real attachment to a house, a real bond.”

Months later, Fariola still lives in Monrovia, miles away from her home, her neighbors and her yesterdays. Sometimes Fariola’s conversation is a confusing mix of the past and the present. She speaks of long-ago people and places as if they still exist, as if they are still part of her life.

Sitting in the lounge of the Monrovia complex, she is calm but somber when she talks about the move.

“I knew they weren’t going to let me stay there,” she said, looking away. “I don’t blame them. I sure miss my house.”

Merrill not only helped remove Fariola from her damaged home, but helped oversee the building of her new life--one that is insulated with support from outside public and private agencies.

Now she has a caseworker, a financial counselor, a psychological counselor and a doctor that she sees regularly--none of which she had before the quake. But Fariola had not sought any of the help herself.

In all her 70 years she has never “been on the dole,” she said.

And she is proud of it.

“I don’t believe people owe me anything,” she said, her voice full of conviction. “You can’t depend on other people. You have to depend on yourself.”

Like she and her family did when she was young and strong quakes hit Santa Barbara. Like they always did during tough times.

“This one is different because my husband’s dead,” she said, softly. “It helps when you have family. It helps even if they can’t do anything.”

Fariola’s case is not unique.

“The hardest cases, I think, are people we had to relocate,” Bayer said. “Now they want to be back in their old neighborhoods, where their church is and their stores are, everything they’re used to.”

There will be no going back for some.

Affordable housing, in short supply before the quake, is even harder to find now. For some older quake victims, especially those who lived in rent-controlled apartment buildings, relocation has also meant a decline in their standard of living.

“Where older people were able to live a reasonably good life before, they’re finding they don’t have the money to live the way they did because it has to go to rent,” Bayer said.

After the quake, Anne Wadler began to reconsider the idea of home ownership.

“I’m thinking I’m not getting younger and my health is not good,” said Wadler, who is partially blind. “There’d be all kinds of problems in a place that I own.”

Just months before the Northridge quake, she’d purchased her own mobile home for $20,000 and moved into Canoga Mobile Estates in Canoga Park. She was proud of her purchase and happy to be close to her daughter and her family.

But the quake seriously damaged her coach and many of her belongings.

In the first weeks after the quake, the Red Cross paid for Wadler’s stay in a motel and provided her with money for food. Eventually, she found a small one-room unit in a Canoga Park apartment building where she now lives. She has decorated the table in the breakfast nook with a bouquet of pink, purple and white cloth tulips that she found at a thrift store. White lacy curtains hang from the kitchen window. But it still does not feel like home.

“I’ve always been independent where I did everything myself,” Wadler said looking out at the courtyard through her kitchen window. “Now, I’m just devastated. I try to fight that off, but it doesn’t go away. The worst thing is, I couldn’t cope for myself. I couldn’t think straight.”

The uncontrollable cough started after the quake, so did the insomnia, the nervous stomach and the piercing headaches--brought on by high blood pressure.

She worried about finding a new place to live. She worried about repairing her old home. Months later she is still worrying about both.

With the $1,200 she receives from Social Security, she is paying rent in two places--$343 for a HUD-subsidized apartment and $390 for the space occupied by her crippled mobile home.

And of course there are other living expenses.

“The money doesn’t go very far,” she said.

With a $9,910 grant she received from FEMA, Wadler has been making arrangements to have the coach repaired through a project run by the state’s Office of Emergency Services.

The Mobile Home Minimal Repair Project was created to help mobile home owners, many of whom are older people, find licensed contractors to repair their quake-damaged coaches, said Dree DeClamecy, spokeswoman for the project.

But while Wadler waits for assistance from the state, independent contractors looking for work have called her and her daughter repeatedly offering to do the repairs. And she still does not know if she will return to the mobile home park or keep her apartment.

The whole ordeal--the commotion and long lines at the FEMA center, the phone calls, the waiting--has consumed her life and left her frustrated.

The kind of frustration Wadler experienced prompted Los Angeles officials to create the Disaster Outreach Recovery Unit so that older people could bypass the long lines and receive whatever additional assistance and referrals they needed.

Initially scheduled to end in June, the unit, which is part of the city’s Department of Aging, has been funded until the end of the year, said Thelma McClinton, who coordinates the unit.

“People are still just coming out of it,” McClinton said. “A lot of people went into shock.”

Toni Moore, 68, had seen it all before, so when the quake hit she was calm.

“I lived in China, through the Sino-Japanese occupation,” Moore said. “I was in air raids when I was 5 and 6 years old. . . . Then I lived in Japan and I experienced earthquakes there.

“I thought I had learned to cope with all this you know,” she said sitting on the couch of her home in North Hollywood. “I thought, ‘Well, it’s not going to bother me. I’m going to be just fine.’ ”

But she isn’t.

With each passing aftershock, her composure dissolved into forgetfulness, disorientation, fear.

“See, I have cracks in my ceiling,” she said pointing up to a jagged line above the mantle. “I have cracks in my bedroom, but that’s how I feel. That’s what happened inside of me.”

“I’ve been through an awful lot. I’ve seen a lot of pain, a lot of illness, buried a lot of people. The quake brings it all back.”

Before the quake, Moore volunteered at the East Valley Multipurpose Senior Center, organizing field trips for seniors. Now she also receives counseling there.

At a recent meeting of her counseling group, an older woman who survived the collapse of Northridge Meadows Apartments spoke about her experience. As she listened, Moore discovered her feelings were shared by others.

“I think with us older people it’s not the death that we’re afraid of, it’s the dying --how you’re going to go, lying under a rock or something, being alone,” Moore said.

For some older people, like Catherine E. McArthur, 68, who worked at the Salvation Army seven days a week in the days following the quake, helping others is a way to help themselves.

In the Senior-to-Senior Peer Counseling group at the Pacoima Senior Citizens Multipurpose Center, volunteers have spent their time dealing with their own feelings and helping others.

One afternoon they gathered with the group’s leader, Bill Hulling, to talk candidly about the way the quake and the continuing aftershocks have changed their lives.

“I’m experiencing anxiety and I’m not one that would normally be considered anxiety-ridden,” said Ted Minor, 73. “I’m secure in myself and in my God, and I’m thinking, ‘Is this the big one?’ ”

In counseling others, they do not pretend to have all the answers or that the problems will go away overnight. They listen. They talk about preparation--having supplies like radios and water. They talk about the reality of their lives as older people.

When an aftershock hit while she was at a restaurant, Carmen Amper, 69, watched diners rush outside and scramble under tables. She didn’t do either.

“I said, ‘I can’t get under the table, my knees won’t bend,’ ” she recalled. “Now, I just pray, ‘Lord protect us.’ ”

“Faith,” Hulling responded. “I think that’s a tool our generation uses.”