'My mommy is dead ...'

2005-09-05 18:22

Laszlo Trankovits

New Orleans - The cute small girl on the roof of a house that is under water up to the first floor is carefully helped into a boat by the police.

"My mommy is dead. Then they pushed her into the water," she says to her rescuers, seriously but apparently unmoved.

This episode on Sunday appears to confirm the views of psychologists, who say that the mental reactions to America's worst natural disaster are not predictable.

People are still in shock and are simply fighting for survival.

But the psychological after-effects could be serious for a minority, albeit one of many thousands.

According to research by Professor Lee Clark of Rutgers University, 80% of those affected by a disaster suffer from anxiety and grief in the six months afterwards.

And up to 5% have to deal with the psychological effects for years, sometimes for a lifetime.

The first ones who obviously can no longer take the strain of the horrific pictures of death and suffering are the police.

Paul Accardo, spokesperson for the New Orleans police, committed suicide on Sunday. Like a second policeman, he shot himself in the head.

"We are seeing babies dead on the ground, babies!" reported an upset Yolanda Jenkins, a local official, in a local paper.

"The most horrible and heart-breaking thing is when people cry out for help, but we can't help."

In the eight day since hurricane Katrina an army of policeman, soldiers and rescuers that now numbers in the thousands have had to help the many people who are still trapped and in danger.

The policemen of New Orleans are not just discovering more and more victims in the collapsed houses, they are finding friends, acquaintances and even family members.

The policemen, who have been working for over a week without a break, are mostly the first ones who are confronted with the horrific images.

Bloated corpses in the water, the disabled who died in their wheelchairs, people who cry for help either in desperation or in anger.

Almost all policemen are themselves homeless - some react by leaving or with aggression.

Local TV reports thousands of policemen deserting, and also of some being caught looting.

The bleary-eyed mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, said defiantly on Sunday evening that despite the "overwhelming and huge problems" the "rebuilding of New Orleans will be a glowing example for the whole world".

However, the reality at the moment could hardly be bleaker.

Homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff predicted soberly that the horror is not over by a long way.

When the water has been removed, it will be "worse than anything we have had in this country, perhaps with the exception of September 11", he said in a TV interview.

And later the psychological problems will arise.

But some families have been able to find each other.

On Sunday the seven children in the Raymond family, who were in a refugee camp in San Antonio, could rejoin their parents.

Desperate people are using the radio and the internet to try to reach their loved ones - but some sob into the microphone that "there is still no sign that my parents are alive", as one young woman said, adding that she is "sure that nothing has happened", before bursting into tears.

Children, especially the handicapped or mentally vulnerable, are particularly at risk of being psychologically damaged, says Susan Hamilton of the Red Cross. - Sapa-dpa

- SAPA