In the MAGAZINE

Dec. 2001 - Volume 10 Number 6
BEHAVIORAL HEALTHCARE TOMORROW
Responding to Crisis

Saving a Community, Door by Door

By William Kanapaux

On Sept. 11, the mental health field faced one of its greatest challenges. Providers, clinicians and agency staff worked around the clock to provide crisis services in the midst of chaos and fear.

So many responded, particularly in the New York metropolitan area, that it would be impossible to single out the effort of any one person or organization.

Nearly all attention in the days immediately following the attacks focused on ground zero, the site of the World Trade Center collapse. But only blocks away, removed from the harsh glare of floodlights, a different kind of victim could be found.

The area below 14th Street is home to some 350,000 people. Among them are large immigrant populations and a fair share of senior citizens and people with disabilities. For many, getting by before the attacks was struggle enough. The events of Sept. 11 cut these residents off from the rest of of the world. Their communities and the services they relied on had collapsed along with the towers.

Benefit cards no longer worked. Neither did phone lines of ATMs. Pharmacies were closed. A siege mentality began to take hold. Frantic shoppers emptied supermarket shelves of food and water. Price gougers moved in.

The event had clearly traumatized people. Many, particularly the elderly and people with disabilities, locked themselves inside their apartments.

Enter the Lower Manhattan Residents Relief Coalition, a group of volunteers that emerged in the days following the attacks. These volunteers launched a different kind of relief effort from the work at ground zero. Their work took them from building-to-building, door-to-door, to seek out those who suffered in silence.

Co-founder Kwong T. Hui offered participants at October's Behavioral Healthcare Tomorrow conference a glimpse of t he coalition's work.

Volunteers offered human contact and comfort as they assessed how people were faring and attempted to draw them out of their homes, Hui said. They found that people were initially stoic but quickly broke down in tears. In the enormity of the disaster, many felt that they didn't deserve help, even those who lost jobs or loved ones.

Many of them had basic unmet needs, such as food, medications and respirators. They voiced fears about the quality of the drinking water. People were in a fragile, agitated state, Hui said, and prone to panic.

The coalition's outreach campaign began on Sept. 15, the Saturday following the attack. In two days, volunteers reached 2,500 families.

The initial outreach took an emotional toll on the volunteers, who felt roughed up by the encounters, Hui said. Volunteers felt that they had to push themselves and were stressed out from the effort as they worked from building to building.

In response, organizers decided that door-to-door should be limited to no more than two hours at a stretch. Volunteers would work in pairs, checking in with each other after every two floors.

The coalition kept track of encounters through a database in a makeshift control center. It set up food-serving stations to bring people out of their apartments, ultimately serving 11,000 hot meals.

Hui said that while the Latino community proved quick to heal itself through candlelight vigils and other events, the Asian population was much more reticent. This reaction threatened to create a rift in the community, as Latino residents concluded that Asians didn't care about the attacks.

So the coalition organized carpenters to build a memorial that would allow people in the community to post messages and pictured of loved ones. Initial postings on the memorial were in English and Spanish, but eventually Chinese residents began posting there as well.

Recovery requires more than rebuilding concrete and steel, Hui said. It requires rebuilding the community. The challenge the coalition now faces is to sustain that momentum in the wake of a disaster that will take a long time to fade.

To learn more about the coalition, visit its Web site at www.geocities.com/lmrc911