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Catastrophe Hits Elderly the Hardest
By Vicki Smith and Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press
September 8, 2005
When Katrina's fury bore down on the Gulf Coast, the old people were the least able to run. Some could barely walk.
Some were left in despair at a rural Mississippi school. Others drowned in a Louisiana nursing home. The lucky ones -- the tough ones -- got out. And now, wrenched from their familiar routines, they may have a harder time coping with the aftermath than younger victims, experts say.
The story of older people and Katrina does contain uplifting sights, like the elderly woman carried off a chartered jet from Baton Rouge by her son in San Diego on Sunday.
But consider what happened late last week at an underpass in Metairie, La., when a man tried to get his 78-year-old father, who's blind, and his 75-year-old mother, who's crippled by arthritis, onto a bus.
"I couldn't get them on because the young people, the healthy people were pushing and fighting to get on the bus. I couldn't put them in that situation," said Bruce Barnes, New Orleans.
That happened time and again as buses appeared, filled up and left. Even when a bus was set aside for the elderly and disabled, the workers wouldn't let both Barnes and his 62-year-old aunt accompany the parents. Rather than leave the elderly couple alone on the bus or the aunt behind, all four waited some more.
Finally a doctor got them onto a helicopter to the airport, where they boarded a plane for Austin, Texas.
Consider Bay High School in Bay St. Louis, Miss. The unofficial shelter turned into a cesspool, the sight of which Gary Turner, Trudy Roberts and Felix Ruiz said should be considered a crime.
The three strangers became a rescue team of sorts when they fled to the high school themselves and found people in their 70s, 80s and 90s wallowing in their own waste on the auditorium floors. They had been brought to the school and abandoned, most unable to move without help.
"Rats wouldn't even go in there," said Turner, Bay St. Louis.
At night, as the older people tried to sleep, they became prey. The ruthless came two nights in a row, stealing money and medications.
Ruiz said he went to a nearby hospital for help but found none. Then he went to the National Guard. Finally, Friday night, someone took the older people to what he hopes was a safer place.
The portable toilets arrived then, too -- far too late.
Even after older people make it to safety, their troubles may not be over.
Experts say they may have a harder time than younger people in dealing with being uprooted -- in part because they're often being wrenched from the comforting routine of neighborhoods they've lived in for decades and maybe hadn't left for years.
Older evacuees do have one thing in their favor, experts say. A lifetime of living may have made them tougher.
"I was in (Hurricane) Betsy. I was in Camille. I was in all of it. And I'm still here now," Josephine Bingham, 68, said on a bus taking her to Dallas.
Dr. Carmel Bitondo Dyer, a geriatric physician and associate professor of medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, has heard comments like that while working at the Astrodome. "Some of the evacuees said to me, 'I made it through two world wars; I can make it through this.' ," she said in a telephone interview this week.
In Dallas, at the Reunion Arena shelter, 74-year-old Gladys Smith, New Orleans, was disoriented and in "very, very terrible" spirits, said her daughter.
"One night she went to the restroom, and when I woke up she was walking into the wall," Patricia Smith said. "She couldn't find her place on the floor."
Linda Bertoniere, a 65-year-old retired restaurant manager who was sleeping on a pallet of plywood at a warehouse in Louisiana last week, said she wanted to leave her demolished neighborhood. But she sounded resigned about her future.
"When you're my age," she said, "it's just too hard to start over again."
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