James and Delphine Lindsey, ages 79 and 70, are so strapped they have to make do with a diet of red beans and pig tails. They have family nearby to help, fellow evacuees from Hurricane Katrina, but if they lose their federal housing assistance, which they have been warned may happen any month now, things could get dire.

“We’re not going to be put out,” Ms. Lindsey insisted, looking around at her small one-bedroom apartment in Houston’s working-class Fifth Ward, a grocery cart parked in the corner beside her wheelchair. “We’re not going out on the street. No, no. We’ll just have to start the penny-pinching, that’s all.”

Thousands of elderly evacuees like the Lindseys still struggle every day to get by in cities hundreds of miles from their homes in New Orleans. But it is the elderly who want most to return, say social service workers, and who have the hardest time doing so.

“There is simply no place for them to go in New Orleans,” said Walter L. Jones, director of community-based initiatives for Neighborhood Centers of Houston, which has worked with about 2,200 families displaced by last year’s hurricanes. 

“There are no nursing homes — none,” Mr. Jones said. “There are no plans to rebuild the public housing where many of them lived. And those apartments that are available are priced way, way beyond the means of anyone on a low, fixed income.”

This week’s arrest of a doctor and two nurses in connection with the deaths of four elderly hospital patients during Hurricane Katrina’s flooding last year served as a reminder of the storm’s continuing toll on the city’s oldest and poorest residents. 

In the storm’s immediate impact, 71 percent of the dead were over the age of 60, and nearly half were over 75. But the stresses and the vulnerabilities did not end with the storm’s passing.

“At no point in your life is it easy to pick up and be displaced, but it’s especially tough for senior citizens,” said Ginny Goldman, chief organizer in Houston for Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. “There are lots of evacuee issues that affect everybody, but they seem to affect seniors especially, because they can’t bounce back so easily.”

So perhaps, Ms. Goldman said, it is all the more surprising that it is this group who seem particularly keen to return to Louisiana. “I had a woman tell me she had to go back because she wanted to be buried next to her husband,” she said. “You hear things like that a lot.”

Henry Armstrong, 60, lives in a center for the elderly with his 82-year-old mother, Dorothy Griffin, who uses a wheelchair. Mr. Armstrong knows that his mother wants very much to go home to New Orleans, and he is willing, if he can get the most basic help, to rebuild his wind-damaged home in suburban Metairie. So far, he said, despite dozens of calls, he has had no luck.

“It’s so hard for my mother here,” Mr. Armstrong said. “Her arms have gotten so bad that she can’t even turn the wheels on her chair. She had a heart attack before the storm, and then another one afterward from the stress.”

The Census Bureau has estimated that 350,000 people fled Louisiana because of Hurricane Katrina, with Texas drawing by far the largest group of them. 

Houston alone added more than 130,000 residents in the months after the storm, most of them evacuees, the bureau concluded, though state and city officials believe that number is low by tens of thousands because it failed to count those living in hotels or shelters.

No one is sure how many evacuees are elderly, or how many of them have chosen to remain in the cities where they were resettled or have tried to get back home to Louisiana. The displaced population is so fluid, and often operating so far outside the nation’s data grid, that finding hard numbers is almost impossible, state and federal officials said, leaving only the various aid agencies to extrapolate from their own experiences to guess at the larger problem.

Don McCullough, disaster recovery supervisor for Catholic Charities in Houston, said that about 10 percent of the evacuees his agency helped were elderly, a proportion that other relief officials in the city said sounded about right. Many were able to live with family, others are on their own in apartments and rental homes. A lucky few hundred have found spots in centers for the elderly.

Only a relative handful have landed beds in nursing homes and assisted care facilities, aid officials said, because the costs of such care are usually beyond their means.

“If you are a low-wage senior, you are a hidden entity in our society,” said Marilyn Tyler, manager of Big Bass Resort, a year-old center for the elderly in the Houston suburb of Jacinto City that has become home to more than 100 elderly evacuees. “To be displaced by the hurricane only makes that worse. As far as the government and society is concerned, the same rules apply whether you’re 25 or 65. There are no provisions for these people.”

Generally more frail and financially and physically vulnerable, they are also more prone to stress, beset by nightmares, isolated and ill-equipped to manage a new start in a strange city.

“As we found out in Louisiana, when you have a real disaster, it’s the elderly who are least capable of taking care of themselves,” said Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, ranking Democrat on the Special Committee on Aging, which held hearings this year on the plight of Hurricane Katrina’s elderly. 

“They are the most at risk and the most likely to be displaced or to lose their lives,” Mr. Kohl said, “just simply because they lack the physical or emotional resiliency or are not as capable of making decisions.”

Up to now, most of the attention by government officials and advocates for the elderly has been on how to lessen the impact of future disasters on the elderly. Only now is the attention beginning to turn to learning lessons from the problems Hurricane Katrina’s older evacuees have had since the disaster. Mr. Kohl said he hoped the committee would hold hearings on this issue in the near future.

Esther Lawless, 69, arrived at Big Bass Resort on Sept. 14, 2005, with her husband, Frederic, part of the first wave of Hurricane Katrina evacuees to find a home in the relatively new center. They had lost everything, but that is an old and common story in this community.

Most distressing, Ms. Lawless said, is the uncertainty. “We don’t know from one day to the next where we stand,” she said. “Are we eligible for help or are we not eligible? One day you are, the next day you’re not. They have you on this seesaw.”

If she could find a place like Big Bass in the New Orleans area, she would happily return, she said. But several months of searching has found nothing. “If there are apartments, I can’t afford them,” she said. “And they say there will be senior centers, but they’re still being built. They can’t even tell you what year they’ll be finished.”

Copyright © Global Action on Aging
Terms of Use  |  Privacy Policy  |  Contact Us