Introduction

The profound physical destruction of Hurricane Katrina (and subsequent Hurricane Rita) was compounded by social and political problems already firmly entrenched before the storms hit. The disaster was a product not only of physical forces, but of neoliberal ideology as well.

My perspective is that of one of the more than 230,000 volunteers with the American Red Cross who responded during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (Becker, 2008). I was dispatched as a Disaster Mental Health worker in the Central Louisiana region. I was one of 22 mental health workers in an area that had over 200 shelters at one point. It was all we could do to try to manage one crisis after another involving the chronically mentally ill, the chronically homeless, the addicts and the severely traumatised. I was ‘a mobile crisis unit of one’ driving from shelter to shelter, trying to help people obtain medications, mediate interpersonal conflicts, procure needed resources and function as a community. To further frustrate the situation, we were practising in isolation. The system of social and health services had temporarily stopped functioning. None of the hospitals or ambulance services would take psychiatric patients. Local mental health would not respond and Child and Adult Protective Services would not respond.

Additionally, immediately before and after Hurricane Rita hit, I ran a small Red Cross shelter and coordinated the initial intake of evacuees. We were at a small church camp and had a possible capacity of about 200 – with no medical staff, no other mental health staff and no manager. The shelter manager was delayed by the worsening conditions and exhausted from managing a shelter for the two weeks previous, during Hurricane Katrina.

The context

Physical

On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in south-eastern Louisiana. It was the largest natural disaster the United States has ever seen. The area affected was roughly equivalent to the size of the entire landmass of the United Kingdom (around 90,000 sq miles). At least 1,836 people died and more than 700 were listed as missing. Between 645,000 and 1.1 million people were displaced from their homes and communities – the largest displacement since the American Civil War of the 1860s. Less than a month later, Hurricane Rita hit in the same region (Knabb et al, 2006).