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 got out. And now, wrenched from their familiar routines, they may have a harder time coping with the aftermath than younger victims, experts say.
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 the man, Bruce Barnes of 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.
And consider Bay High School in Bay St. Louis, Miss. It was an unofficial shelter turned 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, of Bay St. Louis.
A 90-year-old woman named Mildred told Turner she wanted to die, but he wouldn’t let her. He helped her to a potty chair someone carried in, then slowly moved her outside.
“Someone just dumped them there,” he said angrily. “Most of them needed to be in the hospital.”
At night, as the older people tried to sleep, they became prey.
The younger, the stronger and the ruthless came two nights in a row, stealing their money and medications.
“People have no respect for the elderly,” Turner said. “They need to get a better plan. You can’t put people in here who are on oxygen, who can’t walk, who can’t take care of themselves.” Ruiz says he went to a nearby hospital for help but found none.
Then he went to the National Guard. On Friday night, someone took them to what he hopes was a cleaner, safer place.
The story was even grimmer just outside New Orleans. Thirty people died at a flooded nursing home in Chalmette.
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 … and I’m still here now,” Josephine Bingham, 68, said on a bus taking her from New Orleans to Dallas.
