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Report: Health effects of Hurricane Sandy still linger

Philadelphia Inquirer (PA) - 7/30/2015

July 30--Nearly three years after Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey, its effects linger in the form of heightened anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, a report released Wednesday found.

More attention should be paid to the emotional consequences of housing damage, including mold, the report stated. Surprisingly, children who lived in homes with minor damage were even more likely than those in homes with major damage to feel sad or depressed or have trouble sleeping.

"We're definitely still hearing about the issues and the problems," said David Abramson, a New York University researcher who led the Sandy Child and Family Health Study.

Joe Skakum can vouch for that. Even with sleeping pills, he wakes up hours before dawn each day and starts fretting about his house in Brick Township. At first it was thought to be repairable. Then the mold grew. The house had to come down last week and Skakum, 69, and his wife, Marian, 66, have to build a new home on the site. Forget retirement. The Skakums, who are staying with friends, are also worried that the stress will make their health problems worse.

"Is it depressing? You better believe it is," Joe Skakum said. "It's a never-ending thing that keeps getting more and more stressful by the day."

Laurel and Bill Haeser, retirees in Brigantine, have battled bureaucracy and are still waiting for their house to be elevated to qualify for affordable insurance.

"My husband and I, we've gone through some really dark days over this housing issue . . . to the point where I thought he really wasn't going to make it," Laurel Haeser said. Bill Haeser is a cancer survivor and also has lung disease.

"The anxiety is really with you 100 percent of the time," she said. "It just really changes everything."

A separate report by the same researchers called for developing more effective ways to prod residents of high-risk areas to evacuate as storms approach. Only 28 percent of residents in mandatory evacuation areas actually left town.

Patricia Findley, an associate professor at Rutgers University who was one of the investigators for the study, said the state needed to better communicate with residents but faced cultural obstacles. "People in New Jersey don't want to be told what to do," she said.

This week's reports, labeled "Place" and "Person," were the first two of four. The project involves researchers from Rutgers, New York, Columbia, and Colorado State Universities. The second two parts, labeled "Problems" and "Progress," likely will be released in October, Abramson said.

The reports are based on in-person, hour-long interviews of 1,000 adults who live within the nine-county region most affected by the October 2012 storm. About a million people live in those counties.

Mary E. O'Dowd, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Health, said it was not surprising that people would still be suffering emotionally this long after the storm. Some businesses are only now reopening.

"We've said from the beginning that this was going to take years," she said.

The Health Department spent $1.1 million in federal grants on the study because there was inadequate research on disaster aftermath, O'Dowd said. She said that the report validated what state officials had suspected and that it would help New Jersey and other states plan for future events.

The department has asked for federal funding to extend a screening program for behavioral health problems through June 2016, O'Dowd said.

The Sandy research project was modeled on a similar one in Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Abramson, who led that work, said Katrina was a more devastating storm in poorer states. However, researchers saw similar levels of emotional distress long after the skies cleared. He said people without good social support were most likely to suffer.

Abramson also noted that people who had experienced major structural damage had similar "economic burdens" to people in poverty, including trouble paying for rent or mortgages, utilities, transportation, and food.

Researchers said emotional problems take a backseat soon after a disaster as everyone focuses on immediate physical needs. Yet, Abramson said, federal crisis counseling programs typically end after 18 months, too soon to catch all the problems that may develop.

"Seeing mental-health effects coming out now is not surprising as we're resolving some of the bigger things," Findley said.

Abramson said the best way to head off long-term emotional problems was to address underlying issues such as uncertainty, disruption, and financial distress.

He said it would be years before researchers knew about the health consequences of disaster-related stress.

The researchers found that people who had mold in their homes after the storm were more likely to have been diagnosed with asthma. They were also twice as likely to report mental-health "distress," a measure that includes people with heightened anxiety and more serious emotional problems.

As for why minor problems would hurt more than major ones, Abramson suspects that repairs were more likely to be made in homes with major damage. Children in homes with minor damage might live with constant reminders that life has not returned to normal. In addition, the damage could lead to stressed-out parents.

"It's a reminder," he said, "that any state would be well advised to alert child-serving institutions . . . to be aware of the relationships between these ongoing stressors in children's lives and the kind of mental-health effects they might have."

sburling@phillynews.com

215-854-4944@StaceyABurling

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