Victims’ complaints consistent over the years: Help is too little too late or too slow
ITheodore Decker
n the fall of 1991, as a reporting intern with the Gloucester Daily Times in coastal Massachusetts, I helped to cover what the world knows now as “The Perfect Storm.”
For weeks afterward, the paper documented the destruction. I remember speaking to a man whose home had been destroyed by massive onshore waves and storm surge.
What I remember most was his frustration — with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with his insurance company, with all the hoops he had to jump through while rebuilding his life.
Several years later, I covered another disaster for a small daily newspaper in upstate New York. This time, it was flash flooding that occurred as heavy rains and snowmelt raced through Catskills hollows with lethal fury. I remember speaking to an older woman who lived on a dairy farm run by her son.
The water had come fast, and her son — and, as I remember it, a friend of his — rushed to the barn to save his dairy herd. But the cows wouldn’t leave the warmth of the barn, and as the cold water rose, the men climbed into the loft and spent the night there as the water rushed in. They also spent the night shouting and clapping at the cows below, trying to keep them warm and moving as the water kept pouring in. They stayed there until the water receded after dawn.
Two details stood out in her story. The first was her realization that at some point her son and his friend must have stopped shouting, and the barn must have grown quiet except for the moving water. Because all the cows had drowned.
The second was her frustration with the insurance man who showed up at her door. She heard Nine-year-old Paykin Beverage watches for his father to return from a boat rescue in Trenton, N.C., on Tuesday. His father, a fireman in Trenton, had been rescuing people for five days.