VPR’s online Mapping the Money project includes a breakdown the $185 million spent by FEMA on Tropical Storm Irene.
The largest expenditures were for road and bridge repair, but there was money, also, to tend to the emotional needs of those recovering from the storm’s devastation.
Thousand of Vermonters feeling the emotional impact of losing a home or property to Irene took advantage of the services to alleviate what one mental health case manager called “The Mess of Stress”.
“Folks were just extremely, extremely overwhelmed,” says Cathy Aikman who directed Starting Over Strong, which provided post Irene disaster crisis counseling. FEMA awarded $1.1 million in grant money for the services.
The grants were awarded to the Department of Mental Health and administered by Washington County Mental Health Services.
Starting Over Strong employed a dozen crisis counselors who worked in teams. Aikman says many had no background in the mental health field.
“We had some folks who were teachers, we had a gentleman who ran a team who was a pastor, we had a gentleman who was a farmer,” she explains.
Under the FEMA grant the emphasis was on finding and training counselors to work in their own communities.
A professional background wasn’t important because they weren’t acting as therapists. They were simply trying to give people the tools they needed to overcome the confusion and paralysis that many felt after Irene.
“We did a lot of stress reduction so you then can deal with the 10 phone calls that you needed to make,” Aikman says. “So giving them real hands on strategies tha they could do themselves to help de-stress to move on to accomplish what they needed to feel better.”
Case managers made thousands of contacts and met face to face with about 2,000 Vermonters, often multiple times.
Aikman says meeting with so many people struggling to put their lives back together after Irene took its toll on the case managers, too, and at one point they needed counseling.
“Case managers are on the ground working with survivors day after day and the stress level of the case managers, they needed support as well,” she says.
Under the FEMA grants, the free counseling came to an end last October. Aikman says there’s no doubt that even today people who suffered losses in Irene are still feeling the emotional impact of the storm.
In the future she’d like to see disaster counseling services extended at least another six months.
