by Samantha Stainburn
Who can forget the stories of elderly people trapped on high floors of low-income buildings, unable to walk down flights of stairs to get the food, water and medication they needed following Sandy? It’s no coincidence that some of the most heart-wrenching tales of despair after the storm featured the elderly as well as the chronically ill, children, pregnant women and ethnic minorities, according to Joan Valas, R.N., Ph.D., chair of graduate studies and an associate professor at the College of Nursing and Public Health. “Things happen more extensively to vulnerable populations because they don’t have the ability to prepare, and they don’t have the social network [to help them],” she says.
Much of Dr. Valas’ scholarly research focuses on care for vulnerable and diverse populations during and after disasters. Her work indicates that one way to mitigate the suffering of vulnerable people during disasters is to provide better services for them during normal times.
Disasters expose ongoing suffering that’s usually hidden from view during calmer periods, she notes. “A disaster is a setting where vulnerabilities become very prominent,” she says. “Things that never get talked about, things that live in the shadows and are not discussed, all are on the front page of The New York Times and CNN after a disaster.”
Dr. Valas has certainly seen her fair share of disasters. As the emergency management director of Park Ridge, New Jersey, the town in which she lives, she has coordinated her community’s disaster response during five federally declared emergencies in the past six years, including Sandy, Hurricane Irene and several major snowstorms. She also treated injured people and patients with chronic illnesses in Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 as a volunteer supervisory nurse specialist/nurse practitioner with a DMAT.
While in the Gulf, she traveled with an armed guard after being attacked by a man desperate for the medical team’s drugs and visiting a neighborhood where a resident was shooting at strangers. “When you go into a disaster area like this, you’ve got to understand the amount of stress the people are under who’ve lost their homes,” she says. “You can’t imagine what it does to people inside when they’ve lost everything.”
This piece appeared in the Erudition 2013 edition.
