Children and Natural Disasters by Kirsten Anderberg
Children and Natural Disasters
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)
Written in January 2005
Being caught in a deadly natural disaster is traumatizing. But being a parent with a child, or children, during a natural disaster is an extra fright. Often it is confusing for children during natural disasters, because the adults themselves do not know what is going on. During the 1994 Northridge earthquake, my apartment building collapsed, yet when you ask my son who was nine years old at the time, what the scariest part of the quake was, he will say the stairs. When you ask why the stairs, he says it is because for a brief few seconds on the stairs, he lost hold of my hand. While I was overwhelmed in thought trying to navigate the crumbling building in the dark, his only focus was keeping a hold of my hand, which is really how it should be. When my son was interviewed for a TV show on quakes, he was asked if he was scared during the Northridge quake. His response was he knew it was dangerous, but he knew his mom would keep him safe. A single mom in a disaster, or even two parents during a natural disaster, take on a different role than a single adult during disasters. Their first thought is for someone else's safety above their own.
In 1989, my son was five years old, attending Kindergarten. A little before 5:00 pm, on Oct. 17, 1989, I stopped by the Branciforte Library in Santa Cruz, Ca., before picking my son up from after school care. As I stood in the library, I began to hear a rumbling, like a plane was about to crash into the building. All motion in the library stopped and everyone listened. I thought for a brief moment that a train must be about to hit the building, but then realized there were no train tracks nearby. I then began to see dust puffing out from between the bricks in the walls. Then BAM! A 7.1 quake hit us, and the floor of the library began to move so fast and furiously that it was hard to walk. Stacks of books began to fly and fall onto tables, which people went under. Myself and a few others ran out of the library before it got too violent to run effectively.
Kirsten Anderberg. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint/publish, please contact Kirsten at kirstena@resist.ca.