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From November 2001 NASW NEWS Helping people find items like toothbrushes or hairbrushes containing DNA from missing family members in hopes of eventually identifying their bodies was one of the most wrenching tasks faced by social work volunteer Susanne Clark during the week of the terrorist attacks. The 59-year-old retired social work educator was sending e-mail at her Orange, Conn., home when she received a call from her American Red Cross disaster unit asking her to volunteer just after the first jetliner hit the World Trade Center. Although the scope of the disaster dwarfs anything in recent memory, Clark's experiences are typical of hundreds, if not thousands of social workers who volunteer with the Red Cross. Trained as a mental health responder for the Red Cross seven years ago, Clark expected to be transported to the World Trade Center site when she reported to the Red Cross office in Greenwich, the southern Connecticut city that is a bedroom community for many who work in New York City. Instead, the Red Cross found that many of the victims of the disaster and their families lived in Greenwich and were greatly in need of care there. Many people evacuating the city took trains, and the Red Cross met Greenwich trains containing people wounded in the crashes. Crisis intervention took place at the railroad station. As missing-person calls came in, names were placed on a registry. In follow-up calls to families of the missing, Clark said she informed them of ways to get information. Families were so numb from the news they were unsure how to proceed. What should they tell the children? Should the children go to school? Volunteers made sure people had family members or some other kind of support network during the crisis. As the week progressed, volunteers gathered information, such as what floor the missing worked on and whether they bore identifying marks like tattoos. Clark said she had to gently inform family members that the best and perhaps only hope of identifying loved ones was through DNA. She told them what sort of items containing DNA to collect and where to take them. "It was traumatic for families to go through this, and our job was to be supportive while they went through the tasks," said Clark, who for years taught social work at Southern Connecticut University and now does special projects at Yale/New Haven Hospital. Clark said she worked 12-hour days and fell asleep emotionally exhausted afterwards, missing the massiveness of the disaster. "One way I took care of myself was never to look at the New York City skyline, which is visible from Greenwich," she said. Back to NASW NEWS Contents
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