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From November 2001 NASW NEWS Students saw the jetliners just before they crashed. By John V. O'Neill, MSW, NEWS Staff Advanced-standing master's students in Maryellen Noonan's class at New York University on the morning of Sept. 11 were listening to their first lecture since enrolling when a loud noise drew their eyes to the window. To their horror, they saw a large jetliner flying low and wobbling, followed by a tremendous explosion. They thought the airplane had crashed near Canal Street between NYU and the World Trade Center. A few minutes later they saw another jetliner enter from another direction, wobble and go out of sight, followed by a terrific explosion and black smoke. Thus began days of fear and confusion as NYU's social work school, one of the largest in the country with over 1,000 students, reacted to the terrorists' acts at the World Trade Center located near the campus. NYU's school is the only one of Manhattan's five schools of social work that is in the immediate vicinity of the disaster. Faculty and students first took care of each other, then reached out to help the greater university, the community and clients — not only those in the agencies where students were doing internships under extremely trying conditions, but also as part of the social services and mental health components of the city's emergency response.
The university prepared to house students, but by late afternoon enough public transportation was reopened so that everyone with a place to go could leave. Others were housed in makeshift shelters. Although the university was closed the next two days because of security concerns, some faculty and students trickled in to answer the telephone calls of students trying to determine where or if they should go to field assignments. The school became an information center by telephone and the Internet. The university made hotel rooms, clothing, replacement books and small cash stipends available to dispossessed students. Alumni and doctoral students called in looking for volunteer assignments. When classes resumed, the school made sure that there was a teacher in every classroom and that at the beginning of each class there would be an opportunity to talk about the tragedy. "Every class became a community meeting," said Anastas. Clinically trained faculty began to reach out to the larger university community, taking two-hour shifts at a shelter set up for students and coming to the assistance of the university's employee-assistance and counseling services. Then a new level of calls for assistance began, said Anastas, with telephones "ringing off the hook" from social service agencies, corporations and other organizations asking for mental health assistance from faculty and others with clinical licenses. Faculty responded in pairs because of the intense nature of the work. The 300 to 400 administrators of the city's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) on Williams Street saw the tragedy unfold from their windows — the jetliners smashing into the World Trade Center and people leaping to their deaths from the upper levels to escape the smoke and flames. To compound the administrators' trauma, they were forced to move to a new location where they lacked equipment to do their jobs.
Soon, in pairs, the newly trained social workers began to visit the giant agency's offices in other boroughs to debrief others and eventually to train them as well. "It has a ripple effect," said Noonan. When Wall Street's Mercantile Exchange called, concerned that workers — many of whom had seen people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center — were afraid to return to work, Catherine Medina was among the clinical faculty to respond. "The people there had seen the loss of life first-hand and were worried about their loved ones," she said.
She also coordinated a seven-day-a-week, 6 p.m.-to-midnight group of volunteers at the NYU Medical Schools to serve 400 meals to rescue workers from "ground zero," as the World Trade Center site is called. "As clinicians, in twos, we thank them [fire fighters, police officers, steel workers] for their work at ground zero and ask how they are doing," said Dane. "Many are ready to talk about the gruesome work, their sense of hopelessness and the numbing affect it has had on them. Others are happy we are there, but words won't capture their feelings." At the end of two weeks, the telephones were still ringing with requests for help from the university's social workers, said Anastas. Their job was to sort out which they could respond to, weighing the academic workload and needs at the university against those of the community. "The real story is the ongoing social services and mental health needs in the community," she said. "Before Sept. 11, human services were underfunded and stretched, and they were trying to be more efficient than they humanly could be, to try to meet the needs. Now you have the disaster on top of that. We have a huge upsurge in need, and we didn't manufacture any new professionals." Red Cross and disaster professionals say the true extent of the mental health need is only going to reveal itself over time, said Anastas. "And it's going to take a sustained response rather than an emergency response. So when alumni and doctoral students call to volunteer, we ask them to commit to less rather than more, to let us know what they can do on a regular basis over a six- to 12-month period." Even with decades of experience, counseling after the World Trade Center disaster has been very different than anything before, said Dane. "Wherever I've gone in the past two weeks, people say they feel vulnerable and unsafe. For the first time, I can't reassure them. My own feelings parallel what I meet in the community, in class, in support groups and among colleagues. We all feel unsafe." Back to NASW NEWS Contents
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