Families:
New Jersey- One of our interviewees was a mother of a teenager and she described the kind of mental stress her family faced because of Hurricane Sandy. She was able to leave her house on the barrier islands and make it to her mother’s house with kid. The problem was, they had to stay at her mother’s house for months. It took forever to get her house cleared of debris because of the hourly restrictions for the barrier islands. Sandy forced her family to live uncomfortably close for months. Our interviewee described how at one point her daughter pleaded for her mom to take her back to their house because she couldn’t take living in such cramped conditions anymore. Sandy forced families to find temporary houses because their homes were either washed away or were unlivable. Our interviewees daughter also apparently still had to go to school and everyday on the bus would have to pass by all the destruction caused by the storm. That is something that stays with a child forever, and can be extremely stressful mentally.
Japan- In Japan, the earthquake and tsunami had the same effect on families as Sandy, but the nuclear meltdown seemed to have an even more negative impact on them. One mother we interviewed who lived in Fukushima was constantly concerned about how much radiation her children were being exposed to. She was trying to become pregnant before the nuclear accident, but became scared to have a child once it the accident happened. She wanted to move as far away from the power plant as possible, but her husband works at a local church and both can’t and won’t relocate. Her husband does not share her concerns about the radiation reaching them and his work prevents him from moving. Now she has moved a little further from the plant without her husband, but barely sees him. This creates a new issue as her children now barely see their father. The fear of radiation has split this woman’s family apart as much as if her house was destroyed. Another woman we talked to was suing the government for various mental damages caused by the nuclear meltdown, and she hadn’t even told her husband about this lawsuit at the time we talked to her. She wanted to keep it a secret from him because her strained relationship with him was in the lawsuit. The disaster caused her and her husband to grow apart and led to her keeping major secrets from him.