Delayed trauma hits New Yorkers

NEW YORK wakes up this morning to a poignant commemoration of those who died six months ago in the 11 September attack on the World Trade Centre - a day many people are finding hard to put behind them.

On the stroke of 8:46am, Manhattan will fall silent to honour the memory of the dead. A few minutes later, a giant steel and bronze sculpture that once sat in the middle of the World Trade Centre plaza will be unveiled near Ground Zero as a symbol of the city’s resilience. Later this evening, two beams of light will be switched a few hundred yards from the rubble of the Twin Towers as another tribute.

But despite these and other attempts to display courage, it is becoming clear a second wave of trauma is hitting New Yorkers, and it may be even tougher to treat than the first.

Immediately after the World Trade Centre collapse, counsellors were swamped with requests for help from survivors, rescue workers and victims’ relatives, as well as people who watched the tragedy unfold on television. After a lull in November and December, calls to assistance programmes have started again this month on an unprecedented scale.

HENRY Spitz, who heads the couples therapy programme at Columbia University, said: "There is a background tension there all the time. The level of irritability is so high, it’s like chalk on a blackboard."

According to recent statistics published by the Wall Street Journal, psychological problems appear to be spiralling out of control in the fire department.

More than 120 workers are off on stress leave and some have started taking anti-depressants and sleeping pills.

Increasing numbers - 385 in January, a 50 per cent increase from the month before - are seeking psychological help, which has been donated free of charge.

Nobody who visited the scene at Ground Zero could forget the heroic look on the firemen’s faces as they toiled through the wreckage, desperately looking for glimmers of life. Their courage, determination and conviction shone through in a truly amazing fashion.

Six months on, irritability is a widespread symptom among those struggling to get over the attacks. Lethargy and an inability to focus are also common, according to experts.

MALACHY Corrigan, a psychologist, said that most worrying were the appalling images that haunt some firefighters.

He cited one who found that when he was at home playing with his child on his day off, all he could think of were the body parts he had collected during the week at Ground Zero.

Michal O’Keeffe, a fire battalion chief, has a theory to explain why more firefighters are coming forward for help. "In the days and weeks following, all we had were tasks. We worked round the clock. Then we attended funerals - there were days of ten to 12 in 24 hours."

Roger Smyth, a Belfast-born paramedic who spent several days searching for survivors, said: "I’ll never get those images out of my head. But the tragedy hasn’t changed my perception of New York.

"Despite what’s happened, America’s still very much the land of freedom and civilisation as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been here for over two years now and I’m very happy. In my mind it’s no more dangerous than anywhere else."

Despite signs of stress and frayed tempers among New Yorkers, nobody complains about heightened security measures all over the city.

At the two main airports, JFK and La Guardia, waiting time in queues has doubled because of the laborious security checks. Courts and federal buildings employ rigid measures and on the roads there are checkpoints on each of the city’s four main bridges. Traffic is worse than ever.

Things are not going smoothly either for many relatives of the attacks’ nearly 3,000 victims. Many of those who lost loved ones remain bitter over the manner in which they have been treated by the authorities.

Many grieving families complained that they did not have the time or strength to complete the many forms they were asked to fill out before being given access to any charity payments.

One case that stands out is that of Deena Gilbey, whose husband, Paul, a businessman, died while trying to rescue others on the 80th floor of the South Tower.

The mother-of-two, originally from Southend, in Essex, has been told she must leave the US by 11 September, 2002 - a year after her husband’s death - or face being deported.

This is because Ms Gilbey entered the country on her husband’s green card, which gave the family the right to live and work in the United States. Now that he is dead, she has no right to stay in the country that has been her home for eight years.

"I’ll spend Monday paying tribute to my Paul by having lunch with other widows and remembering what wonderful men our husbands were," she said. "It’s been the most upsetting six months of my life but I have a feeling the worst is yet to come. I’m going to be deported in six months’ time, so imagine how I feel. I love this country."

ANOTHER survivor suffering post-traumatic stress is Marcy Borders. In the six months since the image of her leaving the Twin Towers caked in ash was beamed around the world, the 28-year-old has been disowned by her family, lost custody of her eight-year-old daughter and also claims to have been abandoned by the government and denied access to pay-outs.

Her weight has plummeted from eight stones to six and she has to drink herself to sleep. She has become a figure of ridicule among neighbours in the run-down suburb of Bayonne, New Jersey, who have daubed graffiti on her door and nicknamed her "The Dust Lady".

She has suffered a nervous breakdown and ventures out of her rented flat only once or twice a week to buy groceries.

"I don’t know what I’m going to do, " she sobbed, when asked of her plans for today. "I’ll probably just sit in my room and cry, just like I always do."

There is no doubt that New Yorkers miss the presence of the city’s former mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. With his hands-on presence and tremendous sense of urgency, he became a hero in almost everybody's eyes. His successor, Michael Bloomberg, has a tough act to follow.

At a press conference last Thursday, Mr Bloomberg attempted to reassure residents. All across lower Manhattan, he said, roads were being resurfaced. The telephone service is 90 per cent restored and seven out of 11 damaged subway stations have reopened. The massive pile of rubble at Ground Zero is now 83 per cent gone.

"The bottom line is that when you have something of this magnitude it takes time to recover," said Mr Bloomberg, 60. He added: "It just takes an enormous number of people and agencies at all levels to help put things together."

Neither Mr Bloomberg nor George Pataki, the governor of New York state, could offer much of a vision for what downtown will look like in the future.

"The actual redevelopment of Ground Zero is some steps away," said Mr Pataki. "We think the important thing is to make sure it is a thoughtful plan that is developed in an inclusive process."

HUNT FOR OSAMA: TRAIL GOES COLD

IN EARLY February, an unmanned American drone fired a missile at a group of tribesmen in Zawar Kili who the Central Intelligence Agency thought where al-Qaeda leaders. One of them was described as "unusually tall", prompting the US to ask for DNA samples from Osama bin Laden’s relatives to match with body parts found on the scene of the missile strike.

The al-Qaeda leader is over 6ft tall, but the tests appear to have been inconclusive and yesterday, as the US declared Operation Anaconda - the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan’s eastern mountains - to all intents and purposes over, the trail appears to have gone cold.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, summed up the situation last month when he said that bin Laden was in Afghanistan, somewhere else or dead.

There has been a flurry of speculation that he has been hiding in Kashmir, or that he escaped from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia, Chechnya, Sudan, Indonesia or the Philippines

The problem with these options is that to get there he would have to fly or go by ship, making him vulnerable to interception.

The north of Afghanistan is in the hands of Northern Alliance warlords, making it unlikely that he has escaped into the Islamic fundamentalist heartlands of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Kyrgizstan.

This makes it far more likely that he is lying low in the mountainous region along the Pakistan-Afghan border - or has moved deep into the interior of Afghanistan.

Even at the height of the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, Moscow’s troops rarely entered this remote and desolate region because the high altitude made it almost impossible to fly helicopters.

The theory that he has fled into the interior was strengthened over the weekend by reports that bin Laden moved his family to a safe house in a remote part of Afghanistan days before the 11 September attacks on the United States.

One of bin Laden’s four wives, identified only as AS, told of the move in an interview with a Saudi magazine.

She told how, shortly before the attacks on New York and Washington, "he came home and gave me a telephone and asked me to speak to my mother and tell her that we are going be out of touch for a long time".

She said one of bin Laden’s sons and some guards took her family from their home in Kandahar to "a place south, close to Pakistan’s border, in a house belonging to one of the tribal chiefs. After several days we heard about the explosions in America and that it had declared war on Osama".

She said that, after the United States began bombing on 7 October, "we moved to a mountainous area with some children and lived in a cave for two months". Then, they moved again when bin Laden’s son and tribesmen "took us to Pakistan where they handed us over to the government".

But what of the theory that bin Laden is dead? "I feel inside me that he is still alive and, if he were dead, the whole world would know because the death of Osama cannot be concealed," the wife said.

Some western intelligence sources believe bin Laden is hoping to lull the Americans into a false sense of security before unleashing a high profile attack.

"Such an attack would make the Americans look stupid and show that the US has been unable to defeat bin Laden, massively boosting his popularity in the Arab world," said one source. "It also has the potential to break US morale in the same way the Tet offensive did in Vietnam."