A HISTORY OF BEING THERE

And then, there are occurrences so heinous that they challenge the mettle of even those most highly trained to deal with them – such as these galvanizing events, witnessed by most Americans in the blue flicker of televised reality horror: Killeen… Waco… Oklahoma City… the World Trade Center… the Columbia. For the professionals who ply the front lines of such unnatural disasters, the overwhelming sensory assault can become a psychic tsunami. “It begins eating you from the inside out,” says Dr. Fair.

October 16, 1991: Massacre in Killeen

At the peak of lunch hour, a deranged man drove a pickup truck through the plate glass windows of a crowded cafeteria restaurant in Killeen, Texas. Armed with two semi-automatic pistols, he embarked on a 15-minute killing spree — at the time, the worst mass murder in U.S. history. By the time he barricaded himself in a bathroom and committed suicide, 24 people were dead and 20 more injured.

The Killeen Police Department immediately recognized symptoms of traumatic stress among its employees. “We received a call the next day to bring our trauma team,” Dr. Fair recalls. “They had heard of the CISD process, but they didn't know much about it. Law enforcement had just begun to enter the era of critical stress management. There were only six trauma teams in Texas that that provided CISD services, and our department in Brownwood was the only all-law enforcement, all-chaplain team.” Within 48 hours of the massacre, Dr. Fair’s team debriefed nearly 100 employees of Killeen PD, including “law enforcement officers, the unit secretaries who had to write the grisly reports, and the dispatchers who had to handle the frantic phone calls.”

April 19, 1993 and 1995

Dr. Fair was called upon to “debrief the debriefers” and provide post-traumatic counseling services for some of the officers and personnel involved in the most notorious disasters of the mid-‘90s. Nearly 80 lives were lost in the Branch Davidian standoff outside of Waco, Texas in 1993. Two years later, 168 men, women and children died in the domestic terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Though he did not visit the disaster scenes personally, he was among several professionals in his field called upon to help those who were there cope with the aftermath.

September 11, 2001: Ground Zero

For a gut-wrenching week, Dr. Fair served as a chaplain at Ground Zero on behalf of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owner of the World Trade Center. Their operations center had been completely destroyed. Eighty-four employees, including six Port Authority police officers, perished in the collapse of the twin towers.

“I went to ‘the pit,’ while it was still burning,” he somberly recounts. “I talked to the rescuers, men and women that were policemen, firemen and EMS personnel. While I was there the event changed from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. That is very, very hard on the rescuers because you now acknowledge that there is no one else alive. You have gone from attempting to save lives to having to recover remains. That was very difficult for everybody involved.”

Dr. Fair also visited command posts, counseled with morgue workers, and paid calls on hospitalized officers. The experience was of such magnitude that afterward, Dr. Fair himself experienced the onset of post-traumatic stress — a professional hazard known as “compassion fatigue.”

“People in the helping professions can sometimes overextend themselves. From a spirituality standpoint, with Ground Zero, I had prayed and I felt like I was ready to face that trauma. While I was there, I was amazed that, while I saw some very, very disturbing, horrific sights, I was able, with God's help, to stay somewhat above the shock. When I returned home, I thought I was fine. Over the next few days I began having some headaches, muscle aches and stomach problems. Now here's old Dave, who fancies himself as a guy that really knows how to read the signs and symptoms and knows how to work with people and intervene.”

Fortunately, Dr. Fair was able to debrief with a colleague, and get back on kilter. “That episode proves that nobody is immune from being affected by this type of thing. We have to take care of ourselves, too.”

February 1, 2003: Columbia Debris Field

Hurtling through the sky at 18 times the speed of sound, the space shuttle Columbia was 16 minutes away from the conclusion of its 28th mission when it exploded. A wide swath of debris, including the remains of seven crewmembers, rained across east Texas and western Louisiana. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took charge of the recovery of the bodies and the shuttle parts. Participating personnel included local, state and federal law enforcement officers, firefighters, military units, U.S. Forestry workers and NASA engineers, who may have lacked some of the disaster scene preparedness of the others.

FEMA brought in Dr. Fair and another Texas-based chaplain to counsel with the NASA employees who were walking the grids of the debris field. Dr. Fair attached himself to an EMS van and traveled across East Texas. “I would get out and walk with the crews, visit with them on their breaks, talk with them in the tent camps in the evenings. The whole thing is to let people talk. It’s called ‘ventilate and validate.’ I ask questions, close my mouth, let them talk until they’re through, and then I validate their experience. That's what we do in these situations.”

“Traumatic stress is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation,” Dr. Fair notes. “It can self correct, over time, but sometimes, people get stuck. If they're stuck for over thirty days, it can become a psychological diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

That's why police chaplains, and their use of interventional processes like CISD, are such valuable assets to public agencies in today's fast-paced, stress-laced culture. Also a licensed EMT, Dr. Fair fully grasps his “first aid” analogy. Just as interventional medical treatment potentially averts residual physical harm, emotional first aid can help prevent deeper psychological scars.

HURRICANE KATRINA

Hurricane Katrina first made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane just north of Miami, Florida on August 25, 2005, then again on August 29 along the Central Gulf Coast near New Orleans, Louisiana, as a Category 4 storm. Its storm surge soon breached the levee system that protected New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Most of the city was subsequently flooded mainly by water from the lake. This and other major damage to the coastal regions of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama made Katrina the most destructive and costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States. People all over the country are trying to help New Orleans and other places that were hit.

The official death toll stands at 1,302 and the damage from $70 to $130 billion, topping Hurricane Andrew as the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Over a million people were displaced — a humanitarian crisis on a scale unseen in the U.S. since the Great Depression.

In Louisiana, the hurricane's eye made landfall at 6:10am CDT on Monday, August 29. After 11:00am CDT, several sections of the levee system in New Orleans collapsed. By early September, people were being forcibly evacuated, mostly by bus to neighboring states.

Federal disaster declarations blanketed 90,000 square miles (²233,000 km) of the United States, an area almost as large as the United Kingdom. The hurricane left an estimated five million people without power, and it may take up to two months for all power to be restored. On September 3, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as "probably the worst catastroph e, or set of catastroph es" in the country's history, referring to the hurricane itself plus the flooding of New Orleans.