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On August 25, 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the central Texas coast, a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 130 miles per hour. It stalled there for 3 days, breaking the U.S. record for the most rainfall in a single storm, flooding Houston and surrounding areas (Foster, 2017). According to the Department of State Health Services, at least 88 people died, 62 due to wind, rain, or floods, and 26 due to unsafe or unhealthy conditions (Afiune, 2017). The death toll would have been higher if not for citizen volunteers who used their own boats to rescue people trapped by the flood (Mann & Salamon, 2017). Survivors were emotionally traumatized (Plohetsi, Ball, & Taboada, 2017) and approximately 47,000 left homeless (Espinosa & Muhammad, 2017).
Incredibly, some of downtown Houston was spared, including the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies where I am a faculty member. Once the institute leaders determined that the faculty and trainees were safe, it was decided to start classes as scheduled on September 8. Many of us were in a mental fog during a somber meeting that day. We learned that our administrator lost a close friend to drowning. A faculty member was rescued from the second story of his home after the first story flooded. Others experienced the total or partial destruction of homes. Some clinicians were volunteering in refugee centers. By the third week of classes, the acute mental fog was lifting, but the losses and difficulties continued. For example, one trainee's family could not afford to leave their home, so they lived upstairs without a kitchen because the first story was gutted.
Although Harvey was not the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, it was an environmental disaster. Ecological crises will persist for years due to oil, chemical, and sewer spills and the destruction of water treatment facilities (Bajak & Minkoff, 2017; Haurwitz, 2017). Mold grew in buildings that were invaded by floodwaters full of dirt, chemicals, and sewage. Through