By SUSAN E. WHITE, The Virginian-Pilot
© September 23, 2006
VIRGINIA BEACH - Fire Battalion Chief David Hutcheson still recalls the cases in fairly vivid detail.
An elderly couple died when the home caught fire. An investigation showed the cause was an overloaded extension cord, but fire officials say the home's overload of contents fueled the fire's intensity...
"It definitely was a contributing factor to their death," Hutcheson said.
These cases all involved hoarders - people who hold on to items that they think are invaluable....
VIRGINIA BEACH - Fire Battalion Chief David Hutcheson still recalls the cases in fairly vivid detail.
An elderly couple died when the home caught fire. An investigation showed the cause was an overloaded extension cord, but fire officials say the home's overload of contents fueled the fire's intensity...
"It definitely was a contributing factor to their death," Hutcheson said.
These cases all involved hoarders - people who hold on to items that they think are invaluable.
Virginia Beach has dealt with hoarders in different ways for years, but the house fire in May tipped the scale, Hutcheson said. The city's Hoarding Services Support Group was formed a month later.
The group - which includes officials from the Fire Department, Emergency Medical Services, Social Services, the Health Department, Housing and Neighborhood Preservation, and the Bureau of Animal Control - aims to educate the public on the dangers of hoarding.
By working together, the departments also try to connect residents with adequate services, said Terry Jenkins, the city's human services director.
"If we can identify them early, then maybe we can prevent the problem," Jenkins said. "At least we'll know who they are and where there is a risk."
Similar groups have formed across the country. Fairfax County created a hoarding task force in 1998 for the same reasons that Virginia Beach's group started, said John Yetman, chairman of the Fairfax task force and the county's environmental health specialist in the community health and safety section.
"What would happen," he said, "is we would all show up at a house - police, fire and health inspectors - and we'd start talking about other cases we'd seen. And we discovered that we were all telling the same war stories from different perspectives."
On average, the Fairfax group gets 80 to 120 hoarding calls a year, Yetman said. Many involve animals. Last year, county officials found a resident with 400 cats.
"The oxygen level was depleted and down to less than 19 percent in the home," Yetman recalled. "It was enough to give you a headache."
For years, Virginia Beach officials mainly found hoarding instances by happenstance. For example, a neighbor might call code enforcement or public health officials to complain about another neighbor's backyard overflowing with junk.
Those who work closely with the elderly also reported cases. Often, volunteers found home-owners who couldn't bear to get rid of anything, including junk mail, said Judith Stevens, executive director of the Citizens Committee to Protect the Elderly and a member of the city's hoarding support group.
"I think for some of these people, they lived through the Great Depression where they saved everything and they were afraid to throw away anything," she said. "Saving comes naturally to them."
Experts say hoarding can be more complicated.
The behavior can lead to significant clutter that impedes a person's ability to live in his own home, said Randy Frost, a psychology professor at Smith College in Massachusetts. Frost is one of the country's leading researchers on hoarding.
"It can create a significant interference in the person's life in the stress that it creates, or the threat it poses on health and safety, or in the conflicts with that person's family," Frost said.
Frost and Gail Steketee, interim dean at Boston University's School of Social Work, are co-coordinators of the New England Hoarding Consortium. They have studied the behavior for nearly a decade. Ultimately, hoarding is a subtype of obsessive compulsive disorder, Frost said.
"The samples we've studied recently show over half of the people have significant depression and nearly a third have generalized anxiety disorder," he said. "And a significant number have other OCD symptoms."
Going into someone's home and cleaning out the clutter doesn't solve the problem, Frost said. Hoarders have an "information processing problem," he said. "They can't get themselves organized to do a step-by-step process to get rid of things."
Treatment, he said, focuses on teaching people how to tolerate their urges to collect or acquire items.
Frost said he is encouraged that more cities are looking closely at the issue.
"Some kind of integrated approach by the community is needed," he said. "If you have a whole team of people from various sectors, each has had some experiences with this problem and their combined wisdom can help form a protocol for dealing with it."
Hutcheson said the Beach group may create a Web site and a central phone number that the public can use to report hoarding problems. For now, city departments are trying to educate each other and figure out how each agency can play a role in keeping residents safe.
"We're trying to get out in front of this so we don't have another fire like we had in May," Hutcheson said. "It was just a terrible tragedy that we don't want to happen again."