Bush Pledges $10 Million for Florida Cleanup Jobs

President Bush on Wednesday set aside $10 million to hire 5,000 cleanup workers as corporations joined in the first trickle of financial aid to Florida communities laid waste in what may be the country’s most expensive natural disaster.

The estimate of homelessness, put at 50,000 earlier in the week, was upped to 180,000 three days after Hurricane Andrew broadsided the peninsula.

“If there are three people per home, you are talking about 180,000 homeless,” Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) said after meeting with Dade County officials, who estimated that 63,000 homes were destroyed.

Though survivors were turning to the formidable tasks of rebuilding, the number of people in Red Cross and Dade County shelters did not greatly decline because so many returned home for the first time only to find their dwellings uninhabitable.

On Tuesday night, nearly 120,000 people remained in shelters--34,000 in facilities set up by Dade County and 84,000 in Red Cross shelters. For those in the hardest-hit area of south Dade County, the most desperate need was for money, since thousands had lost everything.

The cost of rebuilding is too stupendous for credible estimates. While Dade County officials put the toll at $15 billion to $20 billion, the Federal Emergency Management Agency fixed it at $6 billion to $10 billion.

“We’re going to move now from being in an adrenaline period of high energy to the second phase, which is the realization that this is going to be a long sustained recovery period,” Graham said.

Residents fortunate enough to have insurance were lined up to file claims Wednesday and the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected to open the first disaster relief offices before the end of the week.

The federal disaster agency will make $57 million in “seed money” available to get the serious recovery effort started.

At the same time he announced the federal fund for cleanup jobs, Bush named Transportation Secretary Andrew H. Card Jr. to oversee the federal response to the hurricane’s assault on both Florida and Louisiana. He appealed to Americans to pull together in the effort, saying that the storm’s destruction “goes beyond anything we have known in recent years.”

As the dispossessed struggled to regain control of their lives, several corporations--among them Blockbusters video, Humana Hospital Corp., Anheuser-Busch and AT&T--announced; cash contributions of as much as $1 million.

Thousands found their first attempt to jump-start their lives frustrated by a monstrous traffic jam leading into the devastated communities of Cutler Ridge, Perrine and Homestead in southern Dade County.

Hundreds of volunteers were organized to direct traffic through intersections but driving was still hazardous.

National Guardsmen, Dade County police and U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers set up checkpoints on major arteries to examine the identification of all people entering the area.

The intent was to keep looters out of the ravaged area but few vehicles appeared to be turned back. The checkpoints became choke points backing up traffic for miles.

In Homestead and Cutler Ridge, emergency field hospitals were set up to care not only for storm victims, but others injured in their first attempt at cleanup.

Volunteers’ responses to the calls for help at times exceeded officials’ ability to use them.

After hearing Gov. Lawton Chiles appeal for medical professionals, more than 40 nurses, doctors and paramedics from West Palm Beach drove to Miami and reported to Baptist Hospital early Wednesday.

Finding themselves unneeded there, they headed south to the emergency field hospital at Cutler Ridge, where they waited in a parking lot until midafternoon.

Finally, 10 were asked to help out while the others headed south to Homestead. “We have enough people that we could set up our own hospital, if we had a place to do it,” said Penny Galloway, a paramedic.

As it was, the field hospitals, treating a steady succession of puncture wounds, cuts, sprains and bruises, were being run by Special Operations Response teams from Indiana and North Carolina.

The nonprofit teams, sponsored by hospitals and corporations and trained for such disasters had been flown in by Air Force transports Tuesday morning, bringing with them a 90-bed mobile hospital, their own supplies, food and electrical generators.

While the thousands of storm refugees lined up to buy food, ice, water and gasoline, the more affluent waited to buy generators, selling for as much as $4,000.

Nearly a million people remained without electricity in the state, though Florida Power & Light Co., with help from utilities in Georgia and elsewhere, was gradually making headway.

The lights were on again in luxurious Key Biscayne, a little more than 24 hours after residents were allowed to cross the Rickenbacker causeway from the mainland to their homes.

Officials conceded, however, that it will be weeks before electricity will be fully restored or all the public water supplies in the area will be safe for use.

Nothing more dramatically reflected the power of the storm than the wreckage made of electrical facilities.

Along U.S. 1 through the southern part of the county, huge concrete poles that had supported heavy lines now tilt crazily, while some lie flat, snapped off just above the ground. With most of the thousands of injured having been treated, one of the most serious concerns is that fouled water and spoiled food could lead to outbreaks of dysentery, hepatitis and salmonella poisoning.

“The possibility of an epidemic is very small,” said state health officer Dr. Charles Mahan. “That’s what we are trying to prevent.”

As is usually the case, the most complete devastation was visited upon poorer areas where small homes constructed of wood were no match for the wind screaming off the Atlantic in gusts as high as 164 m.p.h. In such areas, where residents were left without homes, food or money, the Salvation Army has begun setting up mobile canteens and the Pentagon has sent in military rations.

Dade County Emergency Relief Services Director Kate Hale said workers were stepping up efforts to distribute food and water and to keep moving the homeless out of wreckage and into shelters.

“We are looking at today’s objectives of getting a lot more food and water out into the community, setting up staging points so people can get access,” she said.

By late Wednesday, Florida’s death toll stood at 15. The toll may rise. The Coast Guard called off a search for two men reported missing on a yacht off the coast since Sunday.

Although Dade County was put under curfew for the third consecutive night, officials breathed somewhat easier over the possibility of massive looting.

Although there were 70 arrests for curfew violations Tuesday night, only eight were for looting. On Wednesday night, the clampdown was relaxed, not going into effect until 11 p.m., but armed National Guardsmen remained on patrol.

Among those arrested for looting were two men in a rubber raft gathering valuables from sinking yachts off Miami Beach.

Amid the wreckage of the federal prison whose residents--including former Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega--were evacuated ahead of the storm, officials sought Wednesday to apprehend new occupants.

A number of baboons, escapees from the wrecked Miami zoo, were spotted there. Dozens of tropical birds were also on the loose, as were monkeys that fled a University of Miami primate laboratory.

It had been reported that the monkeys are infected with the HIV virus responsible for AIDS, but officials Wednesday said that is not the case. The animals are from the center’s breeding stock, they said.

Times staff writer Kenneth Freed contributed to this story.