Florida Relief Effort Mired in Confusion

He looked much older than 38, the gaunt little man shuffling slowly down Palm Avenue in 90-degree heat.

He’d walked for more than an hour to Florida City from the town of Homestead, where his house had been destroyed, because someone told him that that was where he needed to go to apply for work.

But the information--as it so often is--was wrong.

Now the man, an unemployed farm worker who for more than a week had been sleeping in his wreck of a house “to keep from sleeping on the street,” was trudging back to Homestead. Applications for cleanup jobs were being taken at an elementary school he’d passed a couple of miles earlier.

That is how it has been since Hurricane Andrew devastated much of South Florida on Aug. 24. Desperate victims struggle to get somewhere because the radio or the newspaper or a relief worker or a friend said that is where they need to go, but when they get there, they’re told to go somewhere else.

Or maybe they find the doors locked, with nary a clue about what to do.

In the aftermath of the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, the relief effort, while initially slow to take shape, has been massive. Twenty thousand troops have been deployed in a campaign President Bush this week called “unprecedented in size and impact.” Hundreds of volunteers and thousands of tons of food and supplies have flooded the area to help as many as 250,000 people left homeless.

And although things are improving, officials acknowledge that these resources and personnel often have been deployed in a poorly coordinated and ineffectual manner.

Because of the overwhelming number of donations and an ineffective storage and distribution system, substantial quantities of food and supplies never reached the victims but instead were left for days to rot on the ground near government command centers.

The first of a number of planned tent cities finally opened Tuesday after days of delay, but because of confusion caused by disagreements between the Army and local officials over when the homeless should be allowed in, only two families used the tents the first night.

“Everybody wants to help, but they don’t know who is in charge,” said Francisco Lucas, the Mexican Consulate’s cultural attache in Miami who was here helping in the relief effort.

Speaking of the first week after the disaster, Tom David, a special assistant city manager in Homestead on leave from Dade County to assist in the relief, said: “We had no coordination at all. The central governing authority, which is the city of Homestead, was not prepared to handle the onslaught.”

Neither, apparently, was the Federal Emergency Management Agency quite up to the task. Officials credit the eventual arrival of the military--and especially the arrival Monday of Maj. Gen. Steven Arnold, the new commander of the Homestead sector, with turning the situation around.

Since Monday, the military has relocated mobile kitchens and dry-food distribution sites to put them closer to the people in need. It also has set up a trilingual radio station (broadcasting in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole) to get disaster information to the needy and handed out 10,000 free radios to people with no other way of getting information.

Doctors have been better dispersed throughout the disaster area to make them more accessible to the sick and injured. And the Red Cross set up a sophisticated food distribution system, just in time for the massive shipments of aid coming in from across the country after Bush’s televised appeal Tuesday.

Still, officials acknowledge, there are isolated pockets untouched by relief workers. Officials say there still are migrant farm workers bathing in streams and drinking contaminated water. Some people who still are sleeping in rubble believed that the nearest Red Cross shelters were 30 miles away in Miami when actually there was one within walking distance of their demolished home.

“You can’t get to every place,” said Eliza Perry, a Homestead city councilwoman who was helping in the relief effort. “We know there are people out there with great needs. We could feel their needs. But we couldn’t get to them.”

The great irony of the chaotic relief effort is that food, clothing and supplies have been plentiful. Volunteers from throughout Florida and other states began coming here immediately with donations. On a daily basis, convoys of supplies would arrive at Homestead City Hall only to be sent away because there was no place to store the goods. Warehouses--what few survived the storm--were full. Many of the supplies were sent to the wrong distribution points and so drivers again were sent away.

The Samaritans, many angry and frustrated that they couldn’t get their items to the needy immediately, began leaving them in open fields and along the roadside, where they rotted in the rain and heat, far away from most victims.

“There were literally hundreds of tractor-trailers, trucks and cars coming all day long,” said David, the Homestead special assistant manager. “They all wanted to do something and they all wanted to do it right then.”

Homestead was ill-equipped to coordinate such an effort, and relief workers and officials “have been overwhelmed,” said Red Cross official Bill Rosen.

Literally thousands of people are believed to be still living in homes that are unfit for habitation. Among them is Alma Weaver, who on the night after the hurricane sought refuge at two public schools that she’d heard would be used for shelters--but found them closed.

The other day Weaver and dozens of her neighbors were sitting solemnly amid the rubble and garbage of their battered apartment building, a nightmarish vision of almost post-apocalyptic proportions. The remnant of a huge garbage-bonfire still smoldered in the center courtyard. Felled trees, debris and smashed cars littered the area. The place stank of decay.

Even though they had no lights or water, even though some of them slept outdoors because their homes were too hot or too wretched, and even though fear of looters forced the men to take turns staying awake at night to stand guard, the residents had decided to stay right where they were. In the whirlwind of missing and misinformation about food and aid and shelter, and with the task of getting help so difficult, going nowhere seemed preferable to running in circles.

Others have spurned the Army’s tents, saying they’d rather continue living amid the rubble than leave their belongings behind.

“I ain’t going to a tent,” said Azalee Harris, who continued to live in her dilapidated apartment. “I’d blow my brains out first.”

For the 25,000 Mexican and Mexican-American farm workers in south Dade County, help came faster from the Mexican government.

Bulmaro Pacheto, the Mexican consul from Miami, said Mexico donated 119 tents, 100 portable radios, 20 tons of food and three storage trucks to hold donated food. “We’ve been coming daily to try to identify the needs of the Mexican people,” he said, noting that consulate workers had identified 12 distinct colonies of migrant and seasonal workers and was coordinating with American relief workers to get aid to them.

Because the area’s Spanish radio station was damaged in the storm and only began operating again Tuesday, isolated workers had gotten little relief or health information. Some workers are still drinking contaminated water, said Juanita Alvarez-Mainster, a volunteer.

Until Tuesday, when a shipment of portable toilets arrived, she said that the hundreds of workers who gravitated here had to make do with one portable toilet.

While David acknowledged that the relief effort is not yet perfect, he said that the difference between the coordination today and last week’s chaos was “like night and day” thanks to the military, which he said was able to get supplies and materials to the disaster area faster than FEMA “because the military has its own supply system.”

Others criticize the military’s priorities.

Jimmy Tucker, a contractor from South Carolina who had spent four days trying unsuccessfully to meet with the Homestead city manager to discuss participating in cleanup efforts, complained that the military personnel seemed to be spending too much time setting up their own camps.

“If every one of them would go out and get them a stick of wood apiece, hell, the town would be clear by now,” he groused.