Hurricanes’ Damage to Poor ‘Beyond Imagining’

Life was tough enough on Avenue D, a strip of worn cinder-block stores, homes, churches and corners inhabited by drug dealers. Then the hurricanes came, and much of what Alana Wyche owned -- plus her job -- vanished in the winds.

“My home is wet, my clothes were destroyed, my roof is gradually caving in,” she said. On Monday morning, the 20-year-old renter was tossing out shoes before throwing away her furniture, which without electricity to run air conditioners was moldering in the heat.

A child-care aide, Wyche had been without a paycheck for three weeks: Her workplace was damaged in Hurricane Frances and declared unsafe.

All she had to look forward to now, Wyche said, was government aid. “I called FEMA,” she said. “They said they are going to help me.”

In Florida’s devastating year of four hurricanes, the owners of beachfront estates, yachts, golf course apartments and middle-class homes have taken a material beating totaling billions of dollars -- not to mention the damage done to the tourism and agriculture industries.

But “the impact that we are seeing on the poor, it’s just beyond imagining,” said Margaret O’Brien-Molina, a public information officer for the American Red Cross.

“These people were poor before, but there were shelters, places for them to go,” O’Brien-Molina said from a shelter in Daytona Beach. “Now there is nothing.”

“A lot of people who were living from paycheck to paycheck now are in a world of problems,” said Paula Lewis, Democratic chairwoman of the St. Lucie County Board of Commissioners. “Not that I don’t feel sorry for people who may have lost properties on the beach. But they could probably afford it. There are other people out there, I don’t know how they are functioning.”

About 50 miles north of Palm Beach on the Atlantic coast, Fort Pierce boasts one of Florida’s oldest black settlements, with Avenue D a main commercial thoroughfare. In recent years, the neighborhood also has attracted poor whites and Mexican and Haitian immigrants. There are numerous houses of worship, some of which sustained significant damage in the hurricanes, as well as multiple storefronts where, police and residents say, dealers hawk cocaine and marijuana.

Outside Monday, some of the blue tarps put on homes damaged by Frances lay on the pavement or were wrapped around tree trunks, evidence of the additional calamity visited by Jeanne. Street signs and palm trees were down, and shingles and tar paper that had peeled off roofs littered the street.

“It’s going to be a tremendously hard time for a while to recover,” said Bernard Harrell, 64, owner of a small grocery store on Avenue D.

Harrell said the government might offer assistance, but he was skeptical it would fully compensate people on Avenue D for their losses.

“Sure, FEMA is going to give a check for a while, but how long?” Some people, Harrell said, probably wouldn’t make good use of the checks anyway.

An acquaintance, he said, already was sent $500 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fix damage to her house from Frances, but spent the money to rent a motel room and throw a party for friends.

And as a result of the hurricanes, tens of thousands of Floridians no longer have jobs: 16,474 filed disaster-related unemployment claims after Charley; 22,948 after Frances and 4,206 after Ivan, said Warren May, director of communications for the state Agency for Workplace Innovation.

On Monday, the agency was beginning to accept jobless claims from Jeanne, the hurricane that struck before midnight Saturday.

“Clearly these storms have had a tremendous impact,” May said from Tallahassee.

The recent succession of storms also has trampled Florida’s citrus industry, which traditionally has provided jobs for many African American residents of Fort Pierce. Half the state’s grapefruit crop, a specialty of the groves in this part of Florida, may have been destroyed. To find temporary jobs for fruit pickers and other workers, Lewis said, the state already had been in contact with local growers.

The situation could be even more dire for Florida’s migrant agricultural laborers, many of whom are in the country illegally.

“We have gone into affected areas with bilingual workers on our trucks, trying to get out the message that people don’t have to worry about their immigration status if they need help,” said Carol Lang, Florida director of social services for the Salvation Army in Tampa.

“These people were living in tin shacks,” Lang said. “Now they have nothing -- and no jobs. We have given them food, blankets, hygiene kits, tried to find them shelter. We have gotten so many letters of thanks from immigrants. That population has actually responded to our efforts more than any other.”

Jacob Dipietre, a spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush, said that the state was “doing everything we can” to assist everyone affected by the hurricanes, without regard to income level.

“We are working on providing the basics -- power, water, food -- trying to get back to some kind of normalcy,” Dipietre said Monday. “The governor is traveling all over the state today, checking on people, making sure they have what they need. So many programs are involved. People can file disaster unemployment claims, the Department of Children and Families has emergency food stamp programs. There are just so many things we are doing for all the people affected by these storms.”

President Bush, the governor’s brother, asked Congress late Monday for more than $7.1 billion to help Florida and other Southeastern states. It was Bush’s third request of Capitol Hill for supplemental storm aid, for a total of $12.2 billion.

During a visit to Fort Pierce on Sunday, Gov. Bush said the state must construct more affordable housing units to replace those left uninhabitable by the hurricanes.

But there was a feeling that the economics of fast-growing Florida may conspire against that.

Some farmland devastated by the storms “will never be put back in production again. The land will go to developers for condos for people who can afford them,” O’Brien-Molina said. “What will happen to the people who live off that land now? Where will they go?”

She has been in Florida since Hurricane Charley struck, she said, “and the level of need, the way these problems are going to grow, the amount of money needed -- it’s just unnerving.”

And with many schools closed because of hurricane damage, O’Brien-Molina said, some lower-income people might have to stay home from their jobs to take care of their children.

In Fort Pierce and the rest of St. Lucie County, officials urgently needed to find housing for up to 400 people -- most of them poor -- who lost their homes in this year’s storms, Red Cross official Ron Ellingsworth said Monday.

“A lot of the low-income housing has been destroyed,” Ellingsworth said. “It wasn’t built to hurricane standards.”

Three weeks after Frances struck, the Red Cross official noted, he was still providing shelter for 120 people who had no other place to live.

The lack of public transportation since Jeanne was keeping Lanetta Ellis in her Avenue D apartment with her daughters, ages 2 and 3. That’s where the single mother rode out the storm, as red roof tiles smashed to the ground, because she couldn’t carry her girls, food and clothing to get a bus for a shelter.

“It was terrible, there was a lot of water, a lot of leakage, and the roof caved in,” the 22-year-old said.

Her daughters saw the storm as a thrilling indoor camping trip, enjoying the cold ravioli and Vienna sausages their mother served. But with the power still out two days later, the girls were complaining that they couldn’t watch cartoons.

Ellis, studying to be a certified nurse’s assistant, didn’t go to school Monday. Classes had been suspended because there was no power. She washed her clothes in the kitchen sink and wished aloud that life would soon get back to normal.

“Hopefully before Friday, before the supplies I bought for the hurricane run out.”

Dahlburg reported from Fort Pierce and Marshall from Seattle.