20,000 Families Homeless Now in the Panhandle After Hurricane Michael
A Florida City, Hit Hard by Hurricane Michael, Seeks More Housing Aid
WASHINGTON — Residents and officials from Panama City, Fla., are urging the Federal Emergency Management Agency to speed up its response to a worsening housing crunch that has left thousands homeless or living in buildings damaged when Hurricane Michael tore through the Panhandle well-nigh three weeks agone.
Officials in Panama City gave FEMA loftier marks for its initial response to the storm, which slammed into the Panhandle as a Category four hurricane on October. 10. Merely as electricity and other services come back on line, they are becoming frustrated with the agency'due south complex bureaucracy and increasingly alarmed past what they see every bit an uncoordinated effort to forbid a permanent exodus of tempest survivors from their communities.
Estimates vary widely on the number of people rendered homeless past the storm — local officials place the number at 10,000 to 20,000, with more than 1,000 living in 3 shelters around the urban center.
Final calendar week, the mayor of Panama Metropolis, Greg Brudnicki, made an impassioned plea to federal officials to fast-rails a comprehensive housing plan. He implored them to consider a range of options, including renting modular units and trailers, converting a school into a medium-term residential eye, and leasing local condominium and hotel space. Mr. Brudnicki fifty-fifty floated the idea of repurposing barges or cruise ships into floating shelters.
In addition, Florida lawmakers, led past the state'due south two senators, Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson, wrote to the FEMA administrator, Brock Long, urging him to "quickly approve" Florida's application for emergency housing assistance.
"The magnitude of the storm requires the use of all available resources from FEMA," they wrote.
Legislative staff members privately described the alphabetic character every bit a thinly veiled attempt to light a fire under Mr. Long.
"It's such a huge, complicated organization," Mr. Brudnicki said of FEMA on Sunday. "They are trying their best, just when I sit downwards with somebody, I look them to tell me what they are doing and when things will be available."
"That's starting to happen at present," he said. "But this is a crunch, and my goal is to make sure that nosotros could take care of all of our people as soon equally possible. I don't want a flying out of here like there was from Katrina, and nosotros have to human activity now to keep that from happening."
As of Sat, 48,665 households in Bay County, where Panama City is, have applied for assistance through FEMA — about a quarter of all people living in the Gulf Coast county.
So far, 2,273 homeowners and six,145 renters have received FEMA rental help payouts, totaling nearly $16.v million, co-ordinate to the most recent statistics gathered past the bureau'southward Atlanta regional office.
Another $17.v meg has been paid out to homeowners for repairs or replacement of their wind-dilapidated houses, a pocket-sized down payment on what is expected to be a multibillion-dollar federal recovery and rebuilding effort that will bridge years.
FEMA's main temporary housing initiative, the Transitional Sheltering Assistance program, provides cash payments to landlords willing to rent to people displaced by Michael. Merely so many of Panama City's buildings were damaged that the pool of available apartments is nearing zero. Moreover, many owners of undamaged upscale condominiums and hotels in nearby Panama City Beach are simply unwilling to hire to low-income tenants, Mr. Brudnicki and others said.
Of the 300-plus options listed in FEMA's housing database, nigh were hours away, and merely i — the eighteen-unit Lord's day-N-Sands Motel — was actually in the Panama City surface area, according to The Florida Times-Union.
Mr. Brudnicki has paid special attention to finding temporary housing for local teachers, who are due to be back in classrooms side by side week and need to be within easy driving distance of their jobs.
Paradigm
He institute dozens of condo units were bachelor for about $200 a night, and FEMA referred the landlord to the shelter assistance program. But at that place was a hitch: FEMA reported that it did not accept the authority to earmark the apartments for a specific profession, similar teachers.
Lawyers representing poor tenants displaced past the storm are increasingly concerned that the agency is overstretched past disaster response efforts in the Carolinas and elsewhere.
"FEMA'southward failure to provide adequate temporary housing keeps children, seniors, people with disabilities and other hurricane survivors in dangerous and unhealthy situations," said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonpartisan advocacy group based in Washington. "Low-income hurricane survivors don't have time to navigate layers of state and federal hierarchy — they need a rubber place to sleep tonight."
Federal officials accept told their counterparts in Florida that the deployment of trailers to the areas hit past Hurricane Florence in September has made the supply tight, according to three local officials in direct communication with the agency.
FEMA is proceeding according to the timetable it has used in previous storms, and has sufficient resource to accost the crunch, an agency spokeswoman, Mary Hudak, said.
At the urging of Mr. Brudnicki, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida and lawmakers, FEMA was expected to nowadays a plan to utilise the relatively undamaged J.R. Arnold High School to house hundreds of people displaced by the storm until repair and rebuilding programs funded past FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development get underway.
The proposal to use cruise ships was rejected out of wellness and rubber concerns, according to a person involved in the process.
The situation is dire, even for those who accept a roof over the heads. Several hundred residents of at least one federally subsidized complex, the Macedonia Apartments in Panama City, were given a 72-60 minutes eviction order terminal week by their landlord, who needs to undertake major tempest repairs.
The eviction was halted after a local lawyer, Denise Rowan, who is representing low-income tenants affected past the storm free of charge, intervened as office of an attempt by local legal services organizations to aid those hit hardest.
"It'due south been more than two weeks since the storm came though, and FEMA should have already been mobilizing," said Ms. Rowan, who has put her individual practice on concur. "There should be a playbook for something like this, just apparently there isn't."
Despite the reprieve, many of Macedonia'southward residents, including elderly or disabled people who alive on stock-still incomes, will accept to relocate soon, perhaps to Tallahassee or even Mobile, Ala., or New Orleans — with no guarantee of returning home.
"I need to find something in the area; I have a lot of furniture and I can't afford to move anywhere without assistance," said Bethene M. Barnes, 71, a retired individual-duty nurse who walks with a cane after having major surgery on both knees concluding year.
"FEMA came past yesterday and they didn't tell me anything," she said. "They put $167 in my checking account but couldn't even tell me what it was for, or when I was getting whatever more. I mean, $167 won't fifty-fifty become me a U-Haul to move my things into storage."
Richard Rex, 38, who lives nearby, said that the bureau "hasn't actually been that good during this transition." Several of his friends who live in Panama Metropolis take waited more two weeks for a FEMA inspector to assess the harm and come upwardly with a possible plan for their relocation, he said.
"Nosotros practise not want to relocate," said Mr. Male monarch, an unemployed Navy veteran. "This is my home. I don't want to move away."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/us/fema-hurricane-michael-panama-city.html
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