For Shirley Greene, an attorney with Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida, the most unnerving hurricane moment was seeing a massive tree in her front yard topple like a flimsy stage prop, a powerful demonstration of the storm’s velocity and rage. For Leslie Powers, an attorney with Legal Services of North Florida, the most indelible impression was left after Hurricane Ivan had blown out of town—a broad sweep of blue tarp covering her community, miles of sparkling plastic draped over damaged, uninhabitable homes.

On August 13, Hurricane Charley blew out of the Gulf of Mexico, ramming Orlando, Daytona Beach, and surrounding areas. Over Labor Day weekend, Hurricane Frances slammed into the east coast, ravaging much of Brevard, Volusia, Orange, and Osceola counties. Hurricane Ivan, the worst of the bunch, struck the Florida panhandle and points north on September 16, killing sixteen and causing an estimated $3.8 billion in damages. On September 25, Hurricane Jeanne roared through already overwhelmed areas of mid-Florida, exacerbating the damage. By the time the storms had subsided, Florida had absorbed the brunt of the most ferocious hurricane season to reach the American mainland since 1950.

“A hurricane is a terrifying thing to go through,” says Chris Larson, deputy director of Florida Rural Legal Services (FRLS). “Our staff, especially in Fort Pierce, was traumatized.”

Four of the 12 counties served by Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida (CLSMF) were hit in such rapid succession that there was little time for recovery between their violent battering. The havoc was most palpable in beachside communities, where hotels, motels, restaurants, and beachfront homes were devastated. Tourism ground to a halt. Dramatic photos of damaged and boarded-up businesses combined with national news about Central Florida’s triple whammy frightened away many vacationers for the rest of the year.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported that after Hurricane Frances, 35 percent of the city’s hotel rooms were lost; 50 percent of New Smyrna Beach’s were destroyed. Under normal circumstances, service industry workers, the majority of them working poor—motel maids, tour boat cooks, farmworkers, cashiers, and restaurant servers—struggle to scrape by on their limited incomes. Many low-income families that had managed small savings were forced to spend it on evacuation expenses like hotels, restaurant meals, and gasoline to flee before the storms hit land. Some families evacuated more than once, returning to lost wages, unemployment, and damaged homes or no homes at all.

Ivan, the worst of the four hurricanes to ravage Florida in August and September, did not spare trailer homes.

Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida attorneys couldn’t handle all of the new cases flooding the program’s intake service. Housing problems, in particular, were rampant. Some clients were living in their cars. Few landlords had abated rent because of destroyed or damaged buildings; some made no promises to rehabilitate. Other low-income Floridians, out of work and without savings, reported being evicted by landlords who claimed to need rent payments immediately to make necessary repairs. “The sheriff has served three times as many evictions since the hurricanes as he did before, and we’re seeing them,” says Greene, who works in CLSMF’s Daytona office.

Legal Services Corporation dispersed nearly $350,000 in disaster relief assistance to three grantees struggling to help families rebuild their homes and their lives in the hurricanes’ wake: Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida, Legal Services of North Florida, and Florida Rural Legal Services.

Securing assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) became crucial for families whose homes and offices were destroyed. But many Floridians had difficulty securing or getting information about FEMA aid, especially those living in rural parts of the state.

“FEMA offices are not located where rural poor people live,” Larson says. “FEMA and unemployment eligibility expire in relatively short periods of time. In storms like these, communication breaks down. It’s hard to get information to people on what they need to know about their rights as tenants, as homeowners, as workers. We left our brochures at grocery stores and day care centers, hoping that clients would see them.”

Legal services facilities were not immune from the storms’ fury. CLSMF lost its Kissimmee office, the Daytona office was flooded, and the Brevard office was also damaged. The Ft. Pierce office is unusable, lost to a collapsed sea wall. Staff who returned to gauge Frances’ havoc reported seeing crabs scurrying around the overturned desks.

Migrant workers who lived in crowded, unsanitary camps before the storms are now facing even more deplorable conditions. Many reside in flimsy trailers that were severely damaged by Hurricane Charley and walloped again by Frances and then Jeanne. Fields and greenhouses where they produce their harvest were damaged, and some crops like grapefruit will not return this year. Appallingly, one grower, reportedly concerned that workers would grow soft on the emergency handouts, tried to close down FEMA operations. The Orlando Sentinel reported that “fern growers pushed to cut off hurricane relief to farm laborers…because they were worried that the steady flow of free ice, hot meals, and baby food was discouraging workers from returning to the fields.” A grower, who is also the town’s director of emergency management, shut down the distribution site four days earlier than expected, saying the farmworkers “don’t need any more food. They need to get back to work,” the Sentinel reported.

Meanwhile, Ivan the Terrible took its toll in the north. Fifteen of the 16 counties served by Legal Services of North Florida (LSNF) were designated disaster areas in late September. Panama City, Pensacola, and Fort Meyer were hit hardest. LSNF attorney Jeff Toney recalls looking down Highway 98 and seeing large boats on each side of the road, even though the nearest body of water was two city blocks away. “Looked like a war zone, like a bomb hit,” he says.

Buildings can be rebuilt and highways cleared of debris, but a hurricane’s scars tend to be permanent for those living in poverty. “Hurricanes hit everyone, without regard for class, but ability to recover is very affected by poverty,” Toney says. “Poor people do not have the several hundred dollars required to purchase a generator, even with the promise of a FEMA reimbursement.”

Months after the storms passed through, housing issues still abound. Advocates report multiple incidences of landlords “evacuating” low-income tenants in order to rent their units at higher rates to middle-income Floridians who needed interim housing while their homes are repaired. Powers had a client who was seven-months pregnant and forced to leave her apartment because of mildew. Toney says, “We see unlicensed contractors springing up to do faulty work for unsuspecting people, primarily seniors and situations with price gouging or misrepresentation. Clients fall prey to those who pretend to be from FEMA.”

Larson of FRLS is concerned about the many cases she has seen in which a spouse or boyfriend runs off with the FEMA check. “FEMA usually lets you do one application just for the household. If the person who applies is an abusive boyfriend and grabs the check when it arrives and leaves all the people in the house without relief, we’re not sure of the remedy. We’re trying to work on appeals to the agency now.” Powers of LSNF says it’s particularly hard for her when retirees walk into the office after having their homes obliterated. “I am starting to see a lot of older couples that came here to retire, that had beautiful homes, but because of insurance issues may not be able to rebuild them,” she says.

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