As the sky began to clear around 6:30 a.m. on Thursday, Madeline Colón and her husband, Flor Colón, decided to check on their home on Shadow Brook Lane in the Palmetto community, west of Florida. “It was the most horrible night of my life,” as she described the onslaught of Hurricane Milton.
Fallen trees, flooded streets, and destroyed houses were the scene on their way home. These were the consequences of Milton’s winds, reaching 120 mph and whose eye entered Florida Wednesday night in the Sarasota area. The death toll associated with the hurricane already exceeds a dozen.
Their house survived the storm. But most of the neighborhood did not.
“There are 300, almost 400 houses. I would honestly say that 80% of the houses were damaged,” Madelaine said in a phone interview with the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI).
She didn’t sleep a wink at her son’s house, where she stayed with her husband during the hurricane. She said the family room’s sliding glass door rattled despite being covered with shutters. You could feel when the tree branches hit those window protectors. They moved to the bedrooms, but it was worse.
“The noise was like someone was pounding on the [bedroom] windows,” she described. They spent hours without electricity and in terrible heat.
Photo provided
“Now we have to help those in the community trying to survive and recover what was damaged,” she said. What she found in her community were wooden houses without roofs, fallen fences, without walls, and a lot of debris.
There was one situation that saddened her greatly. A neighbor with her three children lost their roof. The woman was taking out the things that were damaged. Madeline asked if she needed anything.
“She said that what she really needed was food,” Madeline said.
Most of this community’s residents are natives of the United States, although there are some Latin Americans, including Puerto Ricans.
Madeline still doesn’t know when the power will return. In Manatee County, several companies, such as Peace River and Florida Power & Light Company, supply the energy. “Some work faster, others work slower,” she expressed.
Meanwhile, Madeline is cooking on a propane gas grill.
“The government focuses only on large communities and forgets about the small ones. And sometimes the small ones are the ones that matter because they have less government help simply because they are small,” she lamented.
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Some Give: Others Receive
In the west-central part of the state, people in need of assistance in Hillsborough County will be moved to transitional shelters. The county reported having more than 15,000 people in 14 shelters.
“Without power, no one can be sent home because the government has the responsibility to serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner to everyone,” said Linda Pérez Luna of the organization Boricuas de Corazón, who requested that people who want to help bring hand saws to cut down fallen trees blocking the streets.
This Friday, the nonprofit organization will offer breakfast and lunch at its headquarters in Brandon, along with the Red Cross. Pérez said it is estimated that there will be no power for three or four days.
An hour and a half away by car, chef José Martín Grau was offering a free cup of sancocho at his restaurant Grillers Puerto Rico in Kissimmee on Thursday. He had minor losses at his establishment but decided to open the place with a limited menu because many people were out looking for food. He said many people from Tampa (Hillsborough County), St. Petersburg (Pinellas County), and Sarasota (Sarasota County) came to Kissimmee to seek shelter. In these three counties on Florida’s west coast, there is an estimated population of nearly 156,000 Puerto Ricans.
Puerto Rican chef Martín Grau, who has been in Florida for seven years, removes the panels from his restaurant to open to the public after Hurricane Milton. Photo by Brian Negrón | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Puerto Rican chef Martín Grau, who has been in Florida for seven years, removes the panels from his restaurant to open to the public after Hurricane Milton. Photo by Brian Negrón | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
But, in the face of need, fraud and scammers also emerge. Orange County District 4 Commissioner Maribel Gómez Cordero told the CPI that people affected by the hurricane, including Hispanics and the elderly, have been approached by supposed representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to request personal data.
“There are reports of organizations and individuals across Florida being targeted by cybersecurity threats,” said Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings at a press conference. In an emergency, scammers send files that appear to be FEMA documents but are malicious files that harm electronic devices when opened.
Commissioner Gómez Cordero, of Puerto Rican origin, advised people to be cautious, as FEMA personnel do not call or email the public to initiate the aid process. Affected individuals receive letters from the federal agency after applying for assistance.
She also emphasized following instructions when handling a generator. A fire occurred on Thursday in the home of a Hispanic family who had a big scare because they couldn’t find their younger daughter.
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“They turned on the generator inside the garage,” she said. Rescuers and firefighters entered the home to look for the child. “She was outside, but the parents didn’t know where she was.”
Shelters remained open in Orange County, central Florida, said Gómez Cordero. In the 11 shelters for the public, there were 2,000 people. In the three shelters for people with special needs, there were 377. She said public transportation operated by LYNX offered free service on its buses to people who could return home. On Thursday, more than 50,000 customers were still without power.
The Wekiva River, originating in the city of Apopka, overflowed. The commissioner said that flooding was reported in Apopka, Altamonte Springs, and Winter Park communities.
Lack of Accurate Information in Spanish
Government messages are in English. This makes it difficult to disseminate warnings and official communications to foreign communities, especially the Latino community, explained Yesica Ramírez, general coordinator of the Florida Farmworkers Association, which has over 10,000 Hispanic, African American, and Haitian members.
Ramírez said she asked the city of Apopka to translate safety measures on generator use into Spanish, as they had only published them in English on their websites. After the request, city staff sent her the translation, which she shared on her social networks to benefit Spanish speakers.
A day before the hurricane, one of the Association’s members also contacted her because she was trying to communicate with city officials due to a requirement for her special needs son. “In that department [of the city government], they didn’t speak Spanish,” she recounted. A colleague from the Association helped with the translation.
Another obstacle in the community she represents is the lack of guidance, as many of the farmers from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela do not necessarily have experience with the precautions to take in the face of a hurricane. In Florida, distributing sandbags is part of hurricane preparations. They serve to contain the force of water in homes during a flood.
“A lady living on the second floor went [to get] sand, but she didn’t know what it was for or how it would be used, but they told her to go for sand,” Ramírez said. “The lady didn’t need it. The lack of education we have [regarding these issues] is too much.”
Photo by Brian Negrón | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
In the emergency, Ramírez tried to address many community requests. “People asked me things as simple as ‘Do I have to bring my medicine?'” said the coordinator of the Farmworkers Association, which has five offices in Florida.
They are now assessing the damage, as she has spoken with many contractors who have suffered losses at strawberry and blueberry farms affected by Hurricane Milton. They will help community members depending on the donations they receive.
Due to the lack of electricity, “people will lose all their food in the refrigerator. That isn’t recovered easily. Most farmers are missing workdays. They are missing work and losing food. And we don’t know how many more days they will not work,” she expressed. It will be harder for people living in trailers because they don’t have an outdoor space to cook.
There is hope that, eventually, there will be a lot of work because the blueberry bushes need to be replanted, and many farmhands will be needed.
