Hurricane Milton Wreaks Havoc in US
FEMA Begs for More Government Assistance
Only one week after Hurricane Helene left a trail of destruction in the Southeastern region of the United States, which the US government was wholly unprepared and unwilling to contend with, Hurricane Milton is expected to launch a new path of devastation across the state of Florida, primarily.
As of Thursday morning, over three million Florida residents are without power, with some counties having as many as 80% of residents lacking in electricity. At least nine are dead following the storm as crews rescue stranded residents.
Residents blamed amid evacuation orders
As the storm was barreling towards Florida, some media outlets seemed to follow a narrative of blaming residents themselves for not evacuating before the storm hit, including sharing a viral video of a social media influencer describing staying within the path of the hurricane and other similar controversial posts, or reporting on stories of Floridians seemingly willing to put their lives in God’s hands.
While many Florida residents did not evacuate, with over 500 residents needing to be rescued in Tampa’s Hillsborough County, the predominant narrative serves to obscure how many residents have found it materially impossible to evacuate. It is unclear at this point how many exactly did not follow evacuation orders, even with some limited state government incentives including free buses and free Uber rides to shelters.
However, it appears that the lessons learned from past hurricanes especially with regards to the evacuation of vulnerable populations were not applied.
Disabled and elderly left behind
A study published in Applied Nursing Research, surveyed 291 Florida nursing homes during the 2004 hurricane season, finding that finding transportation and shelter resulted in 81% of nursing home residents sheltering in place. The study concluded that “the decision to evacuate must be made long before a storm is projected to strike” and that “evacuation takes many hours, and the earlier an evacuation begins, the more likely facilities will obtain appropriate transportation.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency on Saturday.
Ruth Beltran, a resident of Bradenton, Florida, chose not to evacuate from her home. For Beltran, a disabled woman who also has to take care of her elderly, disabled parents, the government provided her virtually no assistance to leave her home or even to prepare to weather the storm, leading her to work through extreme pain to put hurricane shutters on her own home.
“When the government says evacuate without providing any resources…it’s basically every man for themselves,” said Beltran. Getting in a car and driving a long distance by herself is a risk that she cannot take, Beltran describes. “What if I get a flat tire with my limited mobility? Not only that, but the pain that I’m already in because I had to put up hurricane shutters in my home. We did it little by little, my mom helped me as much as [she] could and so did my dad. But, I’m in extreme pain right now. Everything that I do impacts my mobility,” Beltran said.
“Thinking of, okay, let me get in a car, let me drive up six, seven hours to wherever, so that I can get out of the way, it’s not really a solution… risking running out of gas, risking getting a flat tire, having to change my tire is just something that I physically cannot do.”
“I wish we lived in a system and in a society where people are prioritized,” Beltran said.
Incarcerated Floridians forbidden to evacuate
In addition to the picture Beltran paints of elderly and disabled Floridians left with little option, officials have refused to evacuate many incarcerated in the state’s jails and prisons. Manatee county jail, located in Milton’s path, reportedly refused to evacuate its 1,200 prisoners and instead stocked up with sandbags and other supplies. This is not out of the norm for jails and prisons located in mandatory evacuation zones in the US, which often refuse to evacuate inmates. During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hundreds were left in the Orleans parish prison for days within their cells, without food or water and as flood waters rose.
“The fact that they are unable to evacuate people in mandatory evacuation zones goes to show the complete lack of prioritization of the lives of incarcerated people during hurricanes. And I think we can all agree, if we are prioritizing the safety of our communities, those communities must include the incarcerated people inside,” said Jordan Martinez, an organizer with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, in an interview with Democracy Now.
“Every man for himself” evacuation
The US’s “every man for himself” evacuation system is often contrasted with that of socialist island nation Cuba, which despite being the most highly populated island in the Caribbean, has consistently the lowest death tolls. For example, although in Haiti Hurricane Jeanne killed 3,000 people in 2004, it inflicted no fatalities in Cuba, which was hit even harder.
This has been attributed the Cuban government’s attentiveness to hurricane preparedness, which includes providing buses to government-run pre-arranged shelters stocked with food, water, and staffed with medical personnel, rather than leaving people to fend for themselves to arrange their own transportation.
FEMA begs for more funds
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas continues to urge Congress to return early from its vacation in order to allocate more money to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Congress appears to have no plans to return from recess before 12 November, despite closing its session after failing to set aside additional FEMA funding. Thanks to the efforts of conservative lawmakers, a recently passed funding bill did not allocate additional funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) despite knowing that the agency’s funds had run low before the peak of hurricane season. Mayorkas said on 2 October that FEMA does not have enough money to make it through hurricane season. Even during the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, residents were struggling for access to clean drinking water.
Ahead of Milton, FEMA suffered a staffing shortage, with only 9% of the agency’s staff available.
Despite lack of funds for Hurricane survivors, the US has sent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel since 7 October 2023. This accounts for the largest amount of military funding ever granted to Israel in a single year.
Hurricane survivors foot the bill for damages
As hurricane survivors were given little support in the evacuation process, this year’s hurricane season has once again illuminated how people are again left to fend for themselves after the storms pass through, when seeking out insurance coverage for damages. Damages from Helene could run as high as USD 250 billion, and yet because FEMA’s traditional flood maps have not been updated for decades, damage has been concentrated in zones where homeowners are not required to buy flood insurance. Only around USD 5 billion of those damages are covered by flood insurance, leaving regular people on the hook for the billions more in damages without any plans of government assistance.
In Florida in particular, state legislation passed in December of 2022 aimed to take many off of the state insurance roles, pushing people into the private insurance market, with homeowners having no say in which private insurance company they are saddled with. This will raise the cost of insurance policies with no guarantee that those higher rates will result in better coverage.