No State/Federal Help For Florida Hurricane Survivors?

What in the Holy Hell is going on down there?

In Florida, a Hunt for Basics

By John-Thor Dahlburg, Times Staff Writer
August 16, 2004

PUNTA GORDA, Fla. — Mary Stewart, who has lost her home, doesn't know where she and her parents, both stroke victims, are going to live. Stewart has no idea if the store where she made $6 an hour will reopen, but Sunday she wanted just two things to be happy.

"A shower and having something cold to drink, that's the biggest thing," said Stewart, who lived in Alta Vista, one of the mobile home parks in Punta Gorda that was hit hardest by Hurricane Charley.

In this once tidy subdivision of about 200 households, including many elderly of modest means, existence has been brutally pared to the bare essentials: finding a way to eat, drink and sleep. Forty-eight hours after Hurricane Charley ravaged much of southwestern Florida, residents of Alta Vista mainly were seeking, and getting, help from their neighbors and families, not official agencies....
***

She hasn't seen anyone from the state or federal government, she said....

***

As the temperatures climbed into the mid-90s in early afternoon, she took her panting dogs into her truck's cab and turned on the air conditioning. The Michigan-born woman who did janitorial work before developing a bad back said a neighbor's son had given her barbecued chicken. Others were stopping by to see if she needed water or food. And the daughter-in-law of Juanita Nelson, who lived across the street, offered to take her in, a generous invitation Ricketts said she refused even though she had no cash or solid roof over her head.

It was in stark contrast, she said, to the welcome she found when she went looking for federal emergency relief workers.

"They never asked me who I was, where I was from, what happened to me," Ricketts said. "They didn't care. They made me feel stupid when I asked if they could loan me a generator. And when I went to see them they were eating, and I wasn't." LINK

News coverage of this storm has been... well, just plain odd! Moments ago, ABC Evening News spent 2 minutes showing the devastation, then many more minutes on a canned piece about how difficult hurricanes are to predict. Go figure. I'm pretty sure the networks decided not to focus on the lack of funds and the lack of available National Guard soldiers to help the survivors.