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Wilma wanes, but not for rural Pahokee

As Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties get back to normal, towns struggle on the shores of Lake Okeechobee.

By TAMARA LUSH
Published November 8, 2005

	[AP photo]
	Crossing guard Nathan Rothfeld, 85, helps a West Pine Middle school student cross a street in Sunrise, where schools reopened Monday.

PAHOKEE - The town's two streetlights blinked back to life Monday, two weeks after they were extinguished during Hurricane Wilma's winds.

Electricity was also restored Monday, at least to some; a third of the town is still in the dark. And the biggest milestone is coming soon, maybe this week: FEMA has promised the homeless travel trailers.

But that's where the good news ends in Pahokee. And in Belle Glade, and in South Bay, three economically struggling farming communities clustered on the southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee.

Almost all of Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties are back to normal after one of the region's worst natural disasters. Roofs are under repair and air conditioners hum efficiently.

Only 161,000 customers are without electricity in South Florida, down from a high of 3.2-million after the Oct. 24 storm. Schools reopened in Broward and Palm Beach counties Monday (Miami-Dade students returned to class last week).

But in Pahokee, Belle Glade and South Bay, normal is a long way off.

"We haven't gotten back to normal after last year's hurricanes," said Pahokee fire Chief Gary Burroughs. "This just sets us further back."

Last summer, hurricanes Jeanne and Frances tore apart roofs, felled oak trees and demolished mobile homes in the towns near the lake. Wilma was worse.

Burroughs said that FEMA and local officials have identified 659 homes that have suffered some damage; 57 were mobile homes that were demolished.

Pahokee struggled even before the 120-mile-per-hour winds hit. It is among South Florida's poorest areas, with a median family income of just over $26,000 a year. Most of the people - poor blacks, Hispanics and Haitians - work cutting sugar cane or planting corn, if they work at all. In comparison, St. Petersburg's median family income is $43,000 annually.

Wilma may have cost more than 50,000 full-time farm jobs, Tirso Moreno of the Farmworker Association of Florida told a state legislative panel Monday. Meanwhile, Florida Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson was in Washington on Monday, asking for low-interest loans for growers and a $40-million grant to assist unemployed workers.

Pahokee's fledgling tourism industry, built on attracting fishermen, collapsed when the new marina was leveled. Crews attempting to dredge tons of debris from the lake have to contend with 12-foot alligators and water moccasins by the hundred.

Burroughs' office is just a few hundred yards from one mobile home park, where on Monday, a young boy in a red shirt threw rocks near an uprooted, 40-foot-high tree and a trailer that had been reduced to wood splinters. A gray velour couch was eerily intact, sitting in what was once a living room.

At least 100 people from Pahokee, population 6,500, are still in a Red Cross shelter. It's unclear which shelter they are in, said Pahokee police Chief Jim Blackford. The city's newly homeless were sent to live with Belle Glade's victims, then moved several times - once because the school gymnasium's roof sprung a leak during last week's rains.

"I think they are at the fairgrounds now," Blackford said.

Making matters worse, officials must figure out who really needs help - "separate the greed from the need," Burroughs said.

Some have taken advantage of the free food and water and have stockpiled the items - only to open minigrocery stores from their homes, selling the goods at inflated costs, he said.

In South Bay, Public Safety Chief Michael Morris estimates that 80 percent of the homes were damaged. Many of the damaged homes were 40- or 50-year-old trailers. Morris says he thinks that some of the town's 4,500 residents may be so desperate that they will continue to try to live inside them - especially if they are illegal farm workers who typically try to avoid the law at all costs.

On Monday, Morris, 36, drove through the mobile home parks in his storm-battered cruiser.

"Hey, what's up, man," Morris said to a 12-year-old boy, who was sitting on the rickety porch of a trailer. The boy grinned and ran over to Morris' window. Morris asked the boy to tell his mom and his neighbors that they should visit City Hall to apply for a temporary FEMA trailer.

"It doesn't matter if they are illegal or not, tell them that, okay?" Morris said, adding there would be translators there to help them. The boy, named Tomas, nodded seriously.

A few miles away in Belle Glade, Evelyn Freeman, 51, tried to pack what she could in her trailer. Someone dumped a large pallet containing about 50 bags of ice near her trailer; the ice sat in the sun, melting.

Freeman was at work at a nursing home when the hurricane's winds peeled off one side of her home. When the winds died down, some neighbors picked up some aluminum scrap and nailed it over the hole, so no one would steal Freeman's things.

Freeman is in limbo. She can't go to a shelter because she works nights and sleeps during the day. Shelters are too noisy, she said. And her financial situation is familiar to almost everyone in the region.

"Paycheck to paycheck," she said. She bought the trailer in 1994 and now doesn't have the money to haul the barely standing structure away. She doesn't have insurance. So she's going to move somewhere else and just leave it where it is. Most of all, she just wants to be alone.

"I'm stressing out so much," she said.

The issue of mobile homes - both old and new - is a minefield for local authorities. First, where to put them? Who will live in them - people from the local community or folks from somewhere else? And, because so many people are simply abandoning their damaged trailers, who is going to haul away all the debris?

Pahokee's Burroughs says that many mobile home park owners want the government to pay for the debris removal, then pay to place the new FEMA trailers on the lots.

"The city of Pahokee does not have the money to bail people out," Burroughs said.

One thing is certain: The new, albeit temporary, FEMA trailers will be nicer than many of the places that people called home before the hurricane.

--Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Tamara Lush can be reached at 727 893-8612 or at lush@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 8, 2005, 02:15:36]