Residents of Florida Coast Increasingly Desperate for Food and Shelter

SPRINGFIELD, Fla. — In this storm-ravaged town, where homes have been battered and even food and water are in short supply, Martha and Lindsay Brown have been sleeping in their car.

Much of the roof of their two-bedroom rental home failed when it was hit by Hurricane Michael’s 155-mph winds, and they had no luck when they contacted the American Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency looking for help.

“They referred us to two shelters, but they were already full,” said Martha Brown, 60, a former government worker. “There’s nowhere to go.”

A familiar tension of disasters is emerging throughout the Florida Panhandle: People are increasingly desperate for food, water and shelter, but a sprawling relief operation is confronted with challenging conditions that are delaying the delivery of help.

Emergency workers said they were struggling, two days after the storm made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, to create paths into the hardest-hit communities, limiting their ability to deliver millions of pounds of supplies that were stockpiled before the destruction.

Beyond the formerly picturesque coastline, the Panhandle is a densely wooded region, and many roads are still blocked with debris. The Red Cross said that it had loaded some of its supplies onto National Guard trucks because the terrain was too difficult for some of the nonprofit’s own vehicles.

“This is what disasters look like,” said W. Craig Fugate, a former FEMA chief. “Sit tight, help’s coming, but it’s not going to be there 12 hours after the storm passes.”

In April, FEMA said that residents of Puerto Rico should keep 10 days of supplies on hand. But for people in the continental United States, the government recommends a far smaller amount: enough food and water for three days or more. And as the weekend neared, it was becoming increasingly clear that many Panhandle residents were not only left without a habitable home but also without adequate stockpiles of food in the aftermath of the devastating storm.

At a badly damaged Dollar General store Thursday, residents trickled in through an open door whose glass had been shattered. Some took things they wanted, but most took things they needed — drinks and food.

“Where’s the water?” one man asked. Another asked where he could find batteries. He said he had two small children and when night fell, they were living in total darkness. A pair of men went in stealthily and came out with two large boxes of Gain laundry detergent.

Across the street from the Browns, 11 people said they had crammed into a tiny duplex to spend the night, their own homes battered and open to the elements. Carl Jones, 43, said that they had seen no hint of government response as of Thursday night — “only thing is the police came and said you’ve got to be inside” at nightfall, he said.

Many residents said their food and water were running out. They were worried about the small children among them. One man said he had been driving over to the nearby bay and filling buckets with water to flush the toilets.

“When is anybody coming to do something?” said Trenisa Smith, 48, a school bus driver who had been giving herself insulin treatments in the back of her car. “I’m worried every day. We’re worried.”

In and around the nearby town of Panama City, there were reports of stores opening in some areas, but many neighborhoods remained without running water or electricity, and could stay that way for days.

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said on Twitter that the authorities were “working aggressively to get supplies to families in need.” On Friday afternoon, Scott’s office said that 3 million meals were ready for distribution, along with 2 million gallons of water and 2 million pounds of ice.

By day’s end, the governor’s office said, the National Guard would be staffing 21 distribution points, and others, including the Red Cross, were racing to set up feeding stations. Though 3,000 people are already formally staying in shelters in the state, school officials in Bay County, along the coast, were contemplating opening up even more space, because so many people had been left with homes that were uninhabitable or destroyed.

“We urge patience, but we are also empathetic and understanding of the situations people are dealing with,” said Jonathan McNamara, a spokesman for the Red Cross. “It’s just not easy for people to deal with, and we want to be very aware of and very sensitive to that.”

“The longer we take,” he added, “the longer people go without these supplies and resources, the harder it is for their lives.” Although the storm suddenly surged in intensity as it approached Mexico Beach, where it made landfall Wednesday, emergency management experts said the rapid meteorological changes likely had no substantial effect on the response effort. Preparations, they said, are mostly driven by the population of a threatened region, not the precise dimensions of a storm.

“Once you get to a certain point in this part of the coast, it’s just going to be bad,” said Fugate, who, before becoming the head of FEMA, directed the Florida Division of Emergency Management for about eight years. “You’re responding against a population, not the storm category.”

Although officials pledged to bring supplies into the region as quickly as possible, they remained broadly focused on search-and-rescue efforts Friday, knowing that the time to find survivors was dwindling with each passing day. And they cautioned residents who had found safe refuges, especially beyond devastated communities, that it could be a while before they would be able to return to their homes.

“Bottom line, it was one of the most powerful storms the country has seen since 1851,” Brock Long, the FEMA administrator, said at a briefing in Washington on Friday morning. “It’s going to be a long time before they can get back.”

He said workers were trying to clear roads and safely remove downed power lines and ruptured gas lines to help make it safe for residents to return to their homes.

“There is no infrastructure there to support you,” he warned. “Doing so, you are putting your life in danger.”

Lindsay Brown, 57, said he and his wife would have avoided sleeping in the car and headed further north to find a hotel, but felt they needed to remain close to their home. Already, there have been reports of looting at stores up the street.

He expected it to grow worse at nightfall.

“As soon as that sun goes down,” he said, “oh boy.”