When Hurricane Idalia hit Florida last summer, a tree fell straight onto the trailer where a Hamilton County migrant farmworker family was living. Unable to afford to move even temporarily, the family of six salvaged what they could and continued to live around the rotten tree.
“It was beyond words,” Victoria Gomez de la Torre said.
When Gomez de la Torre, program supervisor for the Alachua Multi-County Migrant Education Program, visited the family after the storm to deliver food and supplies, she noticed widespread loss of flooring in the trailer. The front door handle was nothing more than a piece of rope tied to a nail. “They’re living in survival mode,” Gomez de la Torre said.
In the aftermath of Idalia, farmworkers in rural Florida were overlooked in federal, state and local emergency response efforts, he said. New reports Released Tuesday by the Natural Hazards Center and covered exclusively by Grist, the report highlights how our current flawed disaster management cycle is increasingly failing the communities that are often most upset by extreme weather events.
“This is a matter of life and death,” said Miranda Carver Martin, a social scientist at the University of Florida who led the report. “Everything is at stake.”
Martin and his co-authors Amr Abd Elahman and Paul Monahan found that government emergency management efforts were often flawed in the days and weeks after the hurricanes hit, putting farming communities at risk.
These gaps primarily reside in public data infrastructure. One public dataset that disaster planners and public officials frequently use to identify those most in need of disaster-related assistance is Social Vulnerability Index The index, created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, compiles socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic minority status, housing type and transportation, but does not include immigrant status. Are known It exacerbates social vulnerability and does not take into account the employment status of households. Agricultural workers teeth, Minimum wage workers domestic.
“Ideally, this is a public right that everyone should have, a right to stay safe during a storm. But the sad reality is that a lot of faith groups, farmworker groups, migrant advocacy groups have stepped in to fill the gaps,” Martin said.
So the report’s authors created a unique framework for farmworker communities in north-central Florida that considered individuals’ citizenship status, employment instability, housing situation, language preference, and transportation options. From there, they cross-referenced these vulnerability factors with state geographic data to map where people live and the locations of common disaster sites, like schools. These kinds of maps, with more detailed information about people and their needs, could help public officials create more effective emergency response plans.
But even Martin and his colleagues couldn’t complete the map because of a lack of regional data on where agricultural populations were concentrated.
The next best thing, according to Martin, is Digital Dashboard The National Farmworker Health Center combines many existing public data sources on farmworkers at the national, state and county levels with U.S. Agriculture Census findings and information on H-2A workers, or workers staying on temporary visas, who have historically been excluded. Other Key Federal Farm Worker Surveys.
However, a limitation of this approach is that emergency planning must be carried out at a supra-regional scale to most effectively address population vulnerability. Another drawback is that national-level sources of information, such as agricultural censuses, tend to provide insufficient timeliness of information. Update only It is conducted every five years, and the tool doesn’t collect data at the census tract level (small divisions of a county with thousands of residents), which provides important context to ensure adequate resources are being provided to people in high-need areas.
“There’s a lot of information missing from the dashboard,” Martin said, noting that the broad range of social vulnerability indicators identified for swaths of Florida’s farmworker population highlights how important census tract-level data is. “Where do we put specific services? Where do we put shelters? Where do we provide additional support?”
Moreover, the report notes that a clear idea of ​​language access services available to those with limited English proficiency at the community level is one of the biggest social vulnerability measures missing from disaster management programs. Social vulnerability is lower in areas where multilingual communication is widely available from public institutions, and the opposite is true in areas where everything is provided in English.
“If a Spanish speaker is more likely to not survive a hurricane, it’s not because they speak Spanish, it’s because they’re not being offered services in the language they speak,” Martin said. “I think we need to have oversight of these things to hold public institutions accountable for ensuring the well-being of the entire community.”
Emergency information in languages ​​other than English is crucial, as are ways to improve local communications that reflect the media a community uses, said Fernando Rivera, a sociologist who studies disasters at the University of Central Florida. He said this is especially essential in a state like Florida, where an estimated 10,000 people have died. 30.2 percent The percentage of households that speak a language other than English at home. A study he led in 2015 This underscores the fact that language access issues that have disproportionately kept rural Florida farmworkers away from disaster relief have persisted for almost a decade, if not longer.
“The same problems continue to occur,” Rivera said. “This is a result of inequality within our system, right? Unfortunately, farmworkers are [are] “It’s a group that doesn’t have a strong enough lobbying presence to make this a major issue at the federal or state level.”
Federal Lawas well FEMA Language Access PolicyThe state mandates accessible translation services during disasters, but enforcement is another story: Florida’s emergency management website uses Google Translate to provide resources in 133 languages. Central Florida Public Media reported.But the new links “often lead to English-only content,” and community groups working with farmworkers across the state say hurricane-related resources translated from English and even disaster relief sites staffed with Spanish- and Indigenous-language speakers are few and inconsistent.
Victoria Gomez de la Torre of the Alachua Multi-County Migrant Education Program, a federal program of the Florida Department of Education, said she often sees information about storm preparation and local evacuation shelters that schools hand out to children only in English. “We all need to recognize that climate change is not waiting for us to take action. It’s here now, and these massive hurricanes are only going to increase. And [farmworkers] “We still don’t have any kind of resources or assistance, so we need to make a plan,” Gomez de la Torre said.
The people who feed America are starving
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the primary federal agency that works with state, local, and tribal governments to provide government assistance to people after major disasters. But its funding is Eventually only available to legal residentsor someone who meets certain requirements. (Approximately 40 percent country’s Approximately 2.4 million agricultural workers Those without a work permit.
The report’s authors argue that public officials and government agencies, including FEMA, need to partner with community-based organizations to include agricultural workers in emergency planning. But Florida organizers say they’ve heard little to nothing from these organizations, either before or after extreme weather events. “FEMA is there,” said Giovana Perazzo, a community health worker with the Rural Women’s Health Project in Gainesville. “They organize shelters, sometimes they distribute food, etc. But we don’t get a lot of input from them.”
Immediately after IdaliaPerazzo said the Gilchrist County families she helps told her they had no idea what to do or where to go after the storm hit. Where will FEMA be located?“They had no information,” she said. She fears the disconnect will get worse. Anti-immigrant sentiment perpetuated by policymakers and State laws targeting immigrants This has further increased community fear towards the government agencies directing the relief efforts.
A FEMA spokesperson told Grist that the agency “worked hand-in-hand” with the state of Florida to deploy resources and personnel to support the local community during the Idalia disaster. This included operating a disaster recovery center, and the agency said it provided interpretation and translation services for victims in Spanish, Russian, Chinese (simplified), Haitian Creole, German, Korean, Portuguese, Tagalog and Vietnamese. “We are deeply concerned that agricultural workers have felt fear during the recovery process, and we are working closely with our federal partners, state and local officials, and community organizations to ensure everyone has access to the help they need,” the FEMA spokesperson said.
According to the Natural Hazards Center report, Idalia not only exposed and exacerbated existing inequities facing Florida farmworkers, particularly those with limited English proficiency and undocumented status. Aftermath of the Thomas Fire in California and During the COVID-19 pandemicThe authors argue that until more comprehensive indicators are added to social vulnerability assessments and the role of community-based organizations is placed at the heart of disaster planning and decision-making processes, agricultural workers will continue to be largely excluded from relief efforts.
Rather than waiting for officials to address these issues, a statewide coalition of groups is working together to come up with their own locally focused plans, said Dominique O’Connor of the Florida Farmworkers Association. They’re just getting started, but they’re tracking county-by-county things like identification requirements for disaster relief services, coverage of messaging and notification systems in languages ​​other than English, and plans for shelters and distribution sites.
The coalition wants to develop a resource map to get a clearer picture of what those systems look like, at least long before the next crisis hits, she noted. “We don’t necessarily have the capacity or the means, but we’re trying to fill in those gaps,” O’Connor said.
“I’ve heard it’s going to be a brutal hurricane season. I’m kind of bracing myself.”
Lindsay Gilpin contributed reporting to this article.
