"In a Grist exclusive, a new report finds that data gaps end up putting vulnerable communities at even more risk."
"When Hurricane Idalia struck Florida last summer, a tree fell straight through a trailer occupied by a migrant-farmworker family in Hamilton County. They couldn’t afford to move, even temporarily, so the family of six just picked up the things they could salvage and continued to live around the rotting tree.
“It was indescribable,” said Victoria Gómez de la Torre.
When Gómez de la Torre, who is a program supervisor at the Alachua Multi-County Migrant Education Program, visited the family to deliver food and supplies after the storm, she spotted swaths of the trailer’s floor missing. The front door knob was no more than a piece of rope tied to a nail. “They live on survival mode,” Gómez de la Torre said.
In the aftermath of Idalia, farmworkers in Florida’s rural, agricultural areas were overlooked by federal, state, and local emergency response efforts, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Natural Hazards Center and covered exclusively by Grist. The report reinforces how the current patchwork disaster management cycle is increasingly failing the very communities who often end up the most disrupted by extreme weather events."
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