Calling Gulf Coasters

[gratuitous]

I just saw a report on ABCNews about tropical storm Arlene, which headed north on a path similar to that of Hurricane Ivan, which occurred nine months ago. Fortunately, Arlene wasn't very strong, and it looks like just one person has been killed, a woman who went swimming (!) and got drowned in a rip tide.

However, one of the worries for folks in Arlene's path (western Florida panhandle) was the debris atill littering the area from Ivan, and that Arlene might pick up some of that debris and turn it into projectiles that would hurt or kill folks.

My question: How long do people have to clean up their property? I know that in the Pacific Northwest, when Mt. St. Helens dumps some ash in the area, residents and homeowners are given something like 72 hours to clean the ash off their property (less if it looks like it might rain). Municipal services hire extra trucks to load and transport stuff and get it out of the area before it interacts with rain and turns into cement. This stuff in Florida -- and they had pictures of debris piles -- has been laying around since last September! Was the damage that extensive, or is there no push locally to clean up after a hurricane?

[prole_for_peace]

1. if the property owners weren't going to do it,

the state should have stepped in and cleaned it up. they had to know that there was a good chance of more storms this year

[kcass1954]

4. There are a whole host of problems after the storm...

The county probably didn't get all the $ that FEMA promised. And with property that's been destroyed, the income from property taxes is down. People lose jobs because businesses are destroyed. Insurance companies either go under or only pay up to a certain amount. Deductibles in FL have gone just sky-high in the last year. We used to have a $500 deductible - now the deductible for hurricane damage is over $2800 - and the premium has gone up 50% in the last 2 years.

And then there's the problem of having enough people and getting enough supplies in to get the work and the cleanup completed. Our roof had a leak after Hurricane Andrew (not related to the storm), and it took us 4 months to get anyone to even come look at it, and another 2 months to get it replaced.

Ivan hit in what - September? I'm not at all surprised that they're still cleaning up.

[Warpy]

2. My 88 year old father

managed to get his property cleaned up in about a month. He didn't have any damage from any of the 4 that hit him (remember Ivan went around in a circle and came back through central Fla as a tropical depression), but part of the problem was that the garbage crews were simply overwhelmed. So were the power crews, and he went a total of 22 days without electricity. He's still active enough to clean up trash. Some retired folks aren't.

Don't forget also that some of that trash left over in the area that Ivan hit directly is sitting on property that is either empty or seasonal, and that people have simply not been around to clean it all up because they live elsewhere.

Also, it seems that cleanup money wasn't as available as Jebbie said it would be when he was doing his photo ops. What a shock.

[whistle]

3. For one thing FEMA under BushCo management has reneged....

...on financial assistance and many communities have been left footing the bill. It seems the Bush operatives used FEMA to help buy votes, but screwed the municipal services, especially where democrats held key municipal government positions.

[kcass1954]

5. Volusia County got hit 3 times last year...

To this day, they've seen almost nothing that FEMA promised. My sister works for one of the cities up there. The budgets are so stretched that she has trouble getting authorization to order even basic office supplies.

[gratuitous]

6. Thanks all for the information

It was puzzling to me, and I hope I didn't come off as insulting or condescending. I understand much better now.

On a side note, maybe instead of spending all that time in the legislature and in the governor's office meddling in things like the Terri Schiavo case they should do a little better job funding hurricane cleanup, because as someone else noted, hurricanes are as annual an event in Florida as snowstorms are in the northeast.

[whistle]

7. As long as republicans control the state, the answer is....

....hurricanes, we don't got no hurricanes, we don't need no hurricane clean up programs, I don't got to show you any stinkin hurricane preparation plans!

That's why the local weather and news channels were making such a big deal out of tropical storm Arleen, its every resident for themselves. Meanwhile Gov. Jeb Bush has allowed the big insurance companies to raise premiums and even cancel over 100,000 homeowner policies of Florida residents without so much as a back-up plan for those homeowners who lost their plans.