When Hurricane Idalia hit Florida last summer, a tree fell right 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 picked up only what 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 with the Alachua Multi-County Migrant Education Program, visited the family to deliver food and supplies after the storm, she saw that parts of the trailer’s floor were missing. The front doorknob was no more than a piece of string tied to a nail. “They live on survival mode,” Gómez de la Torre said.
In the wake of Idaliafarm workers in Florida’s rural, agricultural areas have been 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 patchy disaster management cycle is increasingly failing the communities which is often the most disrupted through extreme weather conditions.
“It’s 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 her co-authors Amr Abd-Elrahman and Paul Monaghan found that official emergency management efforts in the days and weeks after a hurricane hit are riddled with gaps that contribute to the threat to farmworker communities.
Those gaps are largely captured in public data infrastructure. One such public data set frequently used by emergency planners and public officials to identify the people most in need of disaster-related support is the Social Vulnerability Index produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Although the index compiles socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic minority status, type of housing, and modes of transportation, it does not include immigration status, which is known to social vulnerabilities worsen. It also doesn’t account for a household’s type of work, though agricultural workers is among the low paid workers in the country.
“Ideally, it would be a public right that’s available to everyone, that everyone can be safe during a storm. But the unfortunate reality is that many of the religious organizations, these are farmworker organizations, these are migrant-serving organizations who are stepping in to fill those gaps,” Martin said.
So the report’s authors created their own framework—tailored to the farmworker community in north central Florida—that takes into account individuals’ citizenship status, job precariousness, housing situation, preferred language and transportation options. From there, they cross-referenced state geographic data with those vulnerability factors to map where people live and where commonly used disaster sites, such as schools, are located. This kind of map, with more detailed information about people and their needs, can be used to help public officials create more effective emergency response plans.
But a lack of localized data about where farmworker populations were concentrated prevented even Martin and her colleagues from completing the map.
The next best thing, Martin said, is a digital dashboard by the National Center for Farmworker Health, which combines many existing public data sources on farmworkers at the national, state, and county levels with findings from the US Census of Agriculture, as well as information on H-2A workers, or those here on a temporary visa, which has historically been excluded from other important federal farmworker surveys.
A limitation of this, however, is that emergency planning must be done on a hyperlocal scale to be most effective in addressing any population’s vulnerabilities. Another disadvantage is the timeliness of the information, such as national sources such as the Census of Agriculture update only once every five years. What’s more, the tool doesn’t collect data at the census tract level — small subdivisions of counties home to a few thousand residents — that would provide critical context to ensure people in high-need areas get the right resources. be provided. .
“A lot is missing from that dashboard,” said Martin, who noted that the wide range of social vulnerability indicators they identified for the farmworker population in one swath of Florida underscores the importance of census tract-level data. “Where do we put specific services? Where are our shelters? Where do we offer additional support?”
Furthermore, a clear idea of the 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, the report found. Areas where multilingual communication is widely available from public agencies have low social vulnerability, while regions where everything is provided in English have the opposite.
“It’s not the fact that someone speaks Spanish that they are inherently more likely to not easily withstand a hurricane. It is the fact that they are not being provided with services in the language they speak,” said Martin. “These are the kinds of things I think we need to monitor, to hold public institutions accountable to ensure the well-being of the entire community.”
Emergency information in languages other than English is absolutely essential, as are improved methods of local communication that reflect what media a community uses, said Fernando Rivera, a sociologist who studies disasters at the University of Central Florida. He points out how this is especially necessary in a state like Florida, where an estimated 30.2 percent of households speak a language other than English at home. A study he led in 2015 reinforces the fact that language access issues that disproportionately bar Florida’s rural farmworkers from disaster relief have persisted for nearly a decade — if not longer.
“We’re still seeing the same problems,” Rivera said. “It’s the result of the inequalities we have within our system, isn’t it? Unfortunately farm workers [are] a group that does not have a strong lobby that can make it a main agenda at the federal or state level.
Federal lawas well as FEMA’s policy on language access, mandate accessible translation services in the event of a disaster. But enforcement is another story. The State of Florida’s emergency management website uses Google Translate to make its resources available in 133 languages, Central Florida Public Media reported, but new links “often lead to English-only content.” And community-based organizations that work with farmworkers across the state say hurricane-related resources translated from English, or even disaster relief sites staffed with Spanish or native language speakers, are rare and inconsistent.
Victoria Gómez de la Torre at the Alachua Multi-County Migrant Education Program, a federal program under the Florida Department of Education, says she commonly sees information about storm preparedness and local shelters that schools send home with children only provided in English. “We must all be aware that climate change is not waiting for us to act. It’s here. And these mega-hurricanes are only going to increase. And [farmworkers] is still beyond any type of resources and help. So we have to plan,” said Gómez de la Torre.
Working with state, local, and tribal governments, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is the main federal entity that provides people with government assistance after a major disaster. But that funding is ultimately only available to residents with legal citizenship status, or those who meet specific requirements. (Roughly 40 percent of the nation’s About 2.4 million farm workers is without work authorization.)
The report’s authors argue that public officials and agencies, including FEMA, should work with community-based organizations to include farmworker populations in emergency planning. But organizers in Florida say they haven’t heard much — if anything — from those entities, either before or after extreme weather events. “FEMA, it exists,” said Giovana Perazzo, a community health worker with the Rural Women’s Health Project in Gainesville. “They organize the shelters they organize, sometimes the food drives, and things like that. But we don’t have much information about them.”
Immediately upon it Idalia, the Gilchrist County families Perazzo works with told her they had no idea what to do or where to go after the storm hit. “They didn’t know where FEMA is going to be. They had no information,” she said. She fears that this disconnect will only get worse because lately she has noticed it growing anti-immigrant sentiment perpetuated by policy makers and state legislation targeting migrants causing the community to be even more afraid of the state institutions that are directing relief operations.
A spokesperson with FEMA told Grist on background that it worked “hand in hand” with the state of Florida during Idalia, deploying resources and personnel to help local communities. This included operating disaster recovery centers, where the agency says it provided language interpreter and translation services for survivors in Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Haitian Creole, German, Korean, Portuguese, Tagalog and Vietnamese. “We are deeply concerned that farmworkers have felt apprehensive about the recovery process, and we are working closely with our federal partners, state and local officials, and community organizations to ensure that everyone has access to the help they need,” FEMA said. – spokeswoman said.
The Natural Hazards Center report found that Idalia not only exposed and exacerbated existing inequities facing Florida farmworkers, particularly for those with limited English proficiency and undocumented legal status, it also replicated a pattern of aid exclusion that is seen in the aftermath of California’s Thomas Wildfire and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors argue that until more inclusive indicators are added to social vulnerability assessments, and the role of community-based organizations is centered in disaster planning and decision-making processes, farm workers will continue to be largely excluded from relief efforts.
Rather than keep waiting for officials to mobilize on these issues, a coalition of groups nationwide is coming together to craft community-focused plans of their own, according to Dominique O’Connor with the Farmworker Association of Florida. They are just getting started, but are tracking country by country what identification documents are required to access disaster relief services, the extent of messaging services or notification systems in non-English languages, as well as planning shelter and evacuation. locations.
The coalition wants to create a resource map, she noted, or at least get a clearer picture of what these systems look like long before the next crisis. “Even though we don’t necessarily have the capacity or the means, we’re trying to fill the gap,” O’Connor said.
“I was told the hurricane season was going to be brutal. I’m in the process of establishing myself quite a bit.”
Lyndsey Gilpin contributed reporting to this article.
