A deluge from powerful thunderstorms collapsed roofs weakened by Hurricane Wilma across Broward County last week, forcing the emergency evacuations of more than 1,000 people, rendering hundreds of apartments and condos unlivable and testing the police and shelter resources of city and county officials.
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Many residents in Ft. Lauderdale, Oakland Park, Pompano Beach, Deerfield Beach, Lauderdale Lakes and Sunrise fled their buildings, some with barely enough time to grab medicines or other essentials before making their way to shelters.
The storms were the first major rainfall since Wilma battered the area. Up to 4 inches drenched parts of the county, causing the massive collapses. Local, state and federal officials, who still have not decided what to do with thousands of displaced residents, will have to find long-term homes for potentially thousands more. More than 2,000 buildings have been deemed unsafe or unlivable since the hurricane, a number that will grow with the latest storm.
“We have roof collapses all over the city. As soon as we had the rain, we got swamped,” said Stephen McInerny, assistant fire chief for Ft. Lauderdale Fire Rescue.
At least 300 people from at least nine condominium buildings in Sunrise Lakes retirement village were moved as rains caved in or threatened to demolish wind-damaged roofs and unsound structures.
Police and code enforcement officials rushed residents out of their dwellings, allowing them to bring only what items they could carry, said State Rep. Franklin Sands (D-Weston). Sands was helping County Commissioner Ilene Lieberman and others bring food to some homebound older residents.
Frances Blumberg, 80, had just returned from having her nails done when water began dripping down the walls of her first-floor apartment.
“My couch is spoiled. My carpet is spoiled. My furniture is spoiled. My bathroom is soaked,” she said, sitting in a wheelchair with a cane across her lap. When officials said residents had to evacuate, she grabbed some medications and other essentials. “I didn’t know what to take,” she said.
Blumberg and many others were taken to shelters in buses, including nearby Fox Trail Elementary School in Davie.
Sands described the scene as overwhelming.
“We were getting phone calls from family members in Georgia and elsewhere, pleading for us to help their mothers,” he said. “We’ve been in situations where we came to the door and the people have been crying, literally crying, needing someone to help.”
About 300 people were bused to the Arthur Ashe Middle School shelter from the Sunshine Dixie Apartments in Oakland Park.
Resident J.R. Puentes, 51, had just returned from his carpenter job and was looking forward to a hot shower. Then he discovered the collapsed roof.
“Now we’re back to zero,” he said, holding a guitar and his cat. “All I want to do is get my stuff out.”
About 100 residents tried to decide whether to go to a shelter or seek their own lodging. Leila Ranger and her two daughters, Brittany, 10, and Amina, 2, were determined to fend for themselves.
“I need to find someone to put me up,” Ranger said. “I’m not going to no shelter.”
Between 2.5 to 4 inches of rain pounded the area over a two-hour period early last week northwest of the Pompano Beach Air Park, according to the National Weather Service.
The rest of Broward County received 1 to 2 inches of rain. Most of Palm Beach County received less than and inch, and western Miami-Dade County got up to 1.5 inches.
Asked what the Federal Emergency Management Agency was doing to respond to the sudden need for housing in Broward County, spokesman Ricardo Zuniga said FEMA was counting on the state, cities and counties to identify the needs of the residents and the best available options to assist those residents.
“We really need to rely on the locals to tell us what we can do to meet their needs,” he said.
Broward County Mayor Kristin Jacobs said disaster victims should apply to FEMA for financial aid through the agency’s hotline.
“They determine what your need is,” she said. “They will decide if there’s rental assistance or block hotel rentals. They make those calls; that’s what they do.”
The agency already has approved $5.3 million in aid statewide and $1.2 million in Broward County. Of that, $847,550 was intended for housing assistance.
In the short term, Red Cross shelter workers braced for huge influxes of people, many who carried nothing more than purses and wallets.
Deerfield Beach officials evacuated hundreds of people from 248 units in five buildings along South Dixie Highway. Eighty-one people went to the shelter at Monarch High School.
At the Sunrise Gardens apartment complex in Sunrise, resident Sonia Davis said about 200 people had been displaced by the weather. The roof had been knocked off by Wilma, and Tuesday’s rain blew off their tarps.
“The whole place is flooded out. We’re under water,” Davis said. “It’s terrible.”
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Davis said some residents of the two-story, 30-unit complex sought refuge at a shelter at Tamarac’s Challenger Elementary School, but were told there was no room. They then made their way to the shelter at Arthur Ashe Middle School.
With so many people fleeing their homes, Broward County school district officials are scrambling to locate students. They might have to bus many displaced children to their original schools or enroll them at new campuses.
“We have people tracking the shelters,” Supt. Frank Till said. “If 50 kids from an apartment complex end up in a shelter, we’ll know there’s a problem.”
In Pompano Beach, at least one inch of water seeped into Liza Marquez’s third-story apartment. About half of the 36 apartments at the Fairbanks Gardens building flooded, according to Marquez, who spent four hours dumping buckets of brown water into the sink and bathroom tub.
Still, Marquez said she planned to spend the night in the apartment with her children, Chanelle, 4, and Nico, 5. “What else can we do?” said Marquez, as she walked carefully from her room to the kitchen on the slippery tile floor. “It just keeps dripping.”
Marquez’s clothes, bed and living room were all wet. Salvaging anything seemed nearly impossible. “I’m very scared now,” said Marquez, 26, who moved into the apartment in August. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Her neighbor, Johnny Grogan, 44, said the building had not been red-flagged by city officials as uninhabitable, although Hurricane Wilma peeled away the roof.
“The roof ended up in our pool last week,” said Grogan. “I had seen this coming with the first rainstorm.”
Still, Grogan and Marquez agreed on one thing: They’d both rather spend the night in their wet, dark apartments than go to a shelter. “It’s been pretty tough,” Grogan said, “But we still don’t want them to red flag it, bad as it is, because then what do we do?”
South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Megan O’Matz, Mark Hollis, Douane James, Elizabeth Baier, Akilah Johnson, Brian Haas, Daniella Aird, Macollvie Jean-Francois, Andrew Ryan, Alva James-Johnson and Robert Nolin contributed to this report.