Irma refugees still wait for housing

FEMA offers few details, will use trailers only as a last resort

MIAMI — It’s been one week since Margherita Lopez has taken a shower. She has been shuffled to three different shelters since evacuating her home in Key West last week as Hurricane Irma approached. She has slept on a gymnasium floor without a cot, has struggled to find food and says she feels like emergency management officials have forgotten her.

“It’s been a nightmare … there should have been a better plan,” said Lopez, a 43-year-old woman who fled an abusive relationship and entered a women’s shelter and later a communal facility in Key West run by the Florida Keys Outreach Coalition.

Lopez isn’t alone in her frustration. Across Florida, local, state and federal emergency officials are struggling to assist the flood of evacuees, many of whom are seeking temporary or permanent shelter from a storm that cast a wide swath across the state. Even Keys residents who have a home to return to have been left without power, water and sewage service.

The state says about 7,500 people were in nearly 100 shelters as of Friday, and that the Red Cross planned to open four shelters in the Keys once the area was properly surveyed.

Wearing a donated Mickey Mouse T-shirt, Lopez sat in a room Thursday on Florida International University’s campus that had air conditioning but smelled like a pet store. Everyone sleeping there had been housed together because they had been deemed to have “special needs.” Lopez is bipolar and has panic attacks.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has given few details about its plan for short-term and long-term housing, saying only that trailers like those used in Hurricane Katrina will be used only as a last resort. Instead, FEMA may help pay for hotels, apartments, temporary housing and quick-fixes to help people move back into their homes.