FEMA administrator tours North Port site; outreach may go door to door

NORTH PORT – Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell arrived in Florida Friday and first visited hard-hit Lee County, where she marveled at how quickly power and some access has been restored to Fort Myers Beach and praised the resiliency of the North Fort Myers community of Dunbar, in protecting homes from rising waters.

“The stories that I’ve heard have been heartbreaking,” Criswell said Saturday afternoon, after touring the Disaster Recovery Center at Shannon Staub Public Library, 4675 Career Lane. “What always amazes me in events like this is how communities come together and neighbors help neighbors and they’re really our first responders.

“Your neighbors are the ones that are helping you as soon as they can get out their doors to help and that level of community engagement is always inspiring to me.”

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So far, about 40,000 families in Sarasota County have applied for help since Hurricane Ian made landfall on the island of Cayo Costa in Lee County on Sept. 28

Workers at the Shannon Staub site, which opened Oct. 7, had handled 1,642 registrations as of Saturday afternoon. It is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., seven days a week.

Disaster Recovery Centers house resources from FEMA, state agencies and the U.S. Small Business Administration, as well as representatives of insurance agencies.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – which administers a “Blue Roof” tarp distribution program – is in North Port.

The Englewood Disaster Recovery Center, which had originally opened at the Home Depot on McCall Road, moved Saturday to the Tringali Park Recreation Center, 3660 N. Access Road in East Englewood. The Tringali Park center is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., seven days a week.

“The biggest thing is we want a center like this to help them navigate that and figure out which resource is going to be the rest resource for them to help with their needs and then connect them with our faith-based partners and non-governmental organizations,” Criswell said.

“It’s so meaningful to be able to sit across the table from someone and share your story and get the help that you need,” said Sarasota County Commission Vice Chairman Ron Cutsinger, who joined Criswell in a press conference following her tour of the North Port facility.

Cutsinger, who represents Englewood and portions of North Port and Venice as part of his south Sarasota County district, has spent considerable time in the field, mostly with Samaritan’s Purse, as well as visiting FEMA supply distribution centers

“All the people we’ve been working with in the county have been so exceptional; they’ve been embedded with our EOCs. We’re getting requests right to them and they're responding to our requests so quickly.”

The disaster recovery centers also strive to give people for whom English is a second language a chance to tell their stories in their native tongue.

Walter Sarnoi, a California native with the FEMA operations division, speaks Spanish, Thai, Lao, a little bit of Vietnamese and Russian.

FEMA is working on finding additional translators to help with claims from residents with Ukrainian, Russian and other Eastern European backgrounds.

“They can converse and they do know English but when it comes to the root cause of everything, the troubleshooting, they’re going to go back to their root language,” Sarnoi said.

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Improving access online and door-to-door

The fastest way to access aid is online at https://www.disasterassistance.gov, use the FEMA mobile app or call 800-621-3362 from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day.

Help is available in most languages. If you use a relay service, such as video relay (VRS), captioned telephone or other service, give FEMA the number for that service.

Criswell noted that https://www.floridadisaster.org is an effective place to start an online application, too, and that in addition to state and federal agencies, insurance companies have a part to play in the recovery process.

“You do have to have insurance adjusters; our inspectors go out and look at the damage,” Criswell said. “One of the things we are doing though is we are using imagery so we don’t have to send people out there to look at the damage to a property.”

FEMA will also send disaster recovery teams door-to-door, when possible.

Criswell traveled with some of those teams in Lee County on Friday.

Cutsinger, noted that he and Criswell "were just talking about the fact that there are people who find it difficult to get out to a disaster recovery center, so plans are already in place to go out to those areas and find them.

“We want to make sure everybody gets contacts and gets to the resources they need,” Cutsinger said, then added that because of the size and scope of the storm, it’s harder to reach out to everyone than in previous storms.

Criswell, who pointed out that FEMA and other first responders were able to stage more search and rescue teams close by for Hurricane Ian than in other storms, noted that the agency is also taking advantage of technological advances to speed the recovery effort too.

Specifically, the agency can use satellite imagery – captured both before and after Hurricane Ian – to assess damage and determine areas where claims should be filed.

“We know there the path of the storm went, we know the area that are most impacted, we also know the areas that are most vulnerable and under-served and we’re looking at that and laying over it where people are registered for assistance but really where they haven’t,” Criswell said. “So when we can identify those pockets of neighborhoods where we think people should have registered but they haven't, we can target our resources into those communities, go knocking door-to-door and make sure they're getting the assistance they need.”

North Port recovering day by day

North Port, which was hit especially hard by flooding – both because the Myakka River at Myakka State Park reached a new record flood stage at 12.8 feet  and  21.45 inches of rainfall – has been recovering day by day, noted City Manager Jerome Fletcher.

“Overall, as I keep telling people, it’s getting better day by day,” Fletcher said. “Our focus last week was Price Boulevard and getting ready for schools to open, so we worked really hard with the county and the school system and (Sarasota Superintendent of Schools) Dr. (Brennen) Asplen to make sure the routes that are going to be alternated that have no debris in the way of buses.”

Portions of Price Boulevard between Sumter and Toledo Blade boulevards have been restored including the bridge over the McCaughey Waterway but more work needs to be done to make the road safe and usable.

“I feel like every week has a different focus: What do you want to make sure you get done right – real response the first week, the second response was making sure people knew they have resources available and they aren’t alone,” he added. “The world is watching us right now, but what’s going to happen when the world stops watching? That's when the leadership of your city is going to have to step up and make sure they have a plan and a strategy and that’s what we’re working on right now as well.”

Earle Kimel primarily covers south Sarasota County for the Herald-Tribune and can be reached at earle.kimel@heraldtribune.com. Support local journalism with a digital subscription to the Herald-Tribune.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: FEMA outreach may go door-to-door, guided by satellite imagery