Residents of Fort Lauderdale’s Edgewood neighborhood are desperate for help days after flooding as FEMA does damage assessments. NBC6’s Ari Odzer reports
Eight days after the historic rainfall inundated the Edgewood neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale, it still looks like a disaster zone.
There are mounds of debris in front of virtually every house, made up of furniture and other items ruined by the flooding. Like just about all of her neighbors, Michelle Brandenburg survived water up to her chest inside her house. Now the aftermath might be worse.
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WATCH HERE“Who would’ve thought going to work on Wednesday morning you’d lose everything? Everything. It’s horrible, you see it on the news and you don’t think it’s gonna happen to you, then it happens, you know? Shock, basically in shock,” Brandenburh said through tears. “Whole house is drenched, and mold is growing quickly.”
She said her greatest need right now is cash assistance to find a place to live while her house is being restored to livability.
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Help might be on the way. Teams from FEMA and the Florida Department of Emergency Management are going door to door, doing damage assessments, which will determine whether checks are eventually sent to stricken residents.
“They may be homeowners, they may be a renter, and they have lost everything in some cases,” said John Mills, FEMA spokesman.
I asked him if FEMA will help those people.
“Right now we’re still collecting data,” Mills replied. “So they’re looking at, are homes suffering major damage, are some homes destroyed, were some houses affected in some way but they’re safe to occupy, they’re trying to rapidly gather data about the full scope of the damage, the overall trauma to the community, and try to provide assessment of what the unmet needs are.”
The FDEM told me through an email that the assessment should be done by next week, and they will make a determination about whether to ask FEMA for assistance.
In the meantime, the city is asking people not to put storm debris inside garbage bags, because the city needs to differentiate between regular garbage and storm-damaged items. It’s part of an effort to calculate how much the city is spending on storm recovery.
