ASSOCIATED PRESS

October 24, 2005

Wilma Wreaks Havoc on Florida Farm Workers

By Mike Schneider, Associated Press writer

NAPLES MANOR, FLA. – Patricio Sanchez scooped up soggy ceiling tiles Monday from the partially collapsed roof of the small dormitory he shares with other farmworkers in a labor camp battered by Hurricane Wilma.

“I was in bed sleeping when it fell on top of me,” said Sanchez from the labor camp south of Marco Island, among fields of peppers, tomatoes and eggplant.

All over south Florida, Wilma’s winds wreaked havoc on farmworker housing, which is the most vulnerable to Florida’s natural disasters.   Workers in many of the camp’s dozen cinderblock dormitories spent the hours after the hurricane mopping wet floors and hanging damp clothes.  Roof tiles were scattered around the two rows of dorms, while mobile home siding flapped in the wind.

“Everything in here is wet,” Sanchez said.

The camp is owned by Six L’s Packing Co., which said it would try to repair the buildings.  “We’re going to find out which ones are leaking and try to rebuild,” said Jamie Williams, accompany official.

Most of the camp’s 90 workers rode out the storm at the camp rather than seek refuge at a Red Cross hurricane shelter.  Many did not have transportation to the shelters.

“Where would we go?” farmworker Salome Rodriguez said late Sunday, hours before the hurricane hit mainland Florida.  “We’ve got no place else to go.”

Sixty miles to the northeast, in the farming community of Immokalee, flooding turned the parking lot of the Farmworker Village into a lake with waist-high water in some parts of the public housing community where more than 600 farmworkers live in brightly painted one-story cinderblock duplexes.

The water partially swallowed some of the residents’ cars.  “This is ugly,” said Cruz Vasquez as he waded through thigh-high water to reach his father’s house.

Frantz Grache, 46, a Haitian native, complained that residents were unable to get food because their cars were flooded.  “There’s nothing here,” Grache said.

Delfina Vasquez, a pepper packinghouse worker, complained that water seeped through her door and flooded her kitchen.  The drainage problems caused her car to become half-submerged in water.  She said that housing authorities were not doing anything yet to help residents.

“My car is under water.  Water has leaked into my kitchen,” said Vasquez, 56.  “Right now, we haven’t seen anybody do anything.”

Essie Serrata, Collier County’s housing authority executive director, said the community has had drainage problems for several years, but county officials only recently approved money for the project, which had not yet started.  “We’re just going to have to manage,” Serrata said.