‘A matter of life and death’: How disaster response endangers US farmworkers

When Hurricane Idalia struck Florida last summer, a tree fell straight through a trailer occupied by a migrant-farmworker family in Hamilton County. They couldn’t afford to move, even temporarily, so the family of six just picked up the things they could salvage and continued to live around the rotting tree. 

“It was indescribable,” said Victoria Gómez de la Torre.

When Gómez de la Torre, who is a program supervisor at the Alachua Multi-County Migrant Education Program, visited the family to deliver food and supplies after the storm, she spotted swaths of the trailer’s floor missing. The front door knob was no more than a piece of rope tied to a nail. “They live on survival mode,” Gómez de la Torre said.

In the aftermath of Idalia, farmworkers in Florida’s rural, agricultural areas were overlooked by federal, state, and local emergency response efforts, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Natural Hazards Center and covered exclusively by Grist. The report reinforces how the current patchwork disaster management cycle is increasingly failing the very communities who often end up the most disrupted by extreme weather events. 

“It’s a matter of life and death,” said Miranda Carver Martin, a social scientist at the University of Florida who led the report. “Everything’s at stake.” 

Martin and her co-authors Amr Abd-Elrahman and Paul Monaghan found that, in the days and weeks after a hurricane hits, official emergency management efforts are riddled with gaps that contribute to the endangerment of farmworker communities. 

Those gaps are largely found ensconced in public data infrastructure. One such public dataset that is frequently used by emergency planners and public officials to identify the people that need the most disaster-related support is the Social Vulnerability Index produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Although the index compiles socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic minority status, housing type, and modes of transportation, it doesn’t include immigration status, which is known to exacerbate social vulnerabilities. It also doesn’t account for a household’s type of employment, even though agricultural laborers are among the lowest paid workers in the country. 

“Ideally this would be a public right available to everyone, that everyone can be safe during a storm. But the unfortunate reality is that it’s a lot of the religious organizations, it’s farmworker organizations, it’s migrant-serving organizations that are stepping in to fill those gaps,” Martin said.

So the report’s authors created their own framework — tailored to the farmworker community in north central Florida — which takes into account individuals’ citizenship status, job precarity, housing situation, preferred language, and transportation options. From there, they cross-referenced state geographic data with those vulnerability factors to map where people live and where commonly used disaster sites, like schools, are located. This sort of map, with more granular information about people and their needs, could be used to help public officials create more effective emergency response plans.

But a lack of localized data on where farmworker populations are concentrated prevented even Martin and her colleagues from being able to complete the map. 

The next best thing, Martin said, is a digital dashboard by the National Center for Farmworker Health, which combines many existing public data sources on farmworkers together on a national, state, and county level with findings from the U.S. Census of Agriculture, as well as information on H-2A workers, or those here on a temporary visa, who have historically been excluded in other key federal agricultural worker surveys. 

A limitation of this, however, is that emergency planning needs to be done on a hyperlocal scale to be most effective at addressing any population’s vulnerabilities. Another drawback is the timeliness of the information, as national sources like the Census of Agriculture only update once every five years. What’s more, the tool doesn’t collect data at the level of the census-tract — small subdivisions of counties housing a couple thousand residents — which would provide critical context to ensure that people in high-need areas are being supplied with the right resources. 

“A lot is missing from that dashboard,” said Martin, who noted that the vast range of social vulnerability indicators they identified for the farmworker population in one swath of Florida underscores how important census-tract level data is. “Where do we site specific services? Where do we put shelters? Where do we provide additional support?” 

Furthermore, a clear idea of the language access services available for those with limited English proficiency at the community level is one of the biggest social vulnerability measures missing from disaster management programs, the report found. Areas where multilingual communications are widely available from public agencies have a low social vulnerability, while regions where everything is provided in English have the opposite. 

“It’s not the fact that someone speaks Spanish that they’re inherently more likely to not be able to weather a hurricane easily. It’s the fact that they’re not being provided services in the language that they speak,” said Martin. “Those are the kinds of things that I think we need to be monitoring, in order to hold public institutions accountable to ensuring the well-being of the whole community.”

Emergency information is absolutely crucial in languages outside of English, as are improved methods of local communication that reflect what media a community uses, said Fernando Rivera, a sociologist who studies disasters at the University of Central Florida. He points out how this is especially necessary in a state like Florida, where an estimated 30.2 percent of households speak a language other than English at home. A study he led in 2015 reinforces the fact that language access issues disproportionately barring Florida’s rural farmworkers from disaster relief have persisted for almost a decade — if not longer.

“We continue to see the same issues,” said Rivera. “This is the consequence of the inequalities that we have within our system, right? Unfortunately, farmworkers [are] a group that doesn’t have a strong lobby that could make this a principal agenda on the federal or the state level.” 

Federal law, as well as FEMA’s policies on language access, mandate accessible translation services in case of a disaster. But enforcement is a different story. The state of Florida’s emergency management website uses Google Translate to make its resources available in 133 languages, reported Central Florida Public Media, but new links “often lead to English-only content.” And community-based organizations working with farmworkers across the state say hurricane-related resources translated from English, or even disaster relief sites staffed with Spanish or Indigenous language speakers, are scarce and inconsistent. 

Victoria Gómez de la Torre at the Alachua Multi-County Migrant Education Program, a federal program under the Florida Department of Education, says she commonly sees that information about storm preparation and local shelters that schools send home with children are provided only in English. “We all need to be aware that climate change is not waiting for us to get our act together. It’s here. And these mega-hurricanes are only going to increase. And [farmworkers] are still outside of any type of resources and help. So we need to plan,” said Gómez de la Torre. 

Working in tandem with state, local, and tribal governments, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is the main federal entity that provides people with government aid after a major disaster. But that funding is ultimately only available for residents with legal citizenship status, or those who meet specific requirements. (Roughly 40 percent of the nation’s 2.4 million or so farmworkers are without work authorization.) 

The authors of the report argue that public officials and agencies, including FEMA, need to work with community-based organizations to include farmworker populations in emergency planning. But organizers in Florida say that they haven’t heard much — if anything — from those entities, either before or after extreme weather events. “FEMA, it exists,” said Giovana Perazzo, a community health worker at the Rural Women’s Health Project in Gainesville. “They organize the shelters they organize, sometimes the food drives, and things like that. But we don’t have much information from them.” 

Immediately following Idalia, the families in Gilchrist County that Perazzo works with told her they had no clue what to do or where to go after the storm struck. “They didn’t know where FEMA was going to be. They didn’t have any information,” she said. She fears this disconnect will only get worse, as lately she’s noticed that growing anti-immigrant sentiment perpetuated by policymakers and state legislation targeting migrants is causing the community to be even more afraid of the government institutions that helm relief operations. 

A spokesperson at FEMA told Grist on background that it worked with the state of Florida “hand in hand” during Idalia, deploying resources and personnel to assist local communities. This included operating disaster recovery centers, where the agency says it provided language interpretation and translation services for survivors in Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Haitian-Creole, German, Korean, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. “We are deeply concerned that farmworkers felt fear from the recovery process, and we work closely with our federal partners, state and local officials, and community organizations to ensure everyone can access the aid they need,” the FEMA spokesperson said.

The Natural Hazards Center report found that Idalia didn’t just expose and exacerbate pre-existing inequities facing farmworkers in Florida, particularly for those with limited English proficiency and undocumented legal status, it also mimicked a pattern of aid exclusion seen in the aftermath of California’s Thomas wildfire and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors argue that until more inclusive indicators are added into social vulnerability assessments, and the role of community-based organizations is centered in disaster-planning and decision-making processes, farmworkers will continue to be largely excluded from relief efforts. 

Rather than continue waiting for officials to mobilize on these issues, a coalition of groups statewide are coming together to work out community-focused plans of their own, according to Dominique O’Connor at the Farmworker Association of Florida. They’re just getting started, but are tracking down, county by county, what identification documents are required in order to access disaster relief services, the scope of messaging services or notification systems in non-English languages, as well as plotting shelter and distribution locations. 

The coalition wants to create a resource map, she noted, or at least get a clearer picture of what these systems look like long before the next crisis. “Even though we don’t necessarily have the capacity or the means, we are trying to fill the gap,” said O’Connor. 

“I’ve been told that the hurricane season is going to be brutal. I’m kind of bracing myself.” 

Lyndsey Gilpin contributed reporting to this article.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘A matter of life and death’: How disaster response endangers US farmworkers on Jul 30, 2024.