Julio Arias approached a home in the Riverland neighborhood — tucked between Davie and Broward Boulevard and west of I-95 — to document the massive damage caused by this month's heavy rainfall and epic flooding in Fort Lauderdale.
“There’s a water line right there,” said Arias in noting the strikingly high floodwaters. He then snapped a photo of a bedroom with at least eight inches of standing water.
Arias, who works for the city of Fort Lauderdale, logged the information and photos into an application that pinpoints the damage to each property. It acts as an interactive map for the state to use and assess damages.
What Arias and his team are doing is critical in helping hundreds of homeowners possibly get financial assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
He and his team found 766 homes that had at least 18 inches of water inside — what FEMA qualifies as major damage.
But federal authorities have not made a decision about declaring Fort Lauderdale a disaster area.
Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this week requested federal disaster aidfrom the White House and the Biden administration — almost two weeks after historic rainfall caused the major flooding in Fort Lauderdale.
Florida's two U.S. senators, Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Rick Scott, wrote a joint letterTuesday to the White House in support of DeSantis' request.
"The abrupt nature of this storm cell caught everyone off guard," the senators wrote, noting the airport closed for two days and that more than 1,000 homes are estimated to have major damage. "Ensuring that the state has access to federal resources it needs is imperative to helping Floridians in Broward County recover from this disastrous event."
If granted, residents with damaged properties will be eligible for a wide range of loans and other assistance.
READ MORE: 'This is a nightmare': Flooding in Fort Lauderdale brings frustration, homelessness
Arias and others surveying the area mark properties with major damage with bright red dots on the Fort Lauderdale city map. The highest concentration of those dots are in Edgewood — where Claudia Bloechinger lives.
“I mean, you're welcome to come and look, but it looks like a junkyard to me. This neighborhood looks like we're having a big yard sale. It's a devastation of a lot of people losing a lot of stuff,“ she told WLRN outside her home. “Two years ago we had a flood and we just got ourselves back on our feet, and it happened again.”
Her home filled with more than three feet of water during this latest rainstorm.
On Wednesday, she had cleared most of the furniture out of the house. She laid out photo albums and other keepsakes on any surface she could find — an attempt to let the sun dry them out.
“I just got on my kid's yearbooks. I mean, there are a lot of sentimental things. I lost my son two years ago. So I got a lot of pictures of him gone. My mom left. She left me a beautiful picture. Thank God I saved it because I raised it up. But everything's gone. I've lost everything,” she said holding back tears.
She has lived in her home for more than two decades and told WLRN that she is going to live out of state until after hurricane season. Then, she says, she’s going to sell her home.
“What's the sense of putting more money into it? If I'm going to go through a hurricane and it's going to come all back up again? So when I get back, I'm out of here,” she said.
Bloechinger lives a few blocks north of where another group of teams from the city, state and FEMA were walking around, surveying the damage. Her home hasn’t been inspected by any government agencies, but many others in the neighborhood with similar damage have been.
FEMA said the agency’s goal wasn’t to survey every home, rather to survey enough homes to give the state government a better idea of the extent of the damage. Everyone affected by the flooding would be eligible for federal financial assistance — but only if federal authorities deem it a qualified disaster area.
Down the road in Edgewood, Tammie Rosenbloom was talking to a team of government officials.
“So now you're doing the assessments, obviously, what happens next?” she asked a representative from the state’s disaster response team.
“We're collecting the assessment data to ask FEMA to turn on more assistance for everyone,” she responded.
Rosenbloom thanked the group then continued clearing carpeting and other debris from her home.
The team continued to the duplex next door. Agents were talking to a woman who didn’t give her name because of her immigration status.
She didn’t have insurance and hadn’t been staying in the home since the flooding because of the humidity inside. She told the group of government officials the water flooded her oven. When she opened it, water came rushing out.
The damage assessments offered hope to many Edgewood residents who felt as though the government, on every level, had forgotten about them.
Hope that someone was listening, that help would be coming.
