One year after Frances hit Florida

[Guest guest]

One year after Frances hit Florida, snags still hamper efforts to

rebuild

By Kathy Bushouse

Business Writer

Posted September 4 2005

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/local/sfl-

sbsettle04sep04,0,3177057.story?page=1 & coll=sfla-business-front

The sobering images of destruction and devastation from Hurricane

Katrina show the true fury a hurricane can deliver.

For Katrina's victims, the hard part has just begun. Rebuilding is a

slow, painstaking process: cleaning up homes in disrepair, juggling

insurance claims and repair estimates, replacing belongings,

attempting to return to normal life while living out of a suitcase

and eating fast food instead of home-cooked meals.

Approaching the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Frances' slog

through the state, the damage here in 2004 pales in comparison to

what Katrina wrought on places like Biloxi and New Orleans just last

week.

But that doesn't take away from the difficult journey that many have

faced in rebuilding after Frances and Jeanne, twin hurricanes that

hit just three weeks apart, taking similar paths through Florida,

delivering a soggy wallop to thousands.

The four hurricanes of 2004 were a wake-up call to many: Insurance

may not cover everything you thought it did. Hurricane deductibles

mean paying large amounts of your own money to make repairs. What

your insurance company will pay to rebuild your home may be just a

fraction of what your contractor says it costs to do the work.

Those disagreements over coverage have meant many people are still

trying to recover. Of the nearly 1.7 million claims filed after last

year's storms, at least 50,000 -- or about 3 percent -- are still

open. Other claims are being reopened as additional damage has

appeared in the months after the hurricanes.

The state's four mediation centers, opened to help settle disputes

between insurance companies and their customers, have fielded more

than 11,300 requests for help since the centers opened Nov. 20, said

Mark Pritchett, executive vice president of the Center for

Public Policy, the Tallahassee-based nonpartisan center hired by the

state to run mediations.

The center still gets at least 30 calls a day for help, far more

than Pritchett said he thought he'd get by now. The center's

contract was set to expire in December but will probably be extended

into spring, in part because it now needs to handle claims from

Hurricane Dennis and from Katrina's South Florida strike. " I guess

we've never had anything like this happen before, " he said.

These are the stories of just a few Floridians for whom returning to

the routine has not been easy.

`Things just fell apart'

Every day when she picked her daughter up from school west of Boca

Raton, Holmes was asked the same question: " Mommy, are we

going to go home yet? "

Holmes, her husband and their two children had shared a rental condo

in Delray Beach since April, when festering mold forced them out.

The family's doctor wrote them a prescription to move -- blood tests

found four of six varieties of mold in her daughter's system, one of

them toxic, Holmes said.

So normal life is still on hold for Holmes and her family. It has

been since Frances lumbered through Florida last year.

First, it was a dispute over repair costs with her insurance

company -- there was at least a $60,000 difference between

contractor repair estimates and what her insurer, United Property

and Casualty Insurance Co., would pay.

Holmes went into state-sponsored mediation in May and got the money

she needed for repairs. She thought that by June, she and her family

would be back in their home west of Boca Raton.

Then, Holmes said, " things just fell apart. " She discovered the

contractor she hired to do repairs and to remove the mold wasn't

licensed to rebuild the damaged parts of her home, so she fired her

contractor.

She found another contractor to do the work, which is now finished.

But Holmes has no furniture, because the moving company her former

contractor hired to take the furniture out of her home wanted

$15,000 to return her belongings -- a job she was told initially

would only cost $4,000 for moving and storage.

When money ran out for additional living expenses and the house was

repaired, they moved back home, living on air mattresses in their TV

room.

Holmes has hired an attorney, who is preparing legal action against

her old contractor and has worked with her insurance company to get

the couple money they might need. Still, Holmes estimates she and

her husband have had to pay $20,000 out-of-pocket.

She has a timeline chronicling the last year of her claim -- every

time she's made a phone call, collected a check, talked to someone

about her house. She's complained to state officials about her

situation.

Her biggest lesson from the storms: " Be sure you have good

documentation. "

Waiting on a kitchen

Amy Hair is tremendously upbeat for a woman who spent the last seven

months sharing one room with three young children.

Her two-story Lantana home saw minor water damage after Frances;

Hurricane Jeanne delivered the sucker punch three weeks later that

caused an estimated $165,000 in repairs to the house that Hair, a

sign language interpreter, bought 10 years ago.

The water came in through her sewing room, and spread through the

walls. Mold came later. The family had to move out, Hair said,

splitting time between a rented room where the family would sleep

and their Lantana house where they would go after school to oversee

construction crews.

" I always say, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a

time, " Hair said. " But the problem is, they keep bringing in more

elephants. "

The kitchen had to be entirely rebuilt, after the mold spread into

the cabinets. The contents of her kitchen and sewing room are

precariously stacked in a room at the front of her house, waiting to

be returned to their proper resting places once repairs are done.

They're making do. Her refrigerator is plugged in and running,

though her oven and many of her other appliances are on the back

porch. Hair has learned to cook with her microwave and toaster oven.

Often, the family eats takeout.

" Live without a kitchen for a week with three kids and tell me how

you do, " Hair said. " Then do it for a year. "

Hair said she hasn't had a bad time dealing with her insurer,

Nationwide Insurance Co. of Florida, despite having multiple

adjusters see her home and still waiting for money from the company.

She has at least a half-dozen adjuster telephone numbers programmed

into her cell phone.

She's hoping for more money for additional living expenses from

Nationwide, and should get the rest of what she's owed for repairs

once the work is done.

But the most she's done is taken her complaints to the Department of

Financial Services. She was urged to do mediation, but " I like to

give the insurance company a chance, " Hair said.

Patience running out

Never having experienced a hurricane, Kepner and her three

teenage children anxiously prepared for the onslaught on their

northwest Orlando home.

And there was an element of excitement -- this was the Kepner

family's first hurricane.

But the excitement quickly turned into fear and later to frustration.

Frances' wind and rain toppled an old oak tree onto Kepner's home,

causing the ceiling in her son's bedroom to cave in and the windows

to burst. Scared, they abandoned their home midstorm to take shelter

at a friend's house.

" We didn't know how long we could stay in the house. I told my son

grab the memories, grab what's important and leave anything we can

buy, " Kepner said.

Today, she still has a temporary wall holding up part of the roof as

she continues to wait for her insurance company, Citizens Property

Insurance Corp., to come through with a settlement check.

" I can't expedite these people. They are not responding. I know

they're busy, but it's a year later -- they are not overwhelmed like

they were right after the storms, " Kepner said.

She went to several builders and the cheapest repair estimate she

found was $23,000 to fix her four-bedroom home built in 1955. Kepner

said Citizens won't give her more than $12,000.

The wait for repairs has been especially tough on her children.

" You think that kids are able to bounce back after something like

this, but it has been rough. They went from having their own room to

losing their privacy, their own space, " she said. " There has been

more tension [in the house] than I could have imagined. "

Last week, she received word from a Citizens representative that her

claim was being reopened and that a check should be coming soon. But

she doesn't know for how much or how long it will take.

In the meantime, she has updated the house's older electrical and

plumbing systems, hoping to be taken out of the " high risk " so she

can find another insurance company -- once she settles her claim

with Citizens.

Dorimar Mercado of the Orlando Sentinel contributed to this report.

Kathy Bushouse can be reached at kbushouse@... or 954-

356-4667.