Last Wednesday, Hurricane Ian slammed into southwest Florida and made landfall near Fort Myers as a category 4 storm, causing severe storm surge and flooding. Ian is tied for the fifth-strongest hurricane by wind speed in U.S. history. Its strength puts it alongside other recent hurricanes in the Gulf Coast like Ida and Laura.

Early projections of Ian’s destruction estimate that the storm has created tens of billions of dollars in damage across Florida. Although several communities were hit by the hurricane, Fort Myers and Sanibel Island in Lee County were among the hardest hit. And at a press conference on Tuesday, the Lee County Sheriff confirmed 55 deaths in the county, which is more than half of the total deaths in the state. Nearly 180,000 customers are still without power. And school is still closed in the county for the rest of the week.

Now that storm waters have receded, these communities are looking ahead at recovery.  As we’ve learned in the past, not all communities are equally equipped to deal with the devastation after a hurricane. In a November 2020 report, FEMA’s own advisors admitted that the agency wasn’t  meeting requirements to provide aid without discriminating based on race and other factors. One of President Biden’s first goals was to change that. Early in office, he signed an executive order that mandated federal agencies to create racial equity – both in new and existing policies. But in the community of Dunbar, a historically Black neighborhood in Fort Myers, about a quarter of its residents live below the federal poverty line, and many are concerned they won’t get the recovery assistance they need. In nearby Harlem Heights, a predominantly Latino and Black neighborhood, more than a third of residents live below the federal poverty line.

For more, we spoke with Florida State Representative of District 70, Michele Rayner-Goolsby.