Hurricane Survivors In FL, NC, Cuba Find Help Through Mutual Aid Group

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — Having lived through Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi native Liz Edmonds knew exactly what the Tampa Bay area was in for as Hurricane Milton barreled across the Gulf toward Florida’s west coast earlier this month.

“I’d been hit by a Category 3 and I know no one around here has, but I knew what was coming,” she told Patch.

As an organizer with St. Pete Food Not Bombs, a grassroots mutual aid group that feeds the community three times a week, Edmonds and her co-organizers offered money to help people evacuate from the storm.

“We had a few hundred bucks in our little Venmo and we said, ‘If you need gas money, get the hell out of here,’” Edmonds said.

Since then, she’s been on the ground collecting and bringing needed resources to survivors of three recent major hurricanes — Helene, Milton and Oscar.

“It’s just been crisis after crisis,” she told Patch.

Ahead of Milton, Edmonds evacuated to Georgia and then decided to spend some time in Mississippi until power was restored at her St. Petersburg home.

“Then I said, ‘(expletive) it, I’m going to North Carolina,’ and I packed up my truck,” Edmonds said. “I asked people to look in their closets and get me a jacket, get me a clean blanket. And I drove to North Carolina. I got as high up the mountain as I possibly could.”

She brought 10 trash bags of clothing to western North Carolina, which was ravaged by Hurricane Helene in surprise flash flooding that decimated communities as it moved north out of Florida and left more than 240 people dead during its trek. Nearly 100 people remain missing in the mountains.

“You see the images, but to see it in person and see people sleeping in tents by the street because they have no homes, they just have land, they have no power, water, it’s destruction like I’ve never seen in my life, and it’s horrific,” she said. “I even saw a double-wide trailer wrapped around a tree up in the mountains.”

Edmonds quickly realized these mountain communities were inundated by donations that they didn’t have the manpower to sort and distribute.

“There were mountains of diapers, mountains of water, and when I say, mountains of clothes, I saw a parking lot with a mountain of clothes and nobody was even around, and now it’s getting rained on,” she said, adding, “They need labor. They need hands. People to sort through the donations.”

Once she returned to Florida, she immediately got to work again in Pinellas County, which was reeling after back-to-back hits by Helene and Milton.

Food Not Bombs continued feeding the community and also set up in some of the hardest-hit areas. The group continues to work with other mutual aid organizations in the region, which all offer different services and assistance.

“We have our hands in the community and wherever we can, we jump in and help people,” Edmonds said. “We have another mutual aid group that cuts trees down. If you need a tree cut down, we connect you with them. Food is our main goal and to get people the resources they need.”

Now, she’s shifted her focus to Cuba, which was recently hit by Hurricane Oscar. The country’s power grid collapsed even before the Category 1 storm made landfall.

She’s been making independent aid runs to Cuba since 2020 bringing supplies to its residents, who often don’t have access to basic necessities, she said.

She’s collecting donated medicine, hygiene items, food, power banks and rechargeable light sources that volunteers will fly down to Cuba Friday morning.

Those interested in donating items ahead of the trip can order from the group’s Amazon Wish List or reach out to St. Pete Food Not Bombs on Instagram.

Edmonds has made several friends in the country in recent years and she’s appalled to learn about the conditions in which they live.

“The country sends their doctors to everywhere else, yet their citizens are dying because of lack of medical care,” she said. “They don’t have medicines and their small amount of food reserves are going away. They don’t have coffee; it’s Cuba and it doesn’t even have coffee.”

She hopes to start making monthly trips to the country with supplies.

Cuba is often a divisive issue for people who focus solely on the country’s politics, but she hopes donors and volunteers can overlook that.

“Everybody is so divided by it and it shouldn’t be that way,” Edmonds said. “Everyone is super divided and I’d love to reset that mentality from both sides. Maybe the government wasn’t the best. Maybe everybody has a point here. But we need to help these people. It’s a humanitarian issue.”