BIG PINE KEY, Fla. — Standing inside her Florida Keys home, Tara Wood opens a box full of what should be holiday cheer.
“I can’t celebrate Christmas,” Wood, whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Irma in 2017 said.
Instead, the thought of it brings her to tears.
“The last thing I want to do is be standing here doing this," she said. "I'm doing this because I don’t want other people to have to go through this."
The "this" she’s referring to is the delays she’s experienced with Florida’s Hurricane Irma Rebuild and Replacement program.
Wood says after the Category 4 storm, she was one of the first to sign up for the Rebuild program in 2018, but it wasn’t until 2021 that workers started taking the old windows out of her family’s home.
“This just failed the inspection. This was not done right,” Wood said.
It’s been 6 years and her home looks like a construction site.
“This is our caution tape that’s around here. It’s awful. It’s awful,” Wood said. “When I tell you we’ve been through a lot, we’ve been through a lot.”
Wood is one of the dozens of people who emailed 10 Investigates telling us they were still waiting for Rebuild, a state-run program using $480 million of your tax dollars to repair and replace homes damaged by Hurricane Irma.
4,000 Florida families were given contracts stating once construction began, it would take anywhere from 6 months to a year, not 6 years and counting.
It’s why we hit the road, down to the Florida Keys to Wood’s home.
She says initially, contractors replaced the windows and doors in her Big Pine Key home incorrectly.
“The slider upstairs leaked into our bedroom, and this has all been gutted since 2022 all because of Rebuild contractors,” Wood said.
Just minutes away in Little Torch Key, it was Rebuild contractors who delivered this brand-new home that was not even livable.
“You can see the black mold,” Tom Kailian, whose mother-in-law’s house was damaged by Irma said.
“That’s all-black mold down there,” Jennifer Titus asked. “Yep,” Kailian replied.
He says they got the keys in March 2023.
“In both showers, you can see the damage here. From day one, they leaked because they didn’t connect them properly,” Kailian said.
But within a few months, their family moved back out.
“Wasted money the state has done,” Kailian said.
Mold reports show the place was inundated.
“It’s still growing,” Kailian said.
“It was a beautiful home," Pamela Rose Kailian, whose mom's home was damaged by Irma said. "After Irma, it took some damage, but it wasn’t horrible."
This was supposed to be Pamela’s mom’s home to live out her golden years.
“It was her dream," she said. "She couldn’t believe it when I told her they are going to bring her a house."
She signed paperwork with Rebuild Florida back in 2018. The project they were told in writing would take months, took years.
“I’m sorry we ever got involved with Rebuild Florida. You're going to make me cry,” Rose said. “No excuse for how long it took.”
It’s now too late.
Pamela’s mom, Gracie died at age 87, not getting to see the new home.
“I miss her,” said Rose.
No more memories. Holidays together. And still no house.
“If we would’ve brought her home, this mold would’ve killed her anyways,” said Rose.
Another example of wasted time and money.
We took these stories to J.R. Sanderson, the former director of the South Carolina Disaster Recovery Office.
He oversaw one of the country’s most successful programs that received federal dollars to repair hurricane-damaged homes.
“I want to make sure that low to moderate-income people who are at the end of their rope, if you will, with their back up against the wall, they need adequate, resilient housing because another storm is going to hit us next year," Sanderson said. "So if they're not in a house by that point, and it's not resilient, then we're failing as a government entity."
He says in 2015, they completed 1,500 homes quickly and efficiently after the state’s first disaster under his leadership.
We shared with him the stories of Floridians who have been waiting for years, some still living in hotels.
“I would say that there's a measure of what I would call common sense that has to go into all this,” Sanderson said. “Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will come down and do a compliance inspection once a year to almost all their grantees, so that's one part. Most of the pressure that will come on a HUD grantee, though, will come from the press, or it'll come from the state legislature,” Sanderson said.
It's what we’re seeing now.
“The state, we owe her an apology. I also think we owe it to these individuals,” State Senator Shevrin Jones said, referring to one of his constituents, Katoya Wright who is still waiting for her home to be rebuilt.
He sent a letter to the FloridaCommerce secretary calling for an audit of the state’s third-party contractor IEM who won a $252 million contract to oversee all rebuild projects.
“The government has the responsibility, the innate responsibility, to hold contractors accountable. In our view and what we teach is, the state must own the final inspection. The state comes in, the state owns the damage inspection because we need to know exactly how much it's going to cost. And we need to own the final inspection,” Sanderson said.
Pamela Rose says that’s not what happened here.
“Do your job, shame on you,” Rose said.
They hope things change.
“The only people making money here are the contractors. There’s no oversight. No one is overseeing how it is being done,” Tom Kailian said.
It’s certainly Tara Wood’s wish.
“We can’t have Christmas parties," she said. "We can’t have anything.”
Before she has to leave another holiday unboxed.
“I don’t want somebody else to hang their lives up,” Wood said.