'We Survived Irma But We Don't Have Money For Food'

Miami dodged much of Irma's wrath but the aftermath of the storm has been devastating for the city's poor.....
Tiffany Strong walks through the debris in the top floor of her house and sighs as she points to a stack of shoes in one of the rooms. Everything is drenched and neither she nor her two children can use them again.

This has been their home for 12 years in Miami, but they can't go back. Heavy rains flooded the property on Sunday as Hurricane Irma hit the city.

The winds caused the ceiling to collapse and now there is nothing but wet furniture and damaged walls everywhere.

"I don't even know where to begin. To come back to your house and see it like this… it is devastating," says Strong, 42, who evacuated with her two children days before the storm hit.

"We don't have nothing. We don't even have any food. [What] I had got bad when the power was out."
Strong's life was already hard before Irma destroyed her house. She is one of 9,000 residents of the historically black neighbourhood of Overtown, one of the lowest-income areas of Miami.

The average annual family income in this area is $15,280 (£11,300), while in Miami Dade County it is nearly $42,000, according to official figures.

Overtown is just two miles away from downtown Miami, where high-rise luxury buildings look out to the bay and millions of tourists visit every year.

But the landscape in this neighbourhood is very different, with ramshackle buildings, old cars and discount shops.

Days after Hurricane Irma hit Florida, more than 300,000 homes remained without electricity in Miami Dade County, a densely populated area with 2.7 million inhabitants.
Although Miami did not suffer the full wrath of a hurricane that devastated several Caribbean islands, there are communities like Overtown that are struggling to recover.

Most of its residents didn't have money to buy food and water before the storm and the few supplies they had are now gone.

It's the same situation in other vulnerable areas in metropolitan Miami, where more than 21% of the population lives in poverty, according a 2015 county report.

Franklin Wright, 38, walked to a public school near his home to pick up three boxes full of US Army food rations.