SWFL woman left homeless while her emergency housing sat empty, until WINK Investigations stepped in

More than a year after Hurricane Ian devastated southwest Florida, paperwork shows an emergency trailer sits in Kathy Brickers’ name in Fort Myers Beach.

She should’ve had her own space: A safe place to live and shower and sleep, but life is not that simple.

“This is plain cruel,” Kathy exclaimed. “I said dirty words and that wasn’t nice. It just made me furious!”

Like so many in southwest Florida, Kathy’s life changed after Hurricane Ian. The north Fort Myers home she rented was damaged and flooded, making it uninhabitable.

“It was disgusting,” Bricker explained. “Here was water in a lot of stuff, there was sludge all over the place.”

A paper trail from Lee County and emergency management agencies shows a timeline of Bricker’s life since the storm: In January, she moved out of her destroyed house and into the Pink Shell Resort, a location that hosted dozens of Ian survivors.

“Okay, I’m not dead. A lot of people had really bad situations,” Bricker reasoned, staying optimistic. “I can live through about anything.”

Then on May 9, documents show Bricker was assigned a trailer from Unite Florida. The small unit was only accessible through a small, steep set of stairs that came without guardrails. At her age, suffering from a bad knee that requires her to use a cane or wheelchair, she didn’t feel safe using the stairs.

Fearing a serious injury, paperwork shows Bricker declined the unit, choosing to wait for a safer option. She says the staff on site agreed with her decision.

“They said look, we can put you back into the rotation,” Bricker remembered. “We’ll get you one with a ramp and a disability. They had me sign the sheet.”

With no other place to go, Bricker was forced to live out of her car for months. That’s where she was when she got a shocking message in early October.

Bricker was informed that a crew would be performing routine maintenance on “her” trailer. The same trailer she had been locked out of for five months while living out of her car, waiting to be assigned to a new trailer that she could use safely. She realized her original trailer had been sitting empty in her name since the day she declined it.

“They’ve let it sit empty! They didn’t even help anybody else with it,” Bricker said frustratingly. “That made me the maddest with it, that nobody else has been helped.”

Getting Results

WINK Investigations reporter Peter Fleischer reached out to Unite Florida, a Florida Division of Emergency Management agency created after Hurricane Ian. Their website only has one phone number, so Fleischer and Bricker spoke with six different employees over the course of days.

“Nobody could even find a case worker that had worked with me,” Bricker admits sadly. “They said I wasn’t even on the list for a trailer and they didn’t know what I was talking about.”

But after days went by and many more calls and emails were made, Bricker finally got stairs that she could handle. After all her waiting, the company in charge of her trailer built a ramp and stairs that she could safely navigate.

“I just came in and it was like, peace,” Bricker beams from inside her new trailer. “You can sleep and not worry about where it’s going to be. Now I have to settle in and go, okay, how do we make the plan to move on from here? Can we stay in the area? And now I can begin that journey.”

Despite all the challenges and heartbreak, the last year has thrown at her, Bricker still has a smile on her face.

“We’re alive and we’re still here,” Bricker insists. “Maybe I can go on the road with a comedy tour when we’re through with this silly thing.”

The Department of Emergency Management tells WINK News, Bricker will have at least six months to find permanent housing. The agency is no longer accepting applications.