Check the weird path of Camille in 1969:
Compare that with Agnes in '72:
Posted on 08/14/2004 1:42:49 AM PDT by kattracks
PUNTA GORDA, Fla. - The death toll from Hurricane Charley rose early Saturday, when a county official said there had a been "a number of fatalities" at a mobile home park and deputies were standing guard over stacks of bodies because the area was inaccessible to ambulances.Wayne Sallade, Charlotte County's director of emergency management, said early Saturday that there were "a number of fatalities" at the mobile home park, and that there were confirmed deaths in at least three other areas in the county.
The eye of the worst hurricane to hit Florida in a dozen years passed directly over Punta Gorda, a town of 15,000 which took a devastating hit Friday.
Hundreds of people were missing and more were left homeless, said Sallade, who compared the devastation to 1992's Hurricane Andrew, blamed for 43 deaths, most in South Florida.
"It's Andrew all over again," he said. "We believe there's significant loss of life."
Sallade did not have an estimate on a specific number of fatalities. He said it may take days to get a final toll.
Extensive damage was also reported on exclusive Captiva Island, a narrow strip of sand west of Fort Myers.
President Bush (news - web sites) declared a major disaster area in Florida, making federal money available to Charlotte, Lee, Manatee and Sarasota counties. One million customers were reported without power statewide, including all of Hardee County and Punta Gorda.
The Category 4 storm was stronger than expected when the eye reached the mainland at Charlotte Harbor, pummeling the coast with winds reaching 145 mph and a surge of sea water of 13 to 15 feet.
Charley was forecast to spread sustained winds of about 40 mph to 60 mph across inland portions of eastern North Carolina and to dump 3 to 6 inches of rain beginning Saturday morning, forecasters said. Gov. Mike Easley declared a state of emergency.
In South Carolina, roads clogged Friday night as tourists and residents of the state's Grand Strand — beaches and high-dollar homes and hotels — heeded a mandatory evacuation order. Gov. Mark Sanford had urged voluntary evacuation earlier Friday.
At Charlotte Regional Medical Center in Punta Gorda, 40 people sought treatment for storm injuries. The hospital was so badly damaged that patients were transferred to other hospitals.
"We can't keep patients here," CEO Josh Putter said. "Every roof is damaged, lots of water damage, half our windows are blown out."
Among those seeking treatment was Marty Rietveld, showered with broken glass when the sliding glass door at his home was smashed by a neighbor's roof that blew off. Rietveld broke his leg, and his future son-in-law suffered a punctured leg artery.
"We are moving," said Rietveld's daughter, Stephanie Rioux. "We are going out of state."
At least 20 patients with storm injuries were reported at a hospital in Fort Myers.
A crash on Interstate 75 in Sarasota County killed one person, and a wind gust caused a truck to collide with a car in Orange County, killing a young girl. A man who stepped outside his house to smoke a cigarette died when a banyan tree fell on him in Fort Myers, authorities said.
At the Charlotte County Airport, wind tore apart small planes, and one flew down the runway as if it were taking off. The storm spun a parked pickup truck 180 degrees, blew the windows out of a sheriff's deputy's car and ripped the roof off an 80-foot-by 100-foot building.
Martin said he saw homes ripped apart at two trailer parks.
"There were four or five overturned semi trucks — 18-wheelers — on the side of the road," he said.
In Desoto County outside Arcadia, several dead cows, wrapped in barbed wire, littered the roadside.
The hurricane rapidly gained strength in the Gulf of Mexico after crossing Cuba and swinging around the Florida Keys as a more moderate Category 2 storm Friday morning. An estimated 1.4 million people evacuated in anticipation of the strongest hurricane to strike Florida since Andrew in 1992.
Charley reached landfall at 3:45 p.m. EDT, when the eye passed over barrier islands off Fort Myers and Punta Gorda, some 110 miles southeast of the Tampa Bay area.
Charley hit the mainland 30 minutes later, with storm surge flooding of 10 to 15 feet, the hurricane center said. Nearly 1 million people live within 30 miles of the landfall.
The state put 5,000 National Guard soldiers and airmen on alert to help deal with the storm, but only 1,300 had been deployed by Friday night, a state emergency management spokeswoman said.
At a nursing center in Port Charlotte, Charley broke windows and ripped off portions of the roof, but none of the more than 100 residents or staff was injured, administrator Joyce Cuffe said.
"The doors were being sucked open," Cuffe said. "A lot of us were holding the doors, trying to keep them shut, using ropes, anything we could to hold the doors shut. There was such a vacuum, our ears and head were hurting."
At 2 a.m. EDT, the center of the storm was in the Atlantic Ocean, about 190 miles south-southwest of Charleston, S.C., and moving north-northeast at 25 mph. Forecasters expected Charley to increase in speed. Maximum sustained winds were near 85 mph with higher gusts.
The center was expected to approach the South Carolina coast Saturday morning. A hurricane warning remained in effect from Cocoa Beach, northward to Oregon Inlet, N.C., and a tropical storm warning was in effect on the North Carolina and Virginia Coasts north of Oregon Inlet to Chincoteague, including the lower Chesapeake Bay south of Smith Point.
Spared the worst of the storm was the Tampa Bay area, where about a million people had been told to leave their homes. Some drove east, only to find themselves in the path of the Charley.
"I feel like the biggest fool," said Robert Angel of Tarpon Springs, who sought safety in a motel. "I spent hundreds of dollars to be in the center of a hurricane. Our home is safe, but now I'm in danger."
The fourth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, Danielle, formed Friday but posed no immediate concern to land. The fifth may form as early as Saturday and threaten islands in the southeastern Caribbean Sea.
___
Associated Press writers Mark Long in Fort Myers, Ken Thomas in Key West, Mitch Stacy and Brendan Farrington in Tampa, Vickie Chachere in Sarasota, Mike Branom and Mike Schneider in Orlando and Bruce Smith in Charleston, S.C., contributed to this report.
joe has a florida ping list. I'm up around Tampa-- we got next to nothing yesterday. NautiNurse also came out okay, and she's farther south in Palmetto.
>>"The doors were being sucked open">>>>>> I guess no one told them they should open the windows a crack on the down wind side, to keep this from happening.
How does that feel? You know, to be so damn right about everything?
My elderly mother is in a state near there, but she'll be talked into evacuating before another hurricane hits there.
Right.
I spent a summer down in Punta Gorda back in the 80s, I can't even imagine the devastation that must have happened there.
Florida FReeper checking in. It missed the Tampa area completely. My sweetie's family is in Arcadia, where it was really bad, but they're all okay, too.
FoxNews reported that the person who first made the "stacks of bodies" claim is now backing off that statement. There are casualties, but early reports may have been exaggerated.
No matter what sophisticated models Man can come up with, nature has the final say.
You need to lighten up; you've been pontificating all night long; you don't have all the answers.
Fox and Friends just reported that two semi-refrigerator trucks are on their way to Punta Gorda to take away bodies.
Everybody in mobile homes was told to evacuate.
Thank heavens! Appreciate the update.
No, it wasn't.
"We spent several hours in traffic evacuating from Floyd, which didn't hit here."
You were wise to leave just in case. I have lived in Florida for 54 years ( all my life) and nothing I can recall has ever looked any scarier than the radar image of Floyd hovering out there waiting to smash the whole state at once. That was a huge and terrible storm and I thank God that it never hit us directly, it did enough damage from where it was. There have been many bad storms but also many misses and cases where we all lucked out, too. I remember going to the Keys in 1960 and seeing pics of the damage from Hurricane Donna. Not nice at all. I was glad to be in Gainesville when Andrew went through S. Fla. I used to work for an insurance company and I can only imagine what a nightmare that was for everyone, even small tropical depressions can make a big mess.
My brother lives (I hope) in Charlotte Harbor about 150 feet from the harbor. These people were totally caught off guard by this. He was worried on Wednesday and decided they would take shelter in a local nursing home when the storm came. (but you can see that major buildings had huge damage) He took the most important momentos with him but they still had no idea it would be this bad. We haven't heard from him.
His whole mobile home park neighborhood was old folks. Alot of these old folks are not very mobile so he looks after them. That is probably why they stay...they have no family...no support system...I don't even know if the emergency managers will transport them if they don't have resources?
God Bless them.
Fox News banner: "High volume of deaths reported in Punta Gorda Trailer Park"
['high volume'?]
Also: "Hundreds of people reported missing in Florida."
CNN was reporting about 1/2 hr. ago that Emergency Officials in Punta Gorda had ordered 60 body bags. Take that for what it's worth. Let's hope it's just another symptom of the left's obsession with body bags. But unfortunately, I have a sinking feeling all those body bags will be put into service.
projection of a hurricane is never an exact science; the weather guys couldn't believe it had changed course and gained power so quickly.
I hate to say it but I'm afraid some people down there believed it to be no more than a Cat 2 that they could ride out in a mobile home.
Unfortunately, to no one's fault the storm changed direction and power.
Prayers to all involved in the rescue and clean-up down there.
Fran: 37
Floyd: 57
That is just NOT true; articles in their own papers showed that people were deciding NOT to evacuate.
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