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.
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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.
we had a long thread during the approach of the storm - its no one's "fault", but the nature of the way they do the evacuations for these. of course, they issue alot of evacuation requests in a blanket fashion, and that is surely the responsible thing to do when you have to move alot of people and you need alot of lead time to do it. As was done in the Tampa Bay region.
My only point is, they know these storms can turn at the last minute. and there has to be some part of the evacuation system that looks at that "last minute" move - and issues some decidely pointed alerts to the areas that are going to get blasted. There was about a 3-4 hour lead time for charlotte Harbor (I am talking about the direct hit part of it).
I've seen a lot on this forum and put up with a lot. But I won't tolerate someone making jokes about dead old people.
We just got the power turned on here in my area of Longwood Fl just north of orlando. It went out last night.
The hurricane went pretty much overhead, possibly a little to the east.
We didn't have a portable radio in the house and no one wanted to go out to the car just to verify that it was terrible outside. Therefore, I am not sure of exactly where the storm tracked.
We had a few tree limbs come down in our front yard where we have 13 pine trees. Luckily, my older son spent the night with us and he and the younger son and wife have the front yard just about all cleaned up. There are MANY piles of small fallen limbs and needles in front of the house, but all together, we had no severe damage.
A house two doors awat had a huge tree knocked down and the next street south had a few trees downed also. This kind of reminds me of a few years ago when an F6 tornado went directly over my house. All the houses around me had trees down but I received no damage then either. That tornado touched doun about one block away from my house.
The Lord truly does watch over and protect his own.
Your compassion just oozes through your post. /sarcasm
There are a lot of reasons people don't leave. Some have already been mentioned on this thread - lack of transportation, being elderly and not wanting to abandon everything you have or not feeling able to do so, not paying attention, having pets you can't take to a shelter, and no money for travel or a hotel....
Personally, I wouldn't try to ride one out in a mobile home, but between packing and the traffic, evacuation is a royal pain even if you are young, and it's often a danger in itself. In Georgia, more people died in traffic accidents during the mandatory evacuation from Floyd than died from the storm itself, because the storm ended up not striking here at all.
If you watch now, there are a lot of people on barrier islands and Fort Myers Beach who aren't being allowed back to their houses, and may not be until Monday or afterwards. Meanwhile, roofs are damaged, more rain is coming, and some things could be salvaged if someone was there to do it. Some people feel that if they stay close by, at least they have a chance of salvaging some things.
You may consider yourself a born again Christian. You are not.
Sounds like my neighborhood. I was in Richmond a few years ago when Hurricane "?" came thru (it started on land in the N.C. Outer Banks) and it literally shook the hotel. Thankfully the worst storm I've ever had to live thru. BTW, shout-out from Western PA.
You both might want to review the earlier dialogs in this thread. We've already had a round of back and forth about whether the people who suffered for not leaving had adequate notice, were they wise in staying etc. etc.
I've seen more insensitive comments in the last three days on hurricane threads than I care to, and they disgust me..
My heartfelt and sincere condolences to you and your neighbors. You guys are in my prayers.
"Hugo was the first of the modern Killer storms..."
http://www.maritimemuseum.org/camille/
I'm not going to have any sort of dialogue or back and forth about sick, morbid jokes. I just told somebody off, period! Joking about these poor, dead souls down here is like joking about the poor, dead souls who jumped to their deaths out of the Twin Towers in NYC on 9/11. They're DEAD! You just don't joke about it.
HUGO was so bad because of the power it had and destruction it did so far inland. It picked up power from the warm water in the inter-coastal waterway and followed it inland. I live in Sumter 50 miles out of Columbia. It took us two weeks to get our power back. I had to literally cut a path through trees to get in the door of my house. I did not stay there because my roommate was scared to stay there.
Hurricanes love WARM water. The warm waters of the gulf stream are 56 miles off shore from Jacksonville. Check out an insurance map of hurricane probability for an area getting hit. It is quite interesting...
Thanks for your posts. I am OK.
I did not get a direct hit by this storm, but, many others I know did. And, their damages were very severe.
I still do not have power and am not at home right now.
FL Gov Jeb Bush is somewhere in the area and I believe there will be National Guard here soon, and a curfew, from 7PM - 7AM. Most street lights are out, and many stores remain closed.
They are saying on the news that North Captiva Island was sliced into two by this storm, and there is a new waterway now between the two NEW islands, that did not exist before.
"HUGO was so bad because of the power it had and destruction it did so far inland."
Yes, my father lives in the Northern Neck of the Rappahannock and lost power for 10 days last summer. His small generator was not adequate, but no other could be found in the region. He now has one that will likely power his entire neighborhood.
I grew up in Tornado Alley and moved to the east coast 5 ago, after I survived the Oklahoma City tornado in 1999. I've been through Floyd and Isabel out here. The remains of Charlie are over my house as I write this.
There is no comparison between a hurricane and a tornado, except for the fact a hurricane is a twelve hour long tornado that hits an entire state instead of a few square miles.
Some people are really stubborn and won't leave. Then you have those who've had to evacuate for other storms then nothing happened. So they are reluctant to go the next time they're told. It makes no sense to me for anyone in a mh or on the coast to stay.
At this point 42.6% of registed voters in FL are Dems. That ought to tell you something. There is always such low voter turnout that it's pathetic, if the majority doesn't vote the minority wins.
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