Posted on 08/14/2004 12:41:23 PM PDT by Puntagorda
Here's a ground zero report from the Hurricane . . . from my observations as one who lives in the area that was hit.
Charley made a direct hit on Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte Florida.
These two cities sit at the mouth of Charlotte Harbor, and are separated by bridges that cross the Peace river which flows into the Gulf.
Neither city had been hit or threatened by a Hurricane in more than 75 years.
Hurricane Charley which was expected to hit Tampa, 120 miles north, unexpectantly veered into Charlotte Harbor, and followed the Peace River inland.
When Charley hit Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda it packed winds of 145 mph.
The downtown areas of both cities have been heavily damaged, with almost all businesses either being heavily damaged or destroyed. The closer the buildings were to the Peace River, the more the destruction.
Both hospitals heavily damaged. Seven Fire Stations heavily damaged. The Punta Gorda police station was destoyed. The Punta Gorda city hall was destroyed. Punta Gorda historic district was destroyed.
Almost every home in Punta Gorda Isles was heavily damaged (an upscale canal community on Charlotte Harbor).
Most mobile home communities were destroyed.
All radio stations off the air - towers down. The airport was destroyed (a small airport with no scheduled flights).
Thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of homes damaged - hundreds (maybe thousands) were totally destroyed.
Rescue workers are doing a door to door search to find the wounded.
Because local communication is down, including cell phone, no accurate numbers are available of who might be missing, or hurt, or who might be in rescue shelters, so door to door searches through the ruble are being conducted.
The lack of phone service, radio reporting, TV news, is causing major problems. And the downed trees and debris blocking roads, makes it difficult to move into the damaged areas - which include the main artery through town - Hiway 41 (also know as the Tamiami Trail).
Most local residents feared the storm surge most . . . the rising water. This is to expected since so many people live on canal front property.
But there was no storm surge. Charlotte Harbor averages 12 feet deep, so not much water in there in the first place. . . and much of it was blown out by the storm.
Almost all the damage was from the 145 mph winds.
The damaged area appears to be in a path about 15 miles wide - 30 miles long following the Peace river from Port Charlotte to Arcadia (30 miles inland).
The barrier Island communities of Sanibel, and Boca Grande suffered major damage.
Communities on the north side of the storm path were basically unaffected (other than the shock value of having a hurricane hit this area - first time in 75 years.)
Only minor damage to cities to the south - Fort Myers suffered some wind damage.
It will take years to rebuild Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda.
Many residents will discover that to rebuild to the now mandated Hurricane Building codes will cost much more than the insured value of their homes.
No one here expected the hurricane to hit, the forecasters kept telling us it was going to hit 120 miles north.
We were stunned when Charley was upgraded from a low category II to a dangerous category IV just hours before it hit.
Again this was the first time in 75 years that a Hurricane had even come close to this area. And many of the buildings built in the 60's and 70's simply could not stand the wind load.
FYI: Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda are (were?) ranked in the top ten fastest appreciating real estate markets in the US.
PuntaGorda
Obviously it's harder to insure a trailer, and I didn't mean they were in the same category as permanent structures.
I know if my house is destroyed by a fire/tornado (I have no flood insurance) State Farm is obligated to replace.
When my friends ask me "What do you DO on that computer all night?", I point to this web site as the primary reason that I am so hard to contact of an evening. I also tell them that while the vast majority of the posters here seem to be decent conservative upstanding people, there are a few single-issue zealots who apparently delight in performing the text-based equivalent of wearing a pink ballet tutu over a tuxedo for all to see.
A couple of months ago, I saved a post from a quickly-after zotted troll whose solemn contention was that cats are actually genetically-engineered super beings who were sent to Earth by the International Jewish Conspiracy, the Freemasons, and the San Antonio Texas Chamber of Commerce to enslave us all. I called the post "Exhibit A", and I happily showed it to anyone who doubted my contention that there are a (thankfully) very few bent arrows on FreeRepublic.
Well, congratulations: your Post 34 has become my new Exhibit A. It would be a crime to let such utter absurdity go to waste. Welcome to the majors.
YOu are so right about that. I went ahead and upped my insurance after the fire. I know many people who lost their homes and didn't have adequate insurance for the new building costs.
"the forecasters blew this call big time...terrible"
Pure BS. The entire west FL coast was under a hurricane warning. Anyone who has lived any time in the Carribean or Gulf knows that storms can turn, speed up, and strengthen unexpectedly. I live in a gulf community and we have 20,000 body bags in storage because we know most people don't listen to the warnings. This is especially true of old people who refuse to leave their homes.
And do you try to tie all natural disasters into some form of punishment from God?
Oh, and before I forget: Does God like, send you a telegram to tell you what He did, and why He was destroying something?
I'm sorry, I know this is not a very nice post, but your all-encompassing knowledge regarding God offends me. If He gave us free will, why would He go to such extremes to make us do what He wanted?
Sorry about this post, it adds nothing to the discussion on Charley. It was a knee-jerk (or is that digit jerk?) reaction.
Hey, your stepfather is a State Farm agent? Tell him to get me some movement on my Isabel claim.... ;)
I truly lost it when I saw this place was a killing place of 24x7x365 (24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year).
I also had checked to see if there were any CPC's in the area (Crisis Pregnancy Center's).
But my geography was off -- I thought a river in the Fort Myers area was the Peace River.
PuntaGorda (poster) was correct about this being 30 miles away from the Ground Zero of Charley.
I lost it, and I apologize for it, and if I get flamed I deserve it.
It is sort of like finding a Nazi Concentration Camp, at least to me...
How are you faring up there in Maryland?
Actually even if you weren't miles off you'd still be a frikkin idiot for holding all those who were killed responsible for their own deaths simply because they had an abortion clinic in their community.
Mother of God, your a hateful, wicked person to claim to the world that God did this out of spite.
People in Pinellas County are complaining because they WERE warned and nothing happened. Me, I was prepared and am thankful we were spared the brunt of the storm. Today has been worse with almost hourly tornado warnings because of large thunderstorms.
Well, Insurance companies are quick to take your policy payment and slow to cough it back up when you have a claim.
Well, they're morons.
The vast majority of them have never been in a major hurricane, obviously, because if they have, they'd be very glad "nothing happened."
I made a trip to Kissimmee to avoid Charley and was relieved for a short while, when I heard that the path changed. The path changing is one of those mixed blessings; it isn't going to hit you, but you know it's going to hit someone.
While checking into the hotel next to Orlando International Airport shortly before 3, Kissimmee got it's first squall line, which was unnerving since i had just received a call that the storm was coming towards Orlando.
In the first squall line, the sky went from slightly overcast to dark in less than 10 minutes. First the wind kicked up and then rain came flying through. I say flying since it wasn't the normal rain we get in the thunderstorms, which is heavy and falls pretty much vertically, this flew across the car, more horizontal than vertical. The xterra was being pushed around a little bit.
After checking in and getting settled, I started watching the news and confirmed that I had moved into the path of the storm and my apt in Tampa, was high and dry. Sigh.
The Orlando stations radio/tv were doing a great job in getting the word out and the warnings and advice were the exact same things I had heard in Tampa the day before. There definitely was a sense of urgency, since the projected path from Tampa was supposed to go up I75 towards Ocala, which would have skipped the Orlando region.
All over I4, there are traffic cameras which provide video feeds, so an interesting view of the storm developed. The tv stations were able to show the storm's progress up I4 as the night progressed.
The doppler radar was amazing, the projected speeds and impact points and times seemed pretty dead on. We would get prior warnings about when to expect the winds, the rain, and finally the wall, which provided a sense of security through the knowledge it gave you.
Then, starting around 8:00PM, the wind started picking up. I was happy to see that the wind blew parallel to my window, since I was concerned that wind would blow directly into the window (I was on the 4th floor).
In the next half hour, the accelleration of the storm conditions was amazing. I'm used to gusting, but this was completely different. Everything just kept getting faster and faster.
Behind the hotel is a long term parking lot for the airport and next to that was a lighted car rental agency. The light from that car rental agency provided a view of the storm coming through.
The lights dimmed 3 or 4 times before finally going out after 8:30pm and that's when it hit Kissimmee.
My first impressions were of the strange lightning. Well, it wasn't lightning, it turned out there were transformers blowing all over the place. You would see an odd blue-green glow and then there would be an explosion of sparks and sometimes there was a strange humming noise. That happened all over the place.
The window in my room held up very well and while there was quite a bit of shaking and vibration, I felt 'safe' standing a few feet back and watching the storm come through.
Since the lights at the car rental agency remained on, I could see the _waves_ of rain come flying through and while there was a bunch of rain coming through, none of it stayed on the ground, since it was blown away immediately.
The sound was hard to describe. I've heard the wind from some heavy thunder storms and it reminded me of that, except it was much louder and constant. It wasn't just the howling and roar I've heard from occaisional gusts, it just kept going and going.
Suprisingly, I had cell phone service during the whole affair, so my friends and family kept getting calls from me. It must have been a height/range thing though, because once when I went to the 1st floor, my service dropped.
From the video you see on tv, I was expecting to see the stuff (grass, leaves, etc) flying around, but I was couldn't get over the amount of chaos inside the storm. It wasn't as if stuff moved just right to left, but you would have pockets of wind that would throw stuff the opposite way or spin it around.
The palm trees were unreal. You would seem them bending and bending, but they didn't break.
Some of the younger trees in the parking lot went over in this stage.
I was doing fine in this part of the storm, but then there was another 'stage' where the winds, the rains and the noise amped up to another level. The only way to describe it is "more, much more".
It was in this heavy part of the storm that larger items starting flying around. You could see pieces of aluminum siding or sheeting blowing around. It looks like when you blow the paper wrapped off the end of a straw.
The aluminum sheeting was unnerving. You'd heard it flying through the air and then it would hit something with a bang. If it landed, you'd hear it scraping across the ground which sounds like something out of a movie.
Unfortunately, some of the sheeting was coming off our roof and flying into the long term parking, so I feel bad about the people coming back and finding their car with the damage from sheeting hitting it.
It was at this point, the eye came through. Since Charley had come half way across the state, it wasn't the dead calm center you hear about, but it was a breather compared to what we had just been through. It gave some of us a chance to come out in the hall and see how everyone was doing. I had met other people from the Tampa Bay area there and they were nervous, but ok. It was a pet-friendly hotel and the dogs I saw seemed ok, not great, but ok.
I saw some people checking on cars with flashlights through the windows, but nobody wanted to go outside, which is smart.
The eye passed all too quickly and it started up again. It is odd how you get 'used' to something and the noises from the backside of the storm were completely different than what I heard before. That was odd, to say the least.
I guess the front side of the storm loosened up some stuff and the back side came along to finish the job. Right away, sheeting was flying around again and hitting things.
The fancy metal parking lot lights didn't break, but looked like some kind of crazy metronomes; each one moving to their own time.
The first sign of the movement of the storm away from us was the lessening of the rain (and the wind, but that took longer to go away) and the transformers. Yep, it seemed you could follow the path of the storm, by the way the transformers would light up the night further and further away from us. Also, even thought the night ws dark, there was a nig chunk of the sky that was even blacker and it was going away from us.
After the winds died down enough (the clouds were racing by for quite a while though), we started going out and there were trees down all over the place. In our hotel, I didn't hear of injuries, thank goodness, but there were some cars damaged.
I can not imagine how the people in Punta Gorda got through a cat4, a cat2 was bad enough for me. Although it was a huge hassle to get evacuated and I evacutated _into_ the path of the storm, I know there's no sticking it out for me in the future.
I have to give the power people a huge amount of credit, we got power back on at 5:30am. After driving out of Kissimmee this morning, I can't imagine the amount of line work that will need to be done. There are lines down, poles down, poles snapped tensioning the lines, lines wrapped up in trees, etc. What a dangerous mess for them.
"Between the time of my conception and birth, one of the largest nuclear bomb tests were done. I don't know if that has ever affected me."
Consider it confirmed.
If your first reaction to a natural disaster like a hurricane is to do a search for abortion clinics in the area, you are quite simply a fanatic. Bringing your obsession to multiple threads unrelated to the issue is further proof that you have abandoned all sense of proportion, context, and reason. You do your cause absolutely NO good to boot.
I posted this at 1:29 PM EDT:
Charlie now a Cat 4 storm. 145 mph winds. New track is much more to East. Orlando - Lakeland directly in path. Much closer to Andrew like.
So it was reported -- I got it from MSNBC and the NHC.
They reported it as soon as it turned.
Nobody knew because nobody knew.
I agree. At first, I felt a bit of a thrill at being in the path of Charley, but I hadn't been in one before.
Nothing can prepare you for your entire environment being in the storm's chaos. It is so much more than what you see on tv. TV gives you a very small slice of what the reality is.
I became very aware that my life was very dependent on that building surviving. There is literally nothing you can do except wait it out and hope you're in a safe place.
Once was enough.
I have had about enough of you people today; people are stressed; people have died; people are scared.
SHUT UP.
Stop encouraging it!!
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