And the damage is likely even worse than the earliest news articles are reporting. Much, much worse than the December tornadoes in the area.
If I'm not mistaken, I just saw an ad for the Villages on tv. Supposed to be a very nice community.
May those who perished rest in peace. And as for Freepers and others in the path of these storms/tornados, a prayer for their safety.
We rocked & rolled all night here in Tampa Bay. Our power kept going off & on. My daughter is in Orlando. I'm still waiting to hear from her.
Otherwise I suppose we wouldn't have known about these storms that mercifully exited into the Atlantic.....we're just now getting thunder, lightning, rain.
We're in Central Florida.
Timing is everything- I'm going to Orlando on business this weekend :-((
Prayers for those caught in this.
FNC's headline for the past nearly half hour said "FL Thunderstorms Kill an Unknown Number of People" so watching that sword-like storm cut through the FL radar map was eerie. They did clarify and say that "several" tornadoes have touched down in the middle of the night. They said the worst-affected counties were Lake, Volusia and one other I didn't catch: 20,000 without power in one area. Incomplete info coming in about "a couple of mobile home parks" in the Ladylake area with "significant damage."
According to Fox there's wide spread damage with hundreds of home seriously damaged or destroyed.
I rode out a storm like this last Feb while in Tampa. I was camping in a tent. It was not fun.
Hope for the best in Central Florida!
There's now a tornado warning in Polk County, issued 7:56 am.
It's already been moved back to breaking news. Thanks.
What we need to ask is why does George Bush hate white people and old people at The Villages. Why did Karl Rove use the weather machine to try to wipe out a retirement community? This must mean that their solution to the so-called "social security crisis" is to wipe out old people. They're willing to kill old people for some delusion about the "insolvency" of the best government program ever.
I was woken up at around 4 AM by thunder and lightning here at Stetson University. I turned on the TV and saw that the tornado was coming through Deland. After trying to wake everyone up in my section of the dorm, a bunch of us went downstairs to the first floor of the new dorm, where we waited out the storm.
Fortunately for me and the other students at Stetson, the tornado went about a mile south of campus. I feel sorry for the middle school and trailer park that were torn apart, but ~1500 students live here on campus. At the time, most were either sleeping. A mile further north and God knows how many dead there would have been.
Prayer up for all.
The number of fatalities over the decades from hurricanes and tornados in these parks is appalling.
The subject of dealing with the carnage by the legislature or local county commissions comes up every once in a while, but it's so economically, politically and emotionally charged that proposed legislation goes nowhere.
The seasoned citizen lobby alone keeps the kibosh on trailer park phase-outs. Yet years ago in the famous "no-name storm" in an area just a few miles north of me, several seniors perished from a flash flood in their mobile home park. Others saved themselves by climbing to their roofs and clinging there till rescue came.
I grew up in a "tornado alley" area in a northern Illinois county which never has or will allow mobile home parks. Therefore, there's no fatalities from tornadoes striking retirees and the less well-off. And as a bonus local law enforcement is spared a lot of criminal behavior often carried out in many such trailer residential enclaves.
Leni
Good day to be in the glades!
Gov. Crist, press conference 10AM. I think Jeb can use the break.
Subject: Weather Bulletin
Denver Post:
This text is from a county emergency manager out in the central part of Colorado after last week's snowstorm.
WEATHER BULLETIN
Up here, in the Northern Plains, we just recovered from a Historic event---may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" --- with a historic blizzard of up to 44" inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10's of thousands.
FYI:
George Bush did not come.
FEMA did nothing.
No one howled for the government.
No one blamed the government.
No one even uttered an expletive on TV.
Neither Jesse Jackson (The National ****Stirrer) nor Al Sharpton paid a visit.
Our Mayor did not blame Bush or anyone else.
Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else, either.
CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC did not visit - or report on this category 5 snowstorm. Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.
No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House.
No one looted.
Nobody - I mean nobody demanded the government do something.
Nobody expected the government to do anything, either.
No Larry King, No Bill O'Rielly, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and No Geraldo Rivera.
No Shaun Penn, No Barbara Striesand, No Hollywood types to be found.
Nope, we just melted the snow for water. Sent out caravans of SUV's to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars. The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn't ask for a penny. Local restaurants made food and the police and fire departments delivered it to the snowbound families. Families took in the stranded people -- total strangers. We fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Coleman lanterns. We put on extra layers of clothes because up here it is "Work or Die."
We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for 'sittin at home' checks. Even though a Category "5" blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early, we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves.
"In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world's social problems evaporate." It does seem that way, at least to me.
I hope this gets passed on. Maybe SOME people will get the message. The world does Not owe you a living.
Just heard an interview on Fox with a resident that suffered damage and he blamed it all on politicians and global warming. This in in Volusia County, one of the three counties involved in the 2000 recount. Go figure.