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.
The evac orders are plain as day. Everyone in mobile homes and RVs was told to leave 24 hours before hand.
The ENTIRE population of Port Charlotte wasn't ordered to evac; most of the area was "strongly urged" to evacuate closer to the storm.
However, I suspect the overwhelming majority of deaths will be from mobile homes.
I think it is the opposite. As someone accused me of doing, they believed the media reports that this was not going to hit them. Even up to the moment this thing changed course, it was being reported that it would hit Tampa.
Find that information. I am looking for it everywhere. I will show you the messages from yesterday that people were not given evacuation orders until just before this thing hit.
The area hit was under a hurricane warning for 24 hours and a hurricane watch for 36 hours, and neither was ever lifted.
The intention of NHC is everyone in a watch or warning preapare as if they will be hit directly by a hurricane, and those areas are selected based on NHC KNOWING how inaccurate they have been on track in the past. However, the interpretation of that by the media and emergency management is the problem.
"During the roar of most of the storm, the walls on the house looked as though they were breathing--pulsating in and out."
That is exactly the phenomenon being described by musicman yesterday afternoon. Praying for him and his family and all the Floridians in the path of Charley.
ummm...post 48 in this thread.
NOBODY is ever going to get evac orders 3 days before a cane or something. 24 hours is typical, and is long enough to leave or go to a nearby shelter.
Keep in mind that we're creating a culture devoid of personal responsibilty, and people are looking to blame everyone but themselves.
I do recall a local meteorologist on early yesterday talking about how they had the warnings, but when the media and storm tracks predicted the path much further north, the evacuations were not pursued.
You cannot fault these people for not leaving when all the "talking" heads were telling them they were safe. Would I have left, yeah. But we aren't everyone.
Read the very next sentence:
"Forecasters from the National Hurricane Center have moved the landfall of Hurricane Charley slightly north of Tampa"
Thaks for updates. Without cable/dish my TV has cartoons.
And does that rescind the evacuations? Nope.
Dammit. Was it in the triler park that the greatest ddamage and deaths occured? I suspect so.
You are being an egotistical jerk. These people have tragically lost their lives. Families are suffering. Get down off of your horse for 2 seconds, geez.
They should have left, yes. But they didn't. Try supporting the loved ones for now.
Have been listening to the news and weather all night waiting to hear from my son, brother, uncles and their families.
Have not heard any report about "stacks of bodies", perhaps you confused hurricane news with Iraqi news?
The problem is the media primarily. Actually local EODs are a problem as well, really. The problem isn't NHC.
But at root is a failure of people who live in a dangerous area to educate themselves on what NHC is very open about regarding the imprecision of forecasting.
Port Charlotte was under a hurricane warning. That was never rescinded. The intention of NHC is everone under such a warning assume they get a direct hit, and that intensity of storms cannot be predicted.
Yes, it is a great tragedy.
No flames from me. I spoke with my aunt in Pinellas Park yesterday. It was her 80th birthday & the 10th anniversary of the death of her husband. Her health had been failing. I could help but think in the conversaton with her that she looked at this as an "easy" death if it were in cards. She is agnostic, and so would not look at God's providence or will.
I agree that these people probably sat in their houses because the media kept pushing the point that this hurricane was going much further north. If anyone is to fault in this, it would be the media for not persisting in getting people out of the area.
I'd rather be an egotistical jerk than swallow a story line the media is pushing hook, line, and sinker, esp. when the uneducation of the media is one of the primary causes of the original problem.
"Remember, those are the same folks that had trouble figuring out how to successfully mark a ballot...could that be part of the explanation?"
That's cold, many people here did evacuate in the areas that were first predicted to be hit, then they went to somewhere they thought would be safe and ended up in the middle of it after all. These things are very hard to predict- they skip all over the place. Sometimes they pass your area and then they back up and go over where you thought they would miss.
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