Hurricane Hammers Fla. With 145-Mph Winds
PUNTA GORDA, Fla. – A stronger-than-expected Hurricane Charley roared ashore Friday as a dangerous Category 4 storm, slamming the heavily populated Gulf Coast with devastating storm surges and 145 mph wind that snapped trees in half, ripped roofs off buildings and blacked out hundreds of thousands of people.
Airports and theme parks hurriedly closed before the storm arrived, the Kennedy Space Center sent workers home early, and storm shelters quickly filled up as nearly 2 million people were told to flee ahead of the strongest storm to hit Florida in a decade.
Gov. Jeb Bush said damage could exceed $15 billion, but cautioned that it was a preliminary estimate as the storm headed across the center of Florida toward the Orlando area. His brother, President Bush, declared the storm-battered region a federal disaster area.
“This is the nightmare scenario that we’ve been talking about for years,” hurricane center director Max Mayfield said of storm surges that ranged from 10 to 15 feet.
Charley’s eye reached land at 3:45 p.m. EDT when it passed over the barrier islands between Fort Myers and Punta Gorda, some 70 miles southeast of the Tampa Bay area. It struck the mainland 30 minutes later.
“Happy Friday the 13th,” said Don Paterson of Punta Gorda, who tried to ride out the storm at his mobile home but got beaned by a flying microwave oven as his home was demolished. His refrigerator fell on him, and he spent the rest of the storm sheltering behind a lawnmower.
As an airplane hangar at the Charlotte County airport flew apart around him and his wife, “it sounded like a calypso band gone crazy,” said Jim Morgan.
“There was crap flying around there – It looked like the inside of a blender,” said Morgan, 66. “If you want to meet your maker, I got close on that round.”
Two traffic deaths were reported during the storm in Florida. Earlier, Charley had been blamed for three deaths in Cuba and one in Jamaica.
By 7 p.m., Charley was centered about 65 miles south-southwest of Orlando. It had started to gradually weaken from the sustained wind speed of 140 mph it had when it struck the coast, the hurricane center said.
Charley was moving toward the north-northeast at 25 mph and it could speed up, the National Hurricane Center said. That path would take it through an area with 6.5 million of Florida’s 17 million residents. Four to 8 inches of rain was possible.
Hurricane warnings were posted along Florida’s Gulf and Atlantic Coasts and all the way to Cape Lookout, N.C.
Hurricane center meteorologist Hugh Cobb said the storm was expected to maintain hurricane strength as it passed over the Orlando area in central Florida, then cross the Atlantic coast near the Daytona Beach area.
Orlando theme parks, including Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando and SeaWorld Orlando, had closed by early afternoon and Disney’s Animal Kingdom did not open at all. The only previous time that the parks closed for a hurricane was in 1999 for Floyd. Guests remaining at hotels were urged to stay in their rooms.
On the state’s Atlantic coast, 10 Navy ships from Mayport Naval Station near Jacksonville were sent out to sea, the Navy said Friday. At Cape Canaveral, traffic was bumper-to-bumper at noon as Kennedy Space Center employees left work early. All but a skeleton crew of 200 of the center’s nearly 13,000-person work force was sent home, or told to stay home, and the space shuttle hangars and the massive Vehicle Assembly Building were sealed tight.
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford declared a state of emergency and ordered residents and vacationers in two coastal counties to evacuate. State troopers immediately started redirecting traffic on the main highway leading away from Myrtle Beach.
About 340,000 homes and businesses were without power in southwest Florida, said Kathy Scott, spokeswoman with Florida Power & Light. That number was expected to grow as Charley cut across the state.
The hurricane was initially expected to strike as a Category 2 storm, with sustained wind of 96 mph to 110 mph. But it strengthened rapidly as it swung across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Florida coast, largely sparing the Key West area, and was upgraded to Category 4, a storm capable of extreme damage with sustained wind of 131 mph to 155 mph.
Wayne Sallade, director of emergency management in Charlotte County, lashed out at meteorologists for not warning that Charley could become that fierce.
“This magnitude storm was never predicted,” he said. “(Forecasters) told us for years they don’t forecast hurricane intensity well and unfortunately, we know that now.”
Cobb said there had been warnings about the uncertainty of the storm’s path, explaining that its direction was influenced by a weather condition called a trough.
“It is very difficult to forecast a turn when you’re dealing with a trough,” Cobb said. “All along they warned people that the storm could hit Fort Myers on northward.”
The storm was almost on par with Hurricane Andrew, which smashed into South Florida in 1992 with 165 mph wind, killed 43 people and caused $31 billion in damage.
It even affected the nerve center of the war in Iraq, MacDill Air Force Base, where residents evacuated and only essential personnel remained.
Amtrak canceled long-distance service between Miami and New York for Saturday, and trains coming from Los Angeles were stopping at New Orleans instead of continuing on to Orlando.
Charley was the strongest hurricane to hit Florida since the Category 5 Andrew hit south of Miami in 1992. Hurricane Mitch, which stalled over Honduras in 1998, also was Category 5 with sustained wind over 155 mph. Mitch killed some 10,000 people in Central America.
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Associated Press writers Mark Long in Fort Myers, Ken Thomas in Key West and Vickie Chachere in Sarasota contributed to this report.
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On the Net:
National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov