Photo Archive: Hurricane Charlie

Since I've been sick much of the weekend, I decided to take some time today to go through my old photo archives and see what could be posted and what could be discarded. Needless to say, my 2006 folder left very little worth keeping that wasn't already on my site. But I did find this folder called Punta Gorda that caught my eye. The folder contained photos that were taken by myself in the small Florida gulf coast town of Punta Gorda. The images you see here were taken about two weeks after Hurricane Charlie had ripped through the town and literally flattened it. I was living in Tampa at the time and was on my way home from Miami. I knew there had been devastating destruction and wanted to see it first hand.

Now you have to understand something about me...I grew up in Delaware and had been through many hurricanes. I remember a time vacationing with my family in St. Michaels, Maryland and sitting in a hot tub outside as a hurricane swept through the area. I figured I knew hurricanes and knew what to expect. When I moved to Tampa, everyone in my office talked about our amazing hurricane coverage and how engaged the entire newsroom would become. When Hurricane Charlie turned north, crossing Cuba and heading into the Gulf of Mexico, it began. Our newsroom went into 24-hour operation mode. We had daily updates, path projections and wind speeds. Charlie was heading right at Tampa. I lived in St. Pete, two blocks from Tampa Bay, so my neighborhood was under a forced evacuation. I put everything in my house up on the second floor, raised the furniture on blocks and boarded up the windows. I packed my bag and went into the office for what became 48 hours of basically living in the newsroom.

Again, I figured I knew what to expect. I've been there, done that! But I remember the ominous statement from our anchor around 8 a.m. the day Charlie was supposed to make landfall. The hurricane was still heading directly at Tampa and the anchor says "it looks like our worst fears could come true here in the Tampa Bay region." I remember I needed to go take a nap since I had been up all night but suddenly felt uneasy. It was that moment I realized this wasn't a joke. And it certainly wasn't the same type of hurricane I had been through in Delaware or Maryland.

Hurricane Charlie was a category 5 monster. It wasn't very large around and was moving quickly, but it packed winds in excess of 155 mph and a destructive storm surge. The idea of a hurricane of that force hitting Tampa would be apocalyptic for a city of it's size. It was, quite literally, our worst fears.

I remember waking up from my nap about 4 hours later and coming down to our newsroom. I remember thinking the wind outside would surely have woken me up, but it had not. I remember seeing our anchors looking at a hurricane path that looked different than the one we had been watching up until then. Instead of it taking Charlie up into Tampa Bay, it had now shifted in-land towards Orlando. Hurricane Charlie had turned right about 100 miles south of Tampa, right smack into Punta Gorda.

I went through 4 hurricanes that year. I packed up and evacuated more times than I had moved in the last 6 years. I spent most of August and September with plywood on my windows because we got sick of taking down the wood only to have another Cat 5 storm heading our way. After Charlie, Ivan, Jean and Francis all made landfall in Florida. To many residents of the sunshine state, it was the summer of hell.

Hurricane Jean struck my home in St. Pete and left me with a flooded house, no power or water and basically homeless for 2 weeks. I survived. Most of us did. We even joked about it that winter. Soon we wore t-shirts parodying the Master Card commercials with slogans like "Surviving hurricanes in paradise, priceless!"

Not long after I left Tampa for Oakland, CA, Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast. We all remember that one! It was one of the most publicized, tragic and costly natural disasters in American history. But I took away a different feeling on Katrina than most did. I, like most of my former colleagues in Tampa, remembered what it was like. I remembered what I saw in Punta Gorda. The rest of the country had forgotten about these Florida cities that were completely flattened. Heck, most still claim Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. It didn't. Ground zero for Katrina was Biloxi, Mississippi. There was nothing left of that town. Most neighborhoods had been reduced to foundations. Some foundations were even gone. New Orleans was a disaster. Biloxi was simply...gone. Wiped off the map in one day.

I remember all of the anger directed at our President, FEMA and the DHS after Katrina. And yet I recall directing my anger at the Mayor of New Orleans, the governor of the state and their local population. You see, having gone through 4 disastrous hurricanes back to back, I knew the details of evacuations, first responders and hurricane preparedness. We listened to it for 24-hours a day for almost two months the previous year. Bush, FEMA, DHS... they followed standard protocol. They did the same thing with Katrina they had done with Charlie, Jean, Ivan and Francis. You didn't see the same problems in Florida the previous year that you saw with Katrina. Hell, you didn't see the same problems in Mississippi that you saw in Louisiana.

The fact is this, the city of New Orleans was failed by it's leadership. It was failed by the very people the residents elected to protect and manage that city. Look at these photos. The people of Punta Gorda lost everything. But the majority of them survived and went on to rebuild. And they did so because of the leadership in their city, in their county and in their state capital.

I'll never forget that day driving through Punta Gorda. It changed my whole perception on hurricanes and the power of nature. It made me realize - when my house was hit, flooded and lost all utilities for a few weeks - that I was lucky to still have a roof and be alive. I never complained again about evacuations and all the mind-numbing talk about hurricane preparedness.

Some will still disagree with me about this post. I've wanted to write something like this for about 4 years now. I sat there in that Oakland newsroom and let my personal experiences stay silent while all of inexperienced Californians raged on about who was right and who was wrong. Armchair quarterbacks were on every channel. But in my silence, I never forgot Punta Gorda, FL. Or Pensacola, FL. Or Gulf Shores, AL. Or Port Saint Lucie, FL. Or Biloxi...

Labels: Archives, Photography, weather

posted by DVS @ 12:14 AM