Still reeling from Charley, Orlando braces for Frances
Many residents were caught off guard by the last storm that tore through, but packed Home Depots are a testament to a lesson learned.
By SHERRI DAY
Published September 3, 2004
ORLANDO - Hurricane Charley mangled his garage door and nipped at his roof. Now, Tekoa Taemien worries Hurricane Frances will take his home.
"We had a lot of severe wind damage from Charley," said Taemien, whose Winter Park home was struck by a tree. "We had to bring in a bulldozer to clear a path. A lot of trees didn't fall, but I think they were weakened. I figure that whatever Charley didn't get, Frances will."
Still, Taemien plans to put up a fight. He took his place in the plywood line at Home Depot at 5:30 Thursday morning.
He was still there at 1 p.m., hot and weary as he steered his car through a line that snaked from the store's parking lot onto W Colonial Drive.
"You do what you can, and that's all you can do," said Taemien, a customer service agent for Travelers Insurance. "Then there's the rebuilding."
Taemien was one of hundreds of weary Orlando residents who flocked to the same Home Depot on Thursday to make last-minute preparations for the coming hurricane. Many residents, largely unprepared for Hurricane Charley's unexpected march through their city three weeks ago, vowed to be ready this time.
Local and state officials, including Gov. Jeb Bush, warned them to gird for a much stronger storm.
"We will experience significant impact even if the eye of the storm does not cross Orange County," Orange County Chairman Richard T. Crotty said Thursday. "As a community, we just went through a dress rehearsal with Hurricane Charley. We are prepared."
Orange County schools superintendent Ronald Blocker closed schools indefinitely. Since the school year began Aug. 9, children have not had a full week of continuous instruction, Blocker said. They missed seven days for Hurricane Charley.
Even before schools let out, evacuees began showing up Thursday morning ready to use them as shelters.
At a Circle K on E Colonial Drive, 23 cars lined up to pump gas. Jeff Reese paid $71 to carefully fill 13 plastic containers with 50 gallons of fuel. It's insurance, he said, against another eight-day wait for power. Should history repeat itself, Reese said, he can while away the time in cool air.
"Everything is insured, so as long as we make it though with our health that's all that matters," said Reese, who owns a construction company. "Everything is boarded up. I'm going to grab my dogs and my wife and find a safe corner."
While Tyler Alden of Inglis bought large flashlights for her two children at Home Depot, Jacques Woodin tried to secure his 1954 Cessna-180 at Orlando Executive Airport. Officials called for small plane owners to fly west, but that was impossible for Woodin. Hurricane Charley ripped off the rudder and damaged the controls of his plane.
"I'm going to tie everything down as best I can ...," said Woodin, whose plane survived Hurricane Charley largely intact. "I can only be so upset about it. It is what it is."
As he unloaded groceries at his home on Oberlin Avenue in Orlando's College Park neighborhood, Frank Weir weighed the odds of Orlando getting pounded by a hurricane twice in less than a month.
"It's almost like in Central Florida, we're like the "X' that marks the spot," said Weir, 34, who was without electricity for five days in the aftermath of Hurricane Charley, but otherwise had little damage to his wood-frame house. "We're the bull's-eye. We need a break. I feel like we've been knocked down, and it's a strong chance that we'll get knocked down again."
Around the corner, Laura Collins cleaned up piles of debris, a mix of leaves, uprooted trees and snapped tree limbs. City workers took away a tree trunk from her yard Wednesday. But Collins worried that broken tree limbs could fly into windows. As sweat trickled down her face, she reminded herself of her incentive for a job well done.
"I'm going to New York," said Collins, 46, who plans to fly to Albany, N.Y., at 7:30 this morning. "As soon as I heard Frances was coming I said "I'm going to see if I can get out of here.' I just know that there's no way that I could do it again."
