Relief supplies going out
Published: September 28, 2004
Hurricane Jeanne tore a fresh path of destruction and despair as it finished its march Monday up storm-ravaged Florida, where the fourth hurricane in six weeks shut down a large chunk of the state and prompted recovery plans on a scale never before seen in the nation.
At least six people died in the storm, which plowed across Florida’s midsection in a virtual rerun for many residents still trying to regroup from hurricanes that have crisscrossed the Southeast since mid-August.
“This is the price we pay for living in paradise,” said Phyllis Cole, laughing at her predicament as she waited along with about a dozen others on a promise that a Home Depot store in Stuart would reopen. Everyone wanted the same thing: a generator. None were in stock, but the manager thought some were on the way.
“We have some people in Florida who have been hit two or three times now by these hurricanes. They have to be miserable right now,” FEMA director Mike Brown told “The Early Show” on CBS.
Rocketing debris scattered in earlier storms, Jeanne came ashore around midnight Saturday with 120-mph winds, striking its first blow in the same area hit three weeks before by Hurricane Frances. It was expected to weaken into a tropical depression later Monday with winds of less than 39 mph.
The storm passed Monday east of the Panhandle, where 70,000 homes and businesses remained without power because of Hurricane Ivan less than two weeks ago.
“Adversity makes us strong. This dynamic state will return,” Gov. Jeb Bush said at the Indian River County emergency operations center Sunday, where nearly all of the county was without power and residents were told to boil tap water before drinking it to avoid contaminants.
Frustration was obvious Monday. Nicole Jillard and Ed Holzer waited 20 minutes in their car with their 3- and 1-year-old children for two bags of ice, a case of bottled water and 12 Meals Ready to Eat at a Kmart parking lot in Stuart.
The drive-up service provided by the National Guard attracted a line of cars stretching at least a half-mile down U.S. 1, the coastal city’s main thoroughfare.
“This is not good,” Holzer said. “We don’t have enough money to keep running to places like Fort Myers for food and water.”
Jeanne ripped off roofs, left stop lights dangling precariously, destroyed a deserted community center in Jensen Beach and flooded some bridges from the mainland to barrier islands straddling the Atlantic coast. More than 2.6 million homes and businesses were without power early Monday.
“I can’t go home because I don’t have any power. It’s terrible,” Irene Underwood, 88, said as she sat on a chaise lounge covered by a sleeping bag in a Red Cross shelter in Melbourne. She was waiting for a ride to her sixth shelter since the hurricanes started. She went home after Frances but had power for less than two days before leaving her barrier-island home in Indian Harbour Beach for Jeanne.
But in a sign of a relatively quick recovery, Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest utility, restored electricity to nearly half of the 1.7 million customers with outages blamed on Jeanne by midday Monday.
Florida was the first state to withstand a four-hurricane pounding in one season since Texas in 1886 - a milestone that came with two months remaining in the hurricane season.
Martin County Commissioner Doug Smith said Monday that Jeanne left few buildings in his county unscarred because Frances had weakened them and subsequent rain from Hurricane Ivan had saturated the ground.
“Everything has been compromised to some extent,” Smith told NBC’s “Today” show. “We have lost a lot more structures this time.”
Rain sprayed sideways when Jeanne’s eye struck land. As it dragged across northern Florida early Monday, it had weakened to a tropical storm with top sustained wind near 40 mph. The Savannah, Ga., airport recorded a 40 mph gust.
At 11 a.m. EDT Monday, the center of the storm was in southwestern Georgia northeast of Albany. It was moving north at 12 mph.
President Bush declared a major disaster area in 26 of Florida’s 67 counties, while officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the hurricanes represented the largest relief effort in the agency’s history, larger than the response to the 1994 earthquake in Northridge section of Los Angeles.
“We just somehow have to get as much relief to them as possible to show them that we’re going to be right there with them, that we haven’t abandoned them,” said Brown.
More than 3,000 National Guard troops were deployed for relief work. Palm Beach and St. Lucie, two of the hardest hit by Jeanne’s winds and rain, opened distribution sites Monday.
“We now have some commodities flowing into the area: the ice and the water,” FEMA spokesman Mike Beeman said at a Palm Beach County briefing. The agency has about 200,000 tarps on order, but those will be split among at least four states recovering from disasters.
Charley was a faster storm when it hammered Florida’s southwest coast Aug. 13, Frances blanketed much of the peninsula after striking the state’s Atlantic coast Sept. 5; and Ivan blasted the western Panhandle when it made landfall Sept. 16. The three storms caused billions of dollars in damage and killed at least 73 people in Florida alone.
Jeanne was a Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall at Hutchinson Island, 35 miles north of West Palm Beach - almost the same spot that Frances struck.
Once inland, the 400-mile wide storm stretched across the state, passing northeast of Tampa and near Tallahassee. Officials at the National Hurricane Center in Miami said the similar paths of Jeanne and Frances were possibly unprecedented so close in time.
At least 21 Florida county school districts canceled classes Monday, including St. Lucie County, which has not reopened since Frances struck.
Police in St. Lucie rescued five families when the hurricane’s eye passed over late Saturday, including a wheelchair-bound couple in their 90s whose mobile home collapsed around them, emergency operations spokeswoman Linette Trabulsy said.
A Coast Guard helicopter crew found two fishermen who had radioed a mayday after failing to reach port Sunday in their vessel, The Rogue. The men were rescued early Monday from a life raft off Anclote Key, about 25 miles northwest of Tampa. They were examined by medical personnel and released, officials said.
At Cape Canaveral, the third hurricane to hit NASA’s spaceport in just over a month blew out more panels and left more gaping holes in the massive shuttle assembly building.
The toll from the latest storm extended as far north as Daytona Beach and south to Miami, where one man was electrocuted while apparently trying to move a downed power line away from a sidewalk. Two people died when their sport utility vehicle plunged into a lake south of Boca Raton.
A 15-year-old boy was pinned by a falling tree Sunday and died in Clay County southwest of Jacksonville. In Brevard County, a man was found dead in a Palm Bay ditch in what police called an apparent drowning. In nearby Micco, a 60-year-old man was found dead after a hurricane party at a home. He was found lying in water after the house flooded. Police said the death may be alcohol-related or the man may have drowned.
The Palm Beach County sheriff’s office has made 132 arrests for curfew violations, including four people in a car that dragged a sergeant 150 feet Sunday night near the rural community of Belle Glade. The arrests were made after three other deputies fired on the car, which blew a tire.
“I never want to go through this again,” said 8-year-old Katie Waskiewicz, who checked out the fallen trees and broken roof tiles in her Palm Beach Gardens neighborhood after bearing the storm with her family. “I was running around the house screaming.”
With Jeanne dumping heavy rain, there was fear of flooding in the days to come from swollen rivers in east and central Florida, already saturated by two previous hurricanes. The storm left about 10 inches of rain in Palm Beach County and 5 inches in Orlando, St. Petersburg and Melbourne.
Most counties in South Carolina except the northeast corner were under a flood watch, and the National Weather Service placed much of southern Georgia under a tornado watch. Some school districts in both states called off classes Monday with Jeanne forecast to shoot into the Atlantic near the North Carolina-Virginia line early Wednesday.
Earlier, Jeanne tore across the Bahamas, leaving some neighborhoods under 6 feet of water. The storm caused flooding in Haiti that killed more than 1,500 people.
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