© Michael Heller
A PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE
The June Flood & Hurricane Charley
We moved back to Florida in October of 1997 and I went to worl for the daily paper in Port Charlotte. I had given them the idea of including a boating and fishing section to their newspaper and I was supposed to be the editor of it. The loved the idea and within a few years they stole it away from me . I quit and went back to publishing my own magazine. I never was good at working with liberal idiots.
Things went OK for a while, until June of 2003 when a 20-inch rainfall washed out over 5 miles of seawall in our area. Our own seawall was one of the ones affected. Our boat was trapped behind the seawall, but lthough the picture looks bad, the boat is actually being rescued, slid out from behind the collapsed seawall and put back in the water. We named her "Lucky"
Then a year later, on August 13, 2004 Hurricane Charley paid us a visit. My neighbor's boat wound up in his pool, but old "Lucky" tied down ten feet away was lucky again and we renamed her "Lucky-2" Our house on the other hand was not so lucky and ultimately had to be demolished. We were down and out living in the rubble without electricity for two weeks when I wrote the following two columns:
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WE ALMOST WAITED TOO LONG
By
Michael Heller ,Water Life Magazine
At 2:00 p.m. on Friday the 13th we gather all our last minute containers and important papers and put them near the door. Charley was now a full blown Cat III hurricane with winds of 125 mph and was 55 miles south of us. Then 25 minutes later the weather service came on the air with the news that Charley was approaching Captiva Island 25 miles away and was a full blown Cat IV storm with winds of 140 mph. A friend from Fon Du Lac Wisconsin calls to ask if we are 'some of the knuckleheads' who are staying. "Will this house withstand a 140 mph wind?" my wife asks, as I stash stuff up on some high shelves to avoid the predicted 10-foot storm surge. I think for a moment and then answer "No." I stop what I am doing when I hear my own words reverberate in the empty garage.
At 2:35 my friend Capt. Ralph Allen calls and asks: "What do you think?" "I think this is the worst case scenario," I tell him and we agree it is time to leave... if it's not too late.
The hurricane we figuer will push water up the harbor and flood everything. It's what 'emergency management' had always warned of.
At just before 3 pm my wife, dog and I are in our car. Ralph and I have decided to head to Arcadia 15 miles North east. He'll take Hwy. 17 from Punta Gorda and we'll run out Kings Highway, crossing the Peace River on route 560 and then hook up with Route17 at Nocatee. We'll meet around there, Ralph and I agree.
There is not much traffic on the road any more. The sky is grey black with some very gusty winds. Out past the Nav-A-Gator bar, transformers on the telephone poles begin to explode in electric blue eruptions. It is a scene right out of the movie 'Twister,' but it's happening in real life. "This is not good," I tell my wife as I mash the gas pedal harder into the floorboards.
At Arcadia it is raining hard and it is extremely windy. We find out later that a tornado blew through Arcadia at the time we arrived. We make it to SR 70 and haul-ass east in and out of torrential bands of rain and gusty wind. It is amazing how slowly some other people are driving. We pass them all and keep hauling-ass. In a half hour we are in clearing conditions and we reconnoiter with Ralph and his family at a gas station outside of Okeechobee. We are now out of broadcast radio range and have no further contact with any real time reports about where the storm is headed. By the clouds I know it is right behind us and is still closing fast. Ralph decides to continue on 70 east, but we break off for Indian Town, running on the left side of the dark black sky. We pick up the Turnpike, then the Sawgrass Expressway and finally Alligator Alley. Now we are headed back home from behind the storm, coming back up from the south.
At Naples we see the first examples of damage, huge highway signs uprooted and thrown into the pine trees. As we proceed north the scenery only gets worse.
At the Charlotte County line tractor trailers along the interstate are overturned and lay sprawled like toys on the road. We wait for 30 minutes near the Charlotte County airport for the Interstate to be cleared, then we move on. By the time we get to the Peace River bridge everything is dark. From the Harborview exit we follow a state trooper into Port Charlotte.
The trooper swings his hand held spotlight in front of him as we move slowly ahead, through fallen trees and dropped power lines. Calamity is everywhere.
A boat hangs against a power pole, houses and their contents are split open and strewn everywhere. At Whidden Industrial Park, a cluster of metal buildings is ripped open and balled up like tin foil in the trash. Aluminum roofs, plastic soffits, and wires are everywhere.
At U.S 41 the trooper turns north and we are on our own. Driving down Edgewater we drive across lawns and in 4-wheel climb over several power poles and felled trees. We are heading home.
We turn down our block in front of two houses with no roofs at all. We look at each other in silence. A chill runs down my neck, but by 8:30 p.m. we are home.
Our roof is mostly intact, but devoid of shingles. Bare wood shows through everywhere. One piece of plywood is missing and I can see into the attic there. Two of our boarded up windows have been blown out into the street. The living room parquet floor is under an inch of water. Our bedroom only has a two broken panes and the bed is relatively dry. Holding each other in our arms, my wife sobbing quietly with the dog lying against her side, we fall to sleep.
It will be two weeks before the power comes back on. We will live in ruin, trying to cope and figure out what comes next.
IN THE END THERE WAS A GOOD SIGN By Michael Heller, Water LIFE Magazine
The eye of hurricane Charley passed over the Bangsberg - Beaney - Severin area in Port Charlotte where we live. That's why this month's edition is a little late. Seven houses on our block were totally destroyed, 15 others sustained major damage.
Our house was five lots up from the Peace River in a place where the Charley was particularly vicious. The geometric center of the hurricane's eye passed within 100 yards of our home. The storm blew the plywood covered windows on the canal side of our home, plywood still attached, right out of the wall and through the living room and kitchen. Then it punched a hole in the boarded up windows on the opposite side of the house and blew the whole mess out. It was ugly. If it weren't for the windows letting go there is no doubt in my mind the roof would have lifted off.
But to every event of catastrophic proportion there comes a point of closure, a time when you leave the disaster behind and begin to move on. For us, in the wake of hurricane Charley, closure came at 7:15 in the morning on Friday, August 27th, which happened to be my birthday.
Up to that day we had been camped out in the one dry room we had left, living with bottled water, Red Cross "heater meals" and getting minimal power from an old gasoline generator. Every day we were up at dawn, asleep at dusk, probably still in shock.
We were sitting in the living room, that morning, contemplating yet another day of sorting through the mess in the sweltering heat. There was a nice breeze blowing in from the south that came through the gaping hole in the Florida room and blew out through the open front door, pretty much on the same path Charley took. Up to that point every morning had been the same: wake up and start on the heavy work before the day got too hot, but on this morning we lingered in the breeze, drinking coffee boiled with the grounds, camp-style, and not saying much.
My wife sat at the battered dining room table, that was in the middle of the living room now, and I was against the wall sitting in a pool chair about ten feet away. We were stupefied and exhausted from the long ordeal.
Suddenly, something caught my eye outside, a shadow moving in the air and getting bigger. I looked up, focusing on the street through the open front door and saw a wingspan that was big; three feet, maybe four. With the sun rising in the east the bird was clearly visible as it swooped down lower. An osprey, talons dangling, with great brown feathers and yellow eyes, tucked its wings back at the shoulder, then folded them some more and flew right into the living room through our open front doorway - perhaps four feet above the ground. We didn't have time (or the energy) to react. We sat still.
Once inside, the bird extended its wings in a gentle glide, banked slightly to the right and flew directly between us, flapping once, ever so lightly as its right wing tip passed not two feet from my face. The soft air from the great bird's wings blew across my face like a kiss from heaven.
The bird dipped left then right, zig-zagging artfully from the living room into the Florida room and then flew out the large gaping hole left by the missing windows. We sat motionless for a moment or two, goose bumps blossoming, skin tingling, in an uplifting swell of awe.
Like the great owl in the Harry Potter movie the osprey brought us a message, a reminder of why we live here; the wildlife, the birds, the fishing, clean water, unspoiled shorelines, tropical breezes, blue skies. This is still the best place to live. Hurricanes happen, but that's life in the tropics.