Lying in bed one night during the aftermath of Orlando’s worst modern storm called to mind suffocating in steaming mashed potatoes. There was no AC, no lights and no hope for either.
My wife stirred. A man was standing on the deck, she said, meaning someone could have slithered out of the postapocalyptic spookiness of our downtown Orlando neighborhood.
I peered out to see our tall, 11-year-old son, arms spread sidewards. “It’s. Too. Hot. To. Sleep,” he said in an exhausted moan.
That was four days after Hurricane Charley howled in from South Florida on the night of Friday, Aug. 13th, 2004. It savaged Central Florida with such a direct hit that many residents had the opportunity to marvel at Charley’s dead-calm eye.
The storm planted a sense of vulnerability that blooms about now each year into discomfort: Is it time for another Charley — or worse?
Buddy Dyer was in his second year as Orlando’s mayor then. “Charley went through in about 45 minutes with winds close to 100 miles an hour and we had 10,000 trees come down,” he said in response to a recent reminder of the storm’s upcoming 20th anniversary.
That’s about 200 trees a minute – huge oaks and towering pines flattened as readily as a Bush Hog whacks weeds.
Charley is also symbolic of a record year: Four hurricanes traumatized Florida in 2004, when the Sunshine State became the Plywood State.
Now, that record could topple, according to expert expectations for an extremely active hurricane season, which runs June 1 through Nov. 30.
Atlantic waters are simmering, which incubates and energizes storms. Winds that might shred or deflect hurricanes are likely to be lax. Predictions call for nearly two-dozen tropical storms and hurricanes, up from an average of 15.
Among Central Floridians, there’s long been a willing belief that the scariest killer storms are gonna be someone else’s nightmare – the millions foolish enough to live near a coast.
But Charley took the Orlando region to hurricane school for the first time in decades. It made landfall west of Fort Myers as a thumping Category 4 storm and endured crossing 150 miles of land to arrive as a still-punchy Category 1.
While not particularly deadly in Central Florida, the storm and its aftermath were damaging, miserable, lasting and instructive.
Hurricanes grind coastal communities to bits with storm surge.
After traveling inland, Charley unleashed a wood surge.
A cubic foot of living oak weighs about the same as a cubic foot of water.
Orlando’s celebrated tree canopy, and that of neighboring communities, was lazy, overgrown and, from Charley’s point of view, arrogant in its grandeur. Nature’s crazed barber sheared limbs, snipped trunks and ripped out whole trees by their roots.
Every one of the 10,000 downed trees in Orlando seemed to grab a power line or utility pole as it crashed onto a roof, car or the ground. Streets were blocked with hills of tangled wire, leaves and limbs.
Charley packed little lightning. But the night was filled with vibrant, blue-green flashes from electrical lines and equipment being beaten into junk.
For many weeks, as residents piled tree debris at their streets for eventual pickup, the tangy, sweaty smell of leaves rotting in gutters soured the humid, 95-degree days.
The urban terrain conveyed the despair of a Humpty Dumpty disaster, where all of the utility personnel and all of their trucks could never possibly put it back together again.
“Hurricane Charley taught us many lessons,” said Clint Bullock, chief executive officer of Orlando Utilities Commission. It did for other power providers as well, including Duke Energy and Kissimmee Utility Authority.
For those who lost electricity, typical outages were a week to 10 days, or way more than necessary to spoil everything in the fridge. Lots of folks in suburban and rural areas went powerless for weeks.
As crews dug in for repairs and streets were slowly cleared, the 2004 hurricane season began to pitch storms into the Atlantic and Caribbean with ferocity.
Among them were the hurricanes reaching Florida: Frances on Sept. 5, Ivan on Sept. 16 and Jeanne on Sept. 26.
Parts of Orange and Osceola counties were thrashed by Charley, Frances and Jeanne.
In little more than six weeks, Central Floridians became more expert about hurricanes than they likely would have imagined.
Among the things we learned was that storms vary.
Charley, comparatively speaking, had the forward speed of a missile, zipping diagonally across Florida in a bit more than seven hours, but was as skinny as a tornado.
In Orange County, there were no sustained hurricane winds west of Interstate 4. Less than 10 miles east of I-4, Orlando International Airport got its butt kicked with winds rising to 105 mph before the gauge broke. Another 10 miles east of the airport, there were no hurricane winds.
Ivan, which crushed Pensacola, had a far bigger reach with hurricane winds 100 miles from its eye.
Jeanne seemed to have the forward speed of a loggerhead turtle trudging up a beach to drop her eggs.
A particularly jarring lesson involved the National Hurricane Center’s storm track forecasts: Heed them but mind the cone of uncertainty on prediction maps.
As Charley sailed toward Florida, the center warned of catastrophe for the Tampa Bay area. But the storm wobbled, veering into the coast well south of Tampa Bay.
At breakfast that day, Orlando was clucking sympathies for St. Petersburg. By afternoon, stunned Central Floridians were stripping stores of plywood sheets and canned tuna.
All that triggered kvetching toward the hurricane center. A review by the National Weather Service years later deflected blame.
“Media and residents seemed to have focused only on the exact forecasted track of the center of Charley, rather than the cone of uncertainty,” the service noted.
Here are a couple more pearls of hard-earned wisdom.
Panic spreads fast. Dawdling after the hurricane center warns of a storm runs a risk of arriving at a supermarket to find bare shelves and feeling like the worst contestant on the television show Survivor.
Hurricanes are fickle, apt to cut power to most of one neighborhood while leaving the lights and AC on for some homes across the street or down the block.
After Charley, downtown Orlando, with its protected underground electric lines, glowed haughtily at night, while the blackened, adjoining neighborhoods huddled around lanterns and flashlights.
Alas, much of our hurricane wisdom may have faded.
Since the year of Charley, the Orlando region has filled with storm newbies.
Orlando’s population has grown from 210,000 two decades ago to about 325,000 now.
Stefan Rayer of the University of Florida Bureau of Economic and Business Research said that net increase hides an overall churn that includes deaths and people moving away. Each year, he said, roughly 15 percent of city residents are newcomers.
A stroll around Lake Eola in Orlando underscores that so many are unfamiliar.
“We know bombs but not hurricanes,” said Max Botiev of Ukraine.
Tonya Philson moved this year with her husband from Atlanta to a downtown high rise. “I’m waiting to see what it’s like,” she said uneasily.
A group that remembers Charley like yesterday is Orlando Utilities Commission.
As with other power providers humbled by storms, OUC has institutionalized its lessons and steadily implemented upgrades: sturdier, more sophisticated equipment and lines; robust cooperation with other utilities and prepositioned crews, tools and supplies for an invasion-scale response.
For line crews, hurricane time is showtime, embracing nonstop 16-hour shifts until the lights are on.
But nature still has so much to say about the aftermath.
Christian Sanchez was not around for Charley. He was a kid at home in Puerto Rico. He learned about hurricanes from Maria, which bulldozed the island with unholy 155 mph winds and left his family cut off from ordinary water and electricity for nine months.
“We went back to caveman times,” Sanchez said.
Caveman times aren’t out of the realm of possibility for Central Florida today.
The terrible Hurricane Ian two years ago might have eclipsed Charley’s infamy in Central Florida. The storm swerved south, sparing the region of violent wind but delivering extensive flooding.
Looking ahead, a bruiser like Maria in 2017, Michael in 2018 or Dorian in 2019 charging ashore at Cape Canaveral would have a mere 50-mile dash to a target-rich environment: Orlando’s Lake Eola and the surrounding sea of century-old bungalows.
A good time to make a hurricane plan, as multitudes of disaster experts urge, would be soon after reading this.
Orlando Sentinel reporter Kevin Spear witnessed Charley’s thrashing of Orlando from his porch, was in New Orleans as the city filled with Hurricane Katrina floodwaters, rode out Hurricane Ivan in a Pensacola hotel that lost part of its roof, sheltered in a St. Augustine yoga studio in the tailwinds of Hurricane Mathew and has reported on numerous other storms and their aftermaths.
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