Charley, Katrina and I

Getting caught in one hurricane when you are on holiday is bad enough, but getting caught in another the following year is downright careless. But somehow I managed to do it...

It was forecast to make landfall at Tampa Bay, Florida as a high end category 2 hurricane

But Charley had other plans…

It was August 2004 and I was in Orlando with my family and, after a week of hitting the theme parks hard, we were due to drive down to Tampa that evening to stay with our friends Mike and Mel. However, that morning Mike had called to warn us there was a hurricane making its way towards Florida, and Tampa was right in its path. He suggested that we stay put in Orlando and drive down the next day when all the shenanigans were over. That sounded like a plan to us so we hastily arranged to keep our hotel room on for an extra night and headed off to Sea World for the day.

 

Having pounded western Cuba a few days earlier Tampa was nervously bracing itself for the hurricane’s arrival, but at the last minute Charley suddenly veered several degrees off its projected path and made landfall farther south in Charlotte Harbor.

Tampa had dodged the bullet.

By now the storm had intensified into a category 4 hurricane, with winds reaching 145 mph. That’s some serious wind!  Ripping through the city of Punta Gorda, Charley destroyed 11,000 homes, six schools, six fire stations and about 300 businesses. State Governor Jeb Bush (George’s brother) dubbed Punta Gorda Florida’s "ground zero."

Charley's sights were now set on Mickey Mouse.

Meanwhile, in Orlando, we were sitting in Hooters enjoying a pre-hurricane dinner. News had reached us that Charley had set a new course and was heading our way, so we’d decided to cross the street and grab something to eat ahead of the storm rather than use the hotel’s restaurant. It had seemed like such a good idea too until, as we finished eating, all hell broke loose outside. Suddenly it got very dark, the heavens opened with almost horizontal driving rain outside the window we were sitting by, with palm trees bending at seemingly impossible angles and threatening to uproot and be carried away by the unstoppable forces of nature. The manager locked the doors, told us to move away from the windows, and said nobody was to leave. Buoyed by two or three beers, I remember thinking “Oh well, there’s probably worse places to spend the night than Hooters….” 

Thankfully this was to be just the little storm before the ‘big one’… a bit of a pre-party so to speak, a teaser for what was to come, and some twenty minutes or so later things calmed down and we were able to make a mad dash back to the safety of our room at the Rosen Plaza.

My daughter Victoria prepares for the hurricane

My other daughter Jessica unfazed by the approach of Charley

There we hurriedly packed our suitcases and put them in the bathroom in case a window broke and our room was opened up to the elements. I also filled the bath tub with cold water. Why? I don’t honestly know, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Then Charley hit. And it hit hard. Its journey overland had taken some of the sting out of its tail, but winds of up to 100mph are nothing to be sneered at. Ignoring instructions from the hotel to stay away from the window (we learned there was a little speaker in the ceiling of the room so they could talk to us at all times) I positioned myself on the window sill of our tenth floor room, between the curtain and the glass, to watch the free show. Charley tore through Orlando but for the most part America’s vacation capital held firm. I saw trees topple, others split in two, and air conditioning units ripped from rooftops and carried away by the wind, but most memorable all for me was the roar of the wind and the constant splatter of grit, dirt and sand picked up by the wind and trying to wear the glass away like Mother Nature’s very own sandblaster.

 There are more exciting Hurricane Charley

videos on YouTube but this was my experience

  

Twenty minutes later, maybe thirty, it was half time in this battle of wills with the elements as the eye of the hurricane passed over us, and for a while it went eerily calm outside. Realising the situation was somewhat worse than they had anticipated, and no doubt suspecting that idiotic guests such as me were disobeying instructions to stay away from the windows in their rooms, the hotel made an emergency announcement for all guests to evacuate to the conference centre on the lower ground floor. We duly obeyed their instruction, and here is where my fun ended as all my attempts to get anywhere near a window to watch the events outside were met with orders of  “Sir, I need you to keep away from the window” from the morbidly obese security guards.

The view from our room the next morning

Damage in the hotel car park

The next morning a one hour drive down to Tampa to finally catch up with Mike and Mel took nearer five hours as we crawled along the I - 4 in heavy post hurricane traffic. I recall telling my two daughters how lucky they were to have had this once in a lifetime experience.

How wrong I was!

Fast forward to August 2005 and we are once again in Florida, this time in Fort Lauderdale, and guess what, there’s a hurricane on its way and this one is called Katrina. But we’re not worried, this one is only a category 1 and we’ve survived a category 4. We were staying with friends Jay and Lynne, along with two other couples, Dean and Lex and Stephen and Bobby Jo, so we did the only sensible thing we could think of and went to the supermarket to stock up on beer and burgers and had ourselves a hurricane party! As Katrina began to make herself known to South Florida we were out on the back porch barbequing and putting the pool furniture in the swimming pool so it couldn’t get blown away. After eating much fun was had standing in the garden braving the winds... until someone was startled when a lilo from someone’s pool struck them firmly in the back and we decided to enjoy the rest of the hurricane from indoors.

 The wind starts to pick up

as we BBQ in Fort Lauderdale

The morning after the night before

Little did we realise, seasoned hurricane survivors that we now were, was that once Katrina had crossed Florida and entered the Gulf of Mexico she would strengthen rapidly to become a category 5 hurricane, the strongest ever recorded in the Gulf at the time, before making landfall a second time in Louisiana on August 29^th and heading for New Orleans. She may have weakened to a category 3 by then but she caused more than 50 breaches in drainage canal and navigational canal levees, flooding 80 percent of the city. Thankfully an evacuation order had been made and between 80 and 90 percent of the city’s residents had fled before Katrina’s arrival. Many of those who stayed behind took shelter at The Louisiana Superdome but still nearly 1500 perished in their homes and in the city’s flooded streets.

The Louisiana Skydome after Katrina

As for us, we by this time were watching in horror as the events unfolded from the comfort of a cruise ship, Royal Caribbean’s Navigator of the Seas, and the only real inconvenience we had suffered had been the ship arriving late into Miami the afternoon after our encounter with Katrina, having been forced to plot a course back to Florida that would keep it away from the hurricane. Little had we realised during our encounter with Katrina that she was to go on to become one of the deadliest storms ever to hit America. We counted our luck stars many times over the next few days as our original plan had been to be in New Orleans with our children during that time-frame, and we had only booked the cruise to join our friends, who we had hurricane partied with in Fort Lauderdale, at the last minute after a great deal of persuasion from them, or we might have ended up in the Superdome too.

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