by DC Stultz

G21 Staff Writer

To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL("http://www.g21.net/amdream86.html") and enter it in the box after you click through.

TAMPA BAY, FL, USA - Our illustrious publisher emailed me and asked politely when he could expect another MIA [MEMOIRS OF THE INFORMATION AGE] column "even though I know you've been under the gun."

Actually, between a rock and a hard place would be more like it. While I haven't moved to another city and then had to move from my guaranteed living quarters like Rod has, my life the past couple of months has been, shall we say, interesting.

I seemed to have acquired a bullseye painted on my chest in addition to a "kick me" sign being pasted on my back.

When I last checked in, I told my sad tale of woe of living in Florida and escaping hurricane Charley only because the unpredictable dude made a sudden right turn to go ashore a 100 miles to the south of my Tampa Bay home.

Little did I know what the next six weeks would bring. Namely, hurricanes Frances, Ivan and Jeanne. It is/was enough to make a grown man cry. ?All three had Tampa Bay in its sights. Ivan, thankfully for me and my Tampa Bay area neighbors, waited to make its turn to the right and slammed the Florida panhandle instead. Frances and Jeanne both made landfall on the east coast and took the exact same path across the state to wallop us before they exited out into the Gulf of Mexico.

Let me back up and give a recap of my time off.

email address:

Charlie made a believer out of me. The devastation was great. Even my daughter's home in Orlando suffered major roof damage. (Which, as I write, has not been repaired -- roofers and repairmen are scarcer than hen's teeth in Florida right now.)

I vowed not to sit through anything over a Category II storm despite living in a high and dry, sturdy home. And I vowed to board up next time. (Which I thought at the time, meant maybe next year.) I wasn't the only one to make those decisions.

Gas for the vehicles had been a real problem during Charley. They tell you to top off your tanks because even if the service stations have gas after a hurricane, they probably won't have electricity to pump it. ?Only problem: There isn't enough capacity in the ground to fill all of the tanks, let alone fill and replenish the tanks for the millions that evacuate the coastal areas. Then to add to the apre storm misery, the ships that deliver gas to the state can't dock in closed ports and can't travel in hurricane seas. The gas distributors must leave their big tanks mostly filled or else they will collapse in high winds. ?They have too few tanker filling spigots to keep their 18-wheelers on the road delivering gas to the stations -- they all queue up for hours awaiting to be filled. Of course, the truckers can't drive (if they could get the fuel) due to the high winds before and during the storm and then afterwards, can't drive because of damaged roadways.

The result in the Tampa Bay area? Although we dodged hurricane Charley, it took a solid week to get the service stations replenished so that one could buy gas normally.

Only a couple of weeks after Charlie, we start getting anxious watching the local news and the Weather Channel. Is Frances going to hit Florida? I started my compulsive internet surfing of hurricane sites, relying mainly on the Sun-Sentinel site (http://weather.sun-sentinel.com/tropical/) because it groups all the links you want for each storm. I have visited that link literally hundreds of times in the past six weeks.

D.C. Stultz

When the official track for Frances targeted the east coast of Florida, we received a call from a long time friend in Indialantic -- a beachside town [near]by Melbourne and about 30 miles south of Cape Kennedy. "Can me and my daughter come over?" she asked. The immediate response was yes. Her townhouse is a scant 200 yards from the Atlantic and not over 6 feet above sea level.

Audrey and Amy evacuated to our place early to beat the soon to be bumper-to-bum per evacuation of nearly all of the barrier islands on the east coast [of the state]. They arrived to find the Tampa Bay area in a state of panic at the gas stations. EVERYONE was topping off this time. If you found a station with gas, you got in line and prayed that they didn't run out before your turn came.

My neighbor, Trevor Swan, is a great guy. He is handy. His avocation and sideline business is making early American furniture. He was the only one in the neighborhood to go out and fight the lines at Home Depot to get plywood to board up his house for Charley. Now, he was the most popular guy around. He managed to get plywood for my two large picture windows and back patio sliding doors and plywood to do the same for his father's home and his dad's neighbor. ?He not only got the plywood, he put it up for all of us.

How did he find plywood on the Friday before Francis? He drove to Home Depot and to Lowe's every hour starting at 7 a.m. until he spotted a delivery truck loaded with sheets. (Neither store would answer their phones during the crunch.)

Me, my wife, Claudine, and our guests, Audrey and Amy, all hunkered down for two days of high winds. Frances moved so damned slow. Our winds were relatively low -- sustained winds in the 50 - 60 mph range with higher gusts -- but because it was slow, it did a lot of damage in the area. Including some storm surge flooding in the Tampa area. ?We, thankfully, escaped damage other than a trellis blowing over and three boards coming loose from the back privacy fence. We didn't even lose electricity, TV cable/internet access or phone during the storm.

Audrey's townhouse escaped damage on the beach. Their complex lost their aluminum carports, however. They also lost electricity for a week, so they stayed with us.

Between Charlie and Frances, Florida had a big X swath of storm damage cut across the state. Some unfortunate people in Polk county got to see the eye of TWO hurricanes within three weeks. ?Little did they know ...

Hurricane hunter aerial
photo of Ivan

Frances was gone, but my compulsive scanning of the Weather Channel and internet sites became more obsessive because there was another hurricane called Ivan out there and it too looked like it could have Florida in its sights. The models showed Tampa Bay might be a target once again. I only popped off a center piece of plywood on two windows for some sunlight.

I didn't take the rest down.

My coworkers were only half-joking when they tossed around the idea of sending me to Mexico or Texas so that the storm would go there. My history as a disaster magnet had been reviewed often. (I was in San Jose, California for the World Series earthquake, was in Miami just hours before hurricane Andrew hit, and I had been vacationing in Ft Myers when Charlie was heading up Florida's west coast.)

By Thursday, I'd informed the neighbor that I wanted to board up three more windows. By Friday, the computer models for Ivan were looking positively horrible. It was a big storm and it was targeting Tampa Bay. My wife went to WalMart and bought some large plastic tubs to put her keepsakes in. We joined the now all-too-familiar gas lines to top off the van. We decided late Friday, that we would leave the state and head to a daughter's house in Tuscaloosa [,Alabama] on Saturday if a miracle didn't happen.

Audrey and Amy started making plans to return to the east coast on Saturday since living without air conditioning back home seemed better than riding 700 miles with us.

We awoke Saturday to find that the computer models had shifted to the west. Ivan appeared to be headed a little off the west coast [of the state]. We delayed our departure, but Audrey and Amy headed back home. They lucked out; their power was restored while they were driving home.

The models kept shifting to the west a bit during Saturday and we heaved a sigh of relief.

Ivan, as you all know, struck a horrendous blow to Pensacola. It continued inland up through Alabama, damaging the roof of my daughter's house in Tuscaloosa. Yep. The place we had planned to go to escape Ivan. ?The speculation is that the Storm God heard me and the wife make plans to go there, so that is the reason for the miraculous shift to the west that saved Tampa Bay.

Hurricane hunter aerial
photo of Ivan

Ivan actually did visit the Tampa Bay area a week later. He went and dumped rain up the east coast, then looped back south and west, went across the state as a tropical storm (giving us a day of wind and rain) and then scurried across the Gulf to hit Texas.

After Ivan, the internet web sites still showed three other storms out in the Atlantic. But the computer models were showing them heading north, so I removed the plywood from the windows.

Let me tell you, plywood has a mysterious weight quality. The first sheet of 1/2 inch plywood you lift weighs 50 lbs; the second sheet you carry from back to front for storage weighs 65 lbs; the third sheet is a back-breaking 80 lbs.

For the past three years, we've had a canopy over the back patio. We removed it before Charlie threatened and, since it was pretty tattered, we tossed it. The week before Frances, the wife found another one. We waited for Frances to pass and for Ivan to bypass before erecting the new one.

One week to the day after putting it up, I was tearing it down for storage. And, I was carrying that damn plywood back around the house (the weight quality persisted). Hurricane Jeanne had done a loop in the Atlantic and was (could it be?) heading to Florida. The reason for the loop was winds from Ivan affecting its path. Unbelievable.

We called Audrey and Amy and told them to get in the car and come back. Jeanne was going to hit the east coast. My warning was a good 24 hours before the official track said that was the case. My practice of compulsively viewing the computer models and technical discussions on the internet had made me a world-class hurricane path predictor. (Actually, I'd found that the official track often lags the computer models' changes by several hours. The technical discussion once boldly admitted this: "the track should be shifted more to the west, but we must maintain continuity." ?In other words, people will think we're crazy if we shift the track to the current west edge of the cone of uncertainty in one bold move. The TV weather people rarely give the viewers the varying possible scenarios that they have access to -- they stick to the official track.)

Audrey and Amy returned. So did another hurricane. Until it got on our doorstep, Jeanne never varied from the path of Frances by more than 10 or 15 miles in its trek across the state. ?And, some of the folks that had seen two hurricane eyes in three weeks now can claim to have seen THREE eyes in six weeks. Unheard of.

Jeanne traveled faster than Frances, so we only had to endure one day of high winds and rain.

This time, we lost power for four hours. I'm not complaining. (My wife did, of course.) My sister, who lives in a bedroom community just east of Tampa went without power for 3 days for Frances and 5 days for Jeanne. Audrey had her power restored in Indialantic in only two days, so they returned then. I chuickled when she called to say that they'd safely returned home. "I have electricity, but I DO NOT HAVE CABLE TV!" she yell ed. ?She had loved our house with a TV in every room. We even had a car battery powered TV sitting on the wife's car's hood in the garage during the four hours our power was off.

They also loved my broadband internet access and Wi-fi networking around the house. They could borrow the laptop and surf their home town newspaper's site (www.floridatoday.com) to keep up on the latest damage and recovery efforts back home. The photo galleries on that site are awesome.

The plywood is down and stored in the garage again. The canopy is back up over the patio. The yard stuff is back in the yard instead of stacked in my office, the Florida room and the garage. At work, the plastic bags have been removed from covering my PC and monitor and the PC moved from desktop to the floor under it. In the past six weeks, I've had to do that drill both ways FOUR stinking times.

Interestingly enough, Miami and the Keys are the only areas of the entire state that were not hurt by hurricanes in August and September. They are normally the most likely places to get hit. The rest of the state is shoulder deep in uncollected tree debris and construction rubble at curbside.

The humorists and editorial cartoonists have had a field day with hurricane humor. (Our favorite: A map of the US with Florida nestled up next to Idaho and Montana. Florida is saying, "I've had enough!") We were beat up, but hadn't lost our sense of humor. When Audrey and Amy arrived at our doorstep for the second time, they held up that day's Florida Today newspaper with its large banner headline "NOT AGAIN!" in front of their faces when they knocked on the door. After Jeanne passed, the St. Petersburg Times headline blared, "ENOUGH ALREADY".

The agricultural sector of the state is in a bad way. Much of the citrus crop ended up on the ground and many trees were uprooted. The winter vegetable crop must be replanted.

Many thousands of small businesses are out of business. Tens of thousands lost their jobs and homes. Tourists -- our state's lifeblood -- are cancelling in droves. So are conventions. The toll of four hurricanes in six weeks is very high.

Floridians often ridicule "snowbirds" -- those people that spend their summers up north and come to live in Florida during our mild winters. We talk about their driving and their penchant for blue tinted hair and early bird special meals. ?But a lot of us now think that maybe, just maybe, they're not so crazy after all. Living in Florida during hurricane season can be hazardous to your health and wealth.