Furious Frances Pounds Florida

Packing furious winds, Hurricane Frances began its siege of a terrified Florida on Saturday, ripping roofs off homes, uprooting trees, closing hospitals and cutting off electricity to about 1.2 million people.

By 11 p.m. EDT, the strongest part of the storm, just ahead of the eye, had pounded St. Lucie, Martin and Palm Beach counties with torrential rain and winds in excess of 105 mph.

The massive storm system had vexed residents for days as it crawled toward the state’s Atlantic Coast.

Just before midnight, James Coyle of Jensen Beach in Martin County, near where the eye of the storm was expected to come ashore, sat in his pickup truck and marveled over the sheer power being loosed. “It’s really ripping,” said Coyle, 43. “I can feel the back end of the truck lifting up.”

The National Hurricane Center said the whirling system was about as large as Texas and its eye was 45 miles across. Frances, which days ago loomed as a Category 4 storm, had dropped to between Category 2 and 3, with sustained winds of 105 mph.

Along with spawning several small tornadoes, the storm could dump at least a foot of rain on a state still recovering from the aftermath of Hurricane Charley, which killed 27 people and devastated Florida’s southwestern coast on Aug. 13. Officials warned of widespread flooding across Central Florida.

“The real issue will be rainfall,” said Frank Lepore, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center. “The forecasts now call for 8 to 12 inches across Florida, with locally higher amounts. That’s a lot of water coming down the rivers and into the Everglades.”

St. Lucie County, home to 230,000 residents, was expected to receive the worst of the storm. “We’re planning for a direct hit,” said Doug Anderson, a county administrator.

The winds from Frances had become so strong that St. Lucie County fire rescue personnel were no longer responding to emergency calls, officials said. Their high vehicles present too much surface area to the wind, and could be toppled by a strong gust. Sheriff’s deputies, who use lower-profile cruisers, were only answering life-or-death calls, said Ken Mascara, St. Lucie County sheriff.

“All I can tell people is, please stay inside. It’s really bad out there,” Anderson said Saturday in a live television broadcast from the county emergency operations center west of Fort Pierce. Outside the dugout bunker, the wind howled.

Back in Martin County, Steve Crowley, 40, was smacked by a flurry of shingles that ripped off his roof in Jensen Beach. “It was like #10 grit sand paper,” he said, as oak trees snapped with loud cracks nearby.

Not far away, Kenny Allen huddled at home with his family and three dogs -- a pit bull, German shepherd and Australian shepherd. He told of a panicked call from his son, who is serving in the military in Afghanistan. “He called yesterday because it was his birthday and he was worried about us,” Allen said. “I told him I was worried about him.”

As of Saturday, Walt Disney World, Universal Studios Orlando, Sea World and John F. Kennedy Space Center had all closed their doors. Orlando’s airport closed Friday and a Miami International Airport spokesman said that no airlines braved takeoffs or landings Saturday.

In the days before Frances hit land, emergency officials called on 2.8 million residents to flee to safer ground, the largest evacuation in Florida history.

By Saturday afternoon, about 76,000 people had taken refuge in 375 shelters across the state. Shelters also were opened as far away as Georgia and South Carolina to accommodate those escaping Frances.

Authorities in many communities also decreed nighttime curfews to discourage the looting of empty boarded-up homes, but there were still reports of storm-related theft and burglaries. The Navy and Air Force prepared to move ships and aircraft out of the area and all professional sports events were canceled. By Saturday evening, there was only scattered traffic on most coastal roads. The Florida Turnpike, where tolls had been suspended, was also empty.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency mobilized three times as many disaster relief workers for Hurricane Frances as it did for Hurricane Charley, said spokesman James McIntyre. About 1,400 FEMA workers already in Florida for Charley were pulled out of the hurricane strike zone, and were waiting out the storm in Tallahassee, Atlanta and other areas.

“As soon as it’s safe to go back in, we’ll go back in,” McIntyre said. Emergency crews from as far away as Washington state and Oregon will be among the 4,500 additional FEMA personnel -- including three urban rescue teams -- who will help Florida recover after the storm.

As residents searched for last-minute essentials or headed to packed shelters, Frances showed that it meant business. Along the 130 miles of Florida coastline between Vero Beach and Miami, more than a dozen hospitals were forced to evacuate. Winds as high as 90 mph ripped off aluminum storm shutters at deserted mobile home parks and million-dollar ocean-side condos.

Street signs were uprooted. One Palm Beach County stoplight dislodged from its post and dangled from its cord, still changing from green to red before another powerful wind gust sent it crashing to the ground. The awnings over numerous beachside shuffleboard courts were twisted into unrecognizable shapes.

In Palm Beach County, the state’s third-most populous with 1.2 million people, sailboats were toppled and fishing piers had broken apart. One 26-foot sailboat that had dragged anchor across choppy Lake Worth Lagoon sat at a precarious tilt toward shore, its mast snarled in a pine tree. Nearby, two motorboats lay smashed against a bridge.

After being lashed by strong winds and nearly 5 inches of rain throughout most of the day, the town of Jupiter on Florida’s Treasure Coast measured winds reaching 90 mph.

In Palm Gardens, six people were rescued after the roof of a commercial building blew off and the back portion collapsed.

On Hutchinson Island, off the Florida mainland, the coastline was pounded with high winds, eye-stinging rain and boiling seas the color of storm runoff.

The winds prompted Florida Light & Power to reduce to 35% capacity the two reactors at the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant on Hutchinson Island, even as the eye of the storm still hovered over Freeport, on Grand Bahama Island.

An 18-year-old man in the Bahamas was electrocuted while filling a generator with diesel and another man was found dead in shallow water, authorities said.

Officials worried that the combined effects of the intense winds -- prolonged for up to 10 hours -- combined with as much as 20 inches of rain and a possible storm surge of 7 to 10 feet could put the north and south parts of Hutchinson Island under water, or gouge a new channel through the barrier island.

Clad in a yellow rain slicker, John A. O’Connor, a panoramic photographer from Fort Pierce, climbed atop the sand dunes near the raging surf with a hand-held wind gauge, and bent over nearly double to compensate for the gusts of 60 mph.

“All the sand in the air from the beach, it’s like being sandblasted,” grimaced O’Connor through clenched teeth. As Frances approached, the photographer said, he had abandoned his beachfront home and moved eight blocks inland. The pictures he was taking of Frances’ effect, he said, would be posted on the Internet, “provided I live of course.”

About that time, the skeleton crew at the U.S. Coast Guard station on the causeway connecting the island with downtown Fort Pierce decided to abandon ship and head for higher ground.

“Our capabilities are done, and we really can’t help anyone,” said Coast Guard Petty Office Steve McCauley, 27, of Staten Island. “We don’t want to stick around.”

But some people kept their calm during the earliest hours of the storm.

At Archie’s Seabreeze, a beachfront bar and eatery in Fort Pierce, about 200 yards from the ocean, owner Patty McGee and two employees elected to ride out the storm there.

It didn’t faze them that the bar lay in Frances’ projected path, or that police had told them to evacuate at noon Friday. They had put more than 100 bottles of beer on ice, and were playing poker and Boggle in the darkened bar, which was lighted by feeble battery-powered lights after the power failed.

“We’re all single or live on the island. Where else are we going to go?” McGee said. “All the food’s in the cooler, and there’s all the beer you could want. If thing’s get bad, we can always go in the walk-in freezer.”

Forecasters expected Frances to grip Florida throughout the Labor Day weekend, though the storm’s hurricane status -- sustaining winds of 75 mph or more -- was apparently limited

“When it hits land, it drops considerably,” Lepore said. “It looks like it loses its hurricane force Sunday at noon, though it will bring winds upwards of 60 mph as it crosses the state.”

Once over land, Frances was expected to pick up speed and travel at about 12 mph. The storm system will most likely exit the Florida peninsula north of Tampa, in Pasco or Hernando counties, Sunday around 9 p.m. From there, it will trudge across the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and then make a second landfall -- by then downgraded to a tropical storm -- east of Apalachicola in the Panhandle.

The storm was not expected to peter out until Thursday, when it is forecast to drive deeply into the Midwest, reaching Indiana with winds of 25 mph.

In St. Lucie County, officials imposed a 24-hour curfew to keep residents off the streets. “We’ve only experienced the minimal part of this storm,” said Sheriff Mascara. “The worst is yet to come.”

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Dahlburg reported from Fort Pierce, Colker from Martin and St. Lucie counties and Gaither from Palm Beach County. Times staff writer John M. Glionna in Orlando and news researcher Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this report.