Recovery divides those with power, those without

The night her lights came back on, Darla Smith returned from a walk past the homes without electricity in her storm-ravaged Orlando neighborhood and was appalled to see her brightly lighted chandelier shining through the foyer window.

“I thought, ‘Now there’s a beacon of hate. I have to turn that off,’ ” said Smith, 49. “I try to keep my lights on low, because it’s really not fair.”

As Central Florida inches closer to recovery, Hurricane Charley has left behind two worlds. One has electricity. The other doesn’t. There are the Haves and the Have-Nots.

About 5,000 more Orlando Utilities Commission customers joined the Haves on Tuesday, but 35,000 remained without power.

Progress Energy restored power to about 87,000 Central Florida households and businesses. Florida Power & Light reduced its number of Have-Not customers in Central Florida from 100,000 to 79,000 on Tuesday.

Kissimmee Utility said 25,000 of its customers were without electricity Tuesday, compared with 26,500 on Monday.

Those without electricity have anger, envy, resentment, rotten food, wrinkled clothes and sweaty armpits. Those with electricity have guilt, pity, compassion, air conditioning, ice, e-mail and the Internet.

Giberto Gonzalez, 81, and his wife Carmen Xiques, 69, are Have-Nots. Their two-pound bag of ice melted Monday.

Their neighbor down the street on Julio Lane, Raul Perez Sr., is a Have.

Perez, 52, took a long swig from a big glass dripping with icy condensation. When he finished his water, Perez tossed the ice cubes on the lawn and went back to work cutting through tree limbs with an electric saw.

“I feel for them,” Perez said of the Have-Nots. “But this was our luck.”

Then he laughed, “Good luck, huh? I’ll take it.”

His family lost power for only nine hours -- not long enough even for the ice cream to go soft.

Darla Smith also is a Have. Her neighbor down the street, who works for OUC, is a Have-Not.

“He works all day and then has to come home and sleep in the heat,” Smith said.

With the benevolence of the privileged, Smith invites the Have-Nots over for dinner or a swim in the pool.

Acts of kindness from the Haves toward the Have-Nots are common. Many of the Haves were, themselves, Have-Nots just a few days, or a couple of hours ago. They remember what it was like to be cut off from the modern world, stuck in this kind of time warp of candlelight and darkness when the sun goes down -- sleeping and sweating at night with the windows wide open.

In the Monterey neighborhood off Semoran Boulevard, the streets are crisscrossed with extension cords from homes with electricity to homes without -- a nice gesture that could be hazardous.

After the power came back on for Ivan Asmat and his family, they ran a cord to the house of Ana Colon on the other side of La Costa Drive.

“It’s just an old lady and some of her people over there,” said Asmat, 21. “We don’t really know them. But I grabbed an extension cord and ran it across the street.”

Thanks to the Asmats, the Colons have just enough juice to run their refrigerator, TV and one fan. But the family still sleeps in a sweat-drenched living room.

“We’re sweaty and smelly,” said Ana Colon, 53. “We can’t go on like this, and we heard the power might not be back on until Saturday.”

The Have-Nots can’t blame their neighbors for having what they want themselves, so they direct their anger at the seemingly arbitrary way the utility companies give back the power.

Todd Hansen looks out the window of his apartment and all he sees are the lights in the windows of the apartments, houses and businesses along Oak Ridge Road. His persistence in demanding an explanation from OUC got him tossed out of the utility’s offices Tuesday by security guards.

“How do I feel? Powerless. There is nothing I can do about it. I keep asking and asking and I get laughed at and dismissed and thrown out like garbage,” said Hansen, 44.

On Montego Lane, 86-year-old Caroline Erlewein asks the same question.

“Why do they have electricity and we don’t? They’re only just over there,” she said.

Erlewein has been told it might be Friday before her electricity is restored.

“It’s terrible. No electricity, no phone. I can’t sleep. When you wake up, you’re just drenched,” she said. “I woke up at 3 a.m., and it was too hot to sleep. I fan myself with a piece of cardboard and try to be calm.”

Hurricane Charley has even divided families into Haves and Have-Nots. Jacqueline Silvera, 48, and her mother, who lives next door, never lost their electricity in Pine Hills. Her older sister, who lives in Apopka, did.

Silvera was cool and air conditioned. Her sister was hot and cranky.

“Everything was a problem. Everything ticked her off,” Silvera said.

When her mother suggested the older sister come stay with her, the sister refused.

“She chose not to, so I said maybe she was enjoying her pity party,” Silvera said.

In the Parramore neighborhood, the Haves and the Have-Nots on Bentley Street are separated by the tree that fell across the street. On one end of Bentley, music blares from windows and residents stay inside to escape the heat. On the other end, the coolest part of Betty Robinson’s house is her carport.

For the past four days, Robinson has been cooking on the grill and sleeping with the windows open.

“The windows open doesn’t do any good,” said Robinson, 62. “It gets so hot at night.”

Adding to the heat is the annoying, incessant humming of the gas-powered generators belonging to those who live in the land between the Haves and the Have-Nots.

Muriel Lovejoy, 83, said she called the police to complain about her Colonialtown neighbor who runs his generator all night long, but the police said there was nothing they could do about it. Generators don’t fall under the noise-abatement ordinance.

But for Lovejoy, it’s the difference between suffocating in the heat with the windows closed or staying up all night listening to what sounds like somebody mowing the lawn of infinity.

“It runs all the time. He should be more considerate of his neighbors,” she said.

At Linda Matheny’s house in the Lake Lawsona neighborhood, a neighbor’s generator is the only thing at night that keeps her from feeling like she has returned to the days when Florida was not yet civilized by electricity and air conditioning.

At night, her house is illuminated by candlelight. Her 15-year-old daughter reads her books by the light of an oil lamp. The day begins when the sun comes up and ends when the sun goes down. She has lived in Orlando most of her life, but she has never seen the downtown sky so dark at night.

And when her family escapes for an evening to eat dinner at Orlando Fashion Square mall, it almost seems like going to some other world where everything is brighter, colder, faster, louder.

“It’s like we’re living in a parallel universe,” said Matheny, 48. “There’s all these people going about their life normally as if nothing has happened. For a minute it seems like nothing has happened to us, but then we come home and it’s dark. It’s really dark.”

Jeff Kunerth can be reached at jkunerth@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5392. Rich McKay can be reached at rmckay@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5470. Tania deLuzuriaga can be reached at tdeluzuriaga@orlandosentinel.comor 407-931-5934.