Orange expects $3.2 billion in damage

Hurricane Charley’s wreckage in Central Florida varied from the shattered antique-style streetlights in downtown Orlando to thousands of damaged mobile homes in rural areas.

Orange County alone estimated $3.2 billion in damage to 165,000 properties. Parts of surrounding counties appear hit harder in spots, with some residents and business owners returning to face large amounts of repairs and hours of cleanup.

One of the storm’s most frequent acts of fury was to destroy more trees than emergency crews cared to know.

“The more you cut, the more you see,” said Peggy Sue, an Orlando forestry worker who fired up her chain saw early Saturday to clear limbs from roads in the Conway area.

Pine trees exploded under the stress of 100 mph winds. Sycamores tipped over in slow motion. But most often, laurel oaks simply came undone, already weakened by age, disease and structural flaws.

With tree damage came power outages and blocked roads. Orlando city foresters were among the first to navigate the mess.

“It took us an hour to get around eight city blocks,” tree trimmer Brian Eichner said.

Byron Brooks, an Orlando director of recreation and parks, said clearing debris from major roads should be finished within a few days. But even with the additional help of crews from three private companies, many Orlando residential streets won’t be passable for weeks, Brooks said.

By late Saturday afternoon, the city had logged nearly 500 calls of badly damaged trees -- only a fraction of the estimated toll of heavily damaged trees.

“It’s well into the thousands when you add private property,” Brooks said.

The extensive tree loss was hard for residents to accept.

At Winter Park’s Central Park, a smell of shattered trees hung in the air as local artist Lynn Whipple felt the wood of a decades-old cedar tree that had been uprooted.

“This is really sad,” she said.

Other large trees littered park grounds.

Christine Kilbourne, 88, who has lived near Park Avenue since she was 6 years old remembered as a young girl watching the trees being planted.

“It hurts your heart,” she said.

Area residents took tree removal into their own hands. At a drugstore in east Orange County, Jeff Enterkin, 46, loaded his trunk with beer “for my neighbor,” he said.

Saturday morning, Enterkin went to work with a handsaw on the trunk of a great oak. He said it was like scrubbing a floor with a toothbrush. Then a neighbor he doesn’t know well came to his rescue with a chain saw, making short work of the tree.

“I was like, wow,” he said. “So this [the beer] is to pay back.”

Elsewhere, wind ripped off most of the roof of the Recreation and Wellness Center gymnasium at the University of Central Florida, allowing rain to pour in.

Tom Gomez pushed a mop across the 30,000-square-foot maple wood floor of the gym’s basketball court. “I suspect we’ll be here throughout the night,” he said.

At Colonial Drive east of Orlando, Jeff Reese raced against rain showers Saturday afternoon. He had a big job at the Sticks & Stuff furniture store. Its roof was peeled back in spots, and half of the plate glass windows were shattered.

“We’ve got to get up 41 sheets of plywood at least,” Reese said.

Polk County emergency crews scrambled to assess damage to perhaps hundreds of mobile homes and to at least three fire stations -- in Frostproof, Poinciana and Fort Meade.

“It’s going to be awhile before we get everything put back together,” said Larry Alexander, Polk’s public safety director.

In North Brevard County, Tamra Brady said she was relieved to find only tree limbs scattered across her lawn. But it had been her two horses, not her house, that worried her most when the hurricane began howling in Mims.

“I wanted to put them in the garage,” said Brady, 42, explaining it was their first hurricane. The horses survived without incident.

In Seminole County, half of the tin roof at the Bible Believers Tabernacle Church blew off during the storm, leaving old wooden trusses exposed underneath.

Pastor Stacy Goodbread arrived with his wife and two children to find the tiny, A-frame church marked with yellow spray paint by firefighters saying it was not inhabitable -- and yellow evidence tape that read: “Do Not Cross.”

In Osceola County, Pablo Vazquez, 42, said he thought a tornado came through his Pineridge Estates neighborhood near Poinciana, ripping trees out by their roots and blowing his and his neighbors’ patios into another neighbor’s back yard.

“Nobody expected this,” Vazques said. “Just to see the neighborhood, the trees, you hate to see it all ripped apart.”

Brian Baskin, Dorine Bethea, Martin E. Comas, Melissa Harris, Pamela J. Johnson, Ludmilla Lelis, Jim Leusner, Vicki Mcclure, Robert Sargent, Laurin Sellers and Gary Taylor contributed to this report. Kevin Spear can be reached at 407-420-5062 or kspear@orlandosentinel.com.