Hurricane Charley Routs Florida

Hurricane Charley ripped into Florida’s Gulf Coast on Friday afternoon, carrying sustained winds of 145 mph, spawning tornadoes and leaving behind a storm surge that threatened to swamp low-lying beach communities and harbor towns.

The Category 4 storm, the most powerful to strike Florida since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, sent about a million coastal residents fleeing for higher ground and left more than 500,000 without power.

Charley then spun across the interior of Florida, crossing over downtown Orlando and near Daytona Beach before shooting back over the open ocean, where it was expected to rejuvenate overnight. The system was moving north at about 25 mph.

The storm is likely to strike land again this afternoon in the Carolinas. The National Hurricane Center in Miami placed 800 miles of the East Coast under a hurricane warning Friday night, from Cocoa Beach, Fla., to Oregon Inlet, N.C., near the north end of the Outer Banks.

The storm left a 15-mile swath of wreckage and ruins where it made landfall in southwestern Florida near the mouth of the Peace River. On the river’s southern bank, the bayside town of Punta Gorda was one of the first to absorb the storm’s might. Here, the roof of an emergency operations center blew off and several other buildings, including a pizzeria and a hardware store, were reduced to rubble.

Downed electric cables snaked across roads, traffic signs were flattened, billboards were pounded into kindling and the storm tore off the roofs and blew in the windows at a row of car dealerships.

In Port Charlotte on the river’s north shore, traffic lights were torn from their cables. And a roof and a storefront were blown off an Auto Zone store leaving the auto batteries and other wares displayed. A window was blown in at Eye Glass World and boats in a boatyard were thrown around like bathtub toys.

Area officials, who were only beginning to investigate the scope of the damage, feared that some coastal areas were under 15 feet of water, and anticipated widespread flooding.

At least three people, including a young girl killed when the wind knocked a truck over on top of a car, were believed to have been killed in Florida.

“It was awful,” said Donna Ackerman, 61, who rode out the storm in a closet with her granddaughters in Cape Coral, next to Fort Myers. The windows of a Cape Coral hospital imploded and a fire station’s roof was torn off.

“I never want to experience this again,” Ackerman said. “We thank God that we’re still here.”

After pummeling Cuba, where three people were killed, Charley appeared to be headed early Friday for Tampa Bay, the most densely populated region of Florida’s Gulf Coast. But the storm took a lumbering turn to the east shortly after noon, strengthening into a Category 4 hurricane. Category 5 is the highest; a Category 4 classification is reserved for storms with sustained winds of between 131 and 155 mph. An Air Force reconnaissance plane measured one gust of 162 mph.

Charley made landfall at 3:45 p.m. EDT at North Captiva Island, a ribbon of silken sand in the Gulf of Mexico, west of Fort Myers and more than 100 miles south of Tampa.

The storm then moved up the gullet of Charlotte Harbor, a normally tranquil bay north of Fort Myers surrounded by dozens of waterfront communities, most of which seemed shocked to find themselves in the eye of the storm.

Some decided at the last minute to evacuate, then found it was too late.

“It reaches the point that you cannot change your plan. You just have to go with it and you cannot leave,” said Jim Stevens, who stayed behind in Charlotte Park, a canal-lined community on the east shore of Charlotte Harbor, with his wife, an 85-year-old relative and a friend.

“I’m not afraid, but nervous,” he said as the storm rolled in. “We have a room that’s kind of on the interior and we have some chairs and pillows. So if the wind does cause any damage we can go in there and protect ourselves.”

Reached by telephone after the storm, Stevens’ wife, Fran, said the family’s safe room was suddenly exposed when Charley tore off part of the roof.

“So we ended up in the kitchen, all huddled, the four of us,” she said. “We just stayed on the floor and it blew one of our storm shutters off. We put a table against the garage door so it wouldn’t blow in and we backed the car up against the table. That’s what saved the garage door.”

Asked about the well-being of the 85-year-old relative, Fran Stevens said: “She did pretty good. She’s having a glass of wine now.”

Some of those who decided to hunker down for the hurricane seemed to believe that their fate was in nature’s hands.

“I’ve made my bed in the closet,” Louise Coffey, owner of the Coffey House Bed & Breakfast in Port Charlotte, said as the storm came ashore. “The bathtub is full of water, for flushing the commode. I’ve unplugged everything, turned off the computer. There’s no feeling to it, you just do what you’ve got to do. This is the biggest threat we’ve had here.”

At Cape Coral High School, which had been turned into a public shelter, nearly 5,000 people stood shoulder to shoulder as the storm passed, said Gordon “Booch” DeMarchi, a spokesman at the Lee County emergency operations center. Public shelters are often the last places of refuge to fill up during major storms. Many residents, it appeared, failed to heed official warnings leading up to the storm, DeMarchi said.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush estimated that damage from Charley could exceed $15 billion, and his brother, President Bush, declared the state a federal disaster area, a move that expedites the arrival of emergency assistance. In Lee County alone, property appraiser Ken Wilkinson said a preliminary review showed that 250,000 homes and businesses had been damaged. The repair bill, he said, probably would be about $2.9 billion.

Though the east coast of Florida seems to spar with hurricanes every summer and fall, the Gulf Coast rarely sees a direct hit. A storm this powerful hasn’t landed here since “Deadly Donna,” which killed 50 in 1960.

The Gulf Coast is also growing rapidly, and is immensely popular with retirees, among others. That means there are tens of thousands of new arrivals here -- 22,000 a year in the Fort Myers area alone -- who had never experienced a storm of this magnitude. Few windows in the area were boarded up; thousands shattered.

“There is a constant education program going on, but these people have no concept about the tragedy and the severity of hurricanes,” DeMarchi said. “We didn’t think we were going to be ground zero. A whole lot of people got the fear of God put in them today.”

Although many storms weaken rapidly after making landfall, Charley was not done after blowing through Charlotte Harbor. The hurricane continued on across the interior of Florida toward Orlando, where theme parks were shuttered and tourists were told not to leave their hotel rooms. About 6.5 million of the state’s 17 million residents were in the storm’s path.

By 11 p.m. EDT, Charley had passed over downtown Orlando and was heading out to sea near Daytona Beach. The storm sent sustained winds of 85 mph over a 20-mile radius, and gusts of more than 100 mph were reported in the area.

The Orlando International Airport was running on emergency power and trees were uprooted across the area. The storm had left numerous houses ablaze, but was so fierce that calls to the 911 center were put on hold while it passed, said Allen Moore, a spokesman at the Orange County emergency operations center.

“They just brought the fire stations off lock-down,” he said. “After midnight we should be able to get into the field and do some damage assessment.”

Among the millions of Florida residents in the path of the storm were about 700,000 elderly residents, officials said. For some, that made evacuation decisions even more difficult.

“Patients with dementia, if you move them a long way, the stress and trauma will kill people,” said Mickey Melton of the Punta Gorda Elderly Care Center, a facility on the east side of Charlotte Harbor.

In the Tampa region, residents who had earlier turned heavily populated areas into ghost towns emerged outside Friday night and began to breathe a little easier.

At the Pappas Riverside Restaurant in Tarpon Springs, northwest of Tampa, general manager Todd Browne was taking down the shutters and opening up with $2 hurricane drink specials, one that contained a booze-injected peach.

“We did fine,” Browne said.

Wilderness areas in southwest Florida took a beating from the storm, officials said. Biscayne National Park, Everglades National Park and Dry Tortugas National Park, a tiny cluster of islands west of Key West, were closed.

Trees were down in the Everglades and extensive and lasting flooding was expected there, officials said. In the Tortugas, Ft. Jefferson, a 19th century military installation and one of the national park system’s more unusual and inaccessible attractions, sustained heavy damage. The protective moat of the fort, which is a national monument, appears to have been breached, said Elaine Sevy, a National Park Service spokeswoman in Washington.

“The docks appear to be gone too,” Sevy said. “We’re just getting real sketchy details so far.”

Another storm, Bonnie, hit Florida on Thursday, landing in Apalachicola in the Panhandle. Though the tropical storm was weaker than Charley, it also cast off several tornadoes.

One of the tornadoes that spun off Bonnie killed three people in Rocky Point, N.C., said Kendra Gerlach, a spokeswoman for New Hanover Health Network in nearby Wilmington, N.C. The victims lived in a mobile home park and included an 18-month-old girl. More than 30 others were injured, about half of whom were still hospitalized late Friday, Gerlach said.

At least three deaths had been attributed to Charley by nightfall. In Central Florida, the wind appeared to have knocked over a large moving van, which landed on a car, injuring five people and killing a young girl, officials said. A second death also had been attributed to a weather-induced traffic accident. A man who stepped outside his house to smoke a cigarette died when a banyan tree fell on him in Fort Myers, authorities said.

The storm killed a farmer in Jamaica on Thursday.

In a reminder that hurricane season has just begun, two more tropical depressions formed in the Atlantic Ocean in recent days. One of them could become a hurricane as early as this morning.

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Storm prices

Hurricanes cause billions of dollars in damage in the U.S.

every year. Here is a look at those racking up the biggest

price tags.

Costliest hurricanes in U.S. history, in billions+

Bob ‘91: $1.5

Alicia ‘83: $2.0

Agnes ‘72: $2.1

Frederic ‘79: $2.3

Georges ‘98: $2.3

Opal ‘95: $3.0

Fran ‘96: $3.2

Floyd ‘99: $4.5

Hugo ‘89: $7.0

Andrew ‘92: $26.5

+ not adjusted for inflation

Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; AP

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Scale of strength

The Saffir-Simpson scale of a hurricane’s intensity is used to estimate potential property damage and coastal flooding. It is determined by wind speed, because the size of high tidal waves, or storm surge, depends on the slope of the continental shelf.

Category 1 (74-95 mph, 4-5 ft. surge)

Damage primarily to trees and unanchored mobile homes, shrubbery and trees

Category 2 (96-110 mph, 6-8 ft. surge)

Some damage to roofs, doors and windows.

Considerable damage to mobile homes and piers

Category 3 (111-130 mph, 9-12 ft. surge)

Some structural damage; large trees blown down; flooding near shoreline

and possibly inland; mobile homes destroyed

Category 4 (131-155 mph, 13-18 ft. surge)

Extensive damage to doors and windows; major coastal flooding damage; terrain may be flooded well inland. Last Category 4 storm to hit United States was Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

Category 5 (winds more than 155 mph, surge greater than 18 ft.)

Complete roof failure on many residences and industrial buildings; massive evacuation; major flood damage to lower floors near shoreline. Last Category 5 storm was Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Dahlburg reported from Punta Gorda, Fla., Gold from Houston. Times researchers Rennie Sloan in Atlanta and Lynn Marshall in Seattle contributed to this report.