Hurricane turns life into obstacle course

When the sun finally came up on The Morning After, when people peeked out their windows to survey Charley’s ruin, the reaction was largely: Where do we start?

Check on the neighbors? Clear the driveway? Search for food, gas, coffee?

Or just get a hotel room somewhere out of town until the power comes back on?

For Margaret and Russ Russell, who had a massive oak crushing their only car, blocking their front door and poking through the living-room ceiling of their downtown Orlando home, the answer was simple:

“We’ve got wine. We’ve got cheese. We’ve got fruit. And we have candles,” Russ, 57, said. “We called our insurance company last night before midnight, so we’re set.”

It felt like a slice of normalcy, a commodity in woefully short supply in the early post-Charley era.

Even if your car wasn’t crushed, even if your driveway was navigable, streets for miles in every direction were an obstacle course of felled trees and downed power lines.

Near the Russells’ place, in the quaint, older neighborhoods surrounding Lake Eola, the preferred modes of transportation were foot and mountain bike. George Anderson, 39, chose the latter. He, too, had an enormous oak in his front yard and across his roof. So while he pedaled off to check on his business, Anderson Fitness, his wife, Ngaire, 42, held her aching head and moaned, “I just want a cup of coffee.”

For caffeine addicts everywhere, the sentiment was the same, if perhaps expressed more desperately. So when word got out that the Lake Eola Starbucks was open, the stampede was on. At 7 a.m., the line snaked out the door and down the street.

“We stood in line for half an hour,” said 29-year-old Shelby Norwich, who’d spotted a stranger carrying a cup and demanded to know his source.

“You’d think they were giving away bottled water and batteries,” said her friend, 34-year-old Heather Pollak.

Long search for food

As it turned out, they were among the lucky ones. Clint Spurlin, his wife, Jessica, and their infant son, Clint Jr., spent so long searching for a place open for breakfast that it was lunchtime by the time they sat down at a Denny’s in Winter Park.

“I drove 25 miles looking for something open,” Spurlin said. The 35-year-old account executive, whose College Park home was without power, found everything closed near his home, and then tried an Altamonte Springs Cracker Barrel.

“It looked like a two-day wait,” he said.

They kept going.

At Denny’s, a felled Chinese elm near the entrance offered shade to the line of waiting patrons, which stretched out the front door.

Indeed, an “OPEN” sign became precious in the new day. At a Citgo Truck Stop on U.S. 27 south of Interstate 4 in Polk County, the word -- spray-painted across a piece of plywood that served as protection only hours earlier -- was a beacon to weather-weary motorists. Their cars circled the station, one of only a handful that were operating.

The same was true at the Saxon Boulevard Racetrac in Orange City, where waiting traffic backed up nearly to the I-4 exit. There, 44-year-old Tracy Verwey was headed to Deltona to check on her son after being unable to get through via phone.

“There was lots of traffic [and] waiting in line, and people were being very rude, cutting in front of us,” Verwey said. “I’m moving to Ohio soon, and with all that’s happened, it just makes me this much more sure about my decision to leave.”

Marlena and Rick Furman were somewhat more upbeat. The Long Island, N.Y., couple and their children -- ages 6, 9 and 12 -- were headed for a vacation in Fort Myers, but stopped in Savannah, Ga., Friday night to wait out the storm.

Marlena Furman, her husband angling for position at pump 18, said, “We’re looking at it like an adventure.”

Line forms for ice

The Morning After spawned other optimists as well, especially if you had something other people wanted. Like ice.

“Name’s Jimmy. Jimmy Kent. Middle name ‘Clark,’ ” joked the Florida Carbonic worker, passing out dry ice from a warehouse at the corner of Division and 18th Street in Orlando.

Kent was a good guy to know Saturday.

More than 100 people stood in line for up to two hours to buy a few bags from the morning’s semi-trailer delivery. They showed up in company vans and beat-up pick-ups and expensive SUVs. After a hurricane, the stores with the ice were like the DMV -- a great social equalizer. Everybody needed the same thing, from the same place.

Most brought plastic or Styrofoam ice chests for the 20- and 40-pound bags of dry ice. Others were smart enough to bring along beach umbrellas for the wait. They waited to the sound of a chorus of cell phones -- friends and family checking in, wondering if they’d gotten there early enough to nab some ice.

Yvette Charoo, 31, of Vista Lakes, brought her 11-year-old son, Jerimie, to do the toting. At noon, her two-hour-plus wait was paying off.

“We need two 30s and a 20,” she called out to Kent, smiling when her bags dropped into her ice chest. She has a freezer full of food to salvage. “But I’ve got weeks’ worth of canned goods,” she said. “We were ready.”

Prices don’t seem so bad

The Morning After also came with refocused perspective. The gas prices that outraged only a day earlier now seemed positively benign.

Maritza Gonzalez, 27, and her family had been driving on empty up and down Colonial Drive looking to fill up and find something to do that would entertain their two daughters.

“Who cares what you have to pay? You just have to fill up the tank,” the Orlando woman said as her husband pumped 93 octane into their Acura four-door sedan for $1.95 a gallon. “That doesn’t even matter at this point.”

At Lowe’s in Orange City, customers waited in long lines for gasoline-powered generators and chain saws, which were loaded into their arms off the back of a delivery truck. The shipment of 360 chainsaws was expected to be gone by today.

“I could cut with this for the next two days and still not be finished, “ said Tim Anderson, 45, who was clearing 10 downed pine trees from the yard of his Deltona home.

Respite at sunset

Things could be worse. The attorney general received 27 price-gouging complaints from Orange County alone.

The Union Park emergency shelter was without air conditioning and, as of Saturday evening, was running out of food. A boil-water advisory had been issued for Winter Park.

And water leaks forced Orlando’s 911 operators to evacuate to a facility in east Orange County. Officials were worried the water could short-circuit the system.

But as the sun set on the chi-chi Hue in Thornton Park, where the fashionable always seem to know how to party, a quirk of the local power grid offered an oasis of air-conditioning, cool drinks and hot cuisine.

That proved an irresistible combination for Sylvester Mack, 47, whose house, just a few blocks away, had been without power for nearly 24 hours -- and counting.

“My plan is to go out and enjoy it enough so I can go home and it won’t matter how hot it is,” he said.

Aline Mendelsohn, Harry Wessel, Roger Moore, Jim Abbott, Liz Boch, Vicki McClure, Melissa Harris and Errin Haines of the Sentinel staff contributed to this report. Kate Santich can be reached at ksantich@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5503.