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Slow but Fierce, Vast Hurricane Batters Florida
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
New York Times
PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla., Sept. 4 - Shrieking winds and angry sheets of rain thrashed Florida's coast on Saturday as residents hunkered down in crowded shelters or in their barricaded homes to ride out the plodding, sprawling Hurricane Frances. Hurricane-force winds were reported by midday Saturday and by early evening the edge of the massive eye of the storm had reached landfall.
But forecasters were predicting that it would be midnight or later before the center of the eye of the storm would pass over Stuart, 40 miles north of Palm Beach, later than expected because the hurricane had stalled over the Bahamas for more than 24 hours and was moving at only 6 miles per hour as it approached Florida. Experts said the slow movement of the storm could give it a chance to strengthen as it hulked toward the warm waters off the seaboard. That would increase the threat of serious flooding and wind damage, they said.
The timing was ominous, forecasters said, because the peak of the storm would coincide with high tide, making storm surges of up to 10 feet and severe flooding likely at and north of landfall.
Though a ridge of high pressure had weakened Hurricane Frances into a Category 2 storm, with sustained winds of 105 m.p.h., it remained huge - twice the size of Hurricane Andrew, which devastated the Homestead area, about 30 miles south of Miami, in 1992 - and extremely dangerous, officials said.
Winds could increase to at least 110 m.p.h. as the storm moves closer to the coastline and onto land, they added.
"People need to be very cautious and very patient," Gov. Jeb Bush said in a morning news briefing in Tallahassee. "We know that this storm, in spite of fact that it has weakened in terms of hurricane-force winds, will do damage to a lot of places."
Hurricane Frances - the second powerful storm in three weeks - bore down on Florida after battering the Bahamas with winds and as much as 20 inches of rain in some places. Officials in the Bahamas said that the damage throughout most of the islands involved damaged roofs, uprooted trees, and downed power lines.
There was also extensive flooding, and on Friday one death had been reported, an 18-year-old man who was electrocuted as he tried to restart a power generator at his home in Nassau.
At midday Saturday, Al Dillette, a spokesman for Prime Minister Perry Christie, said a second death had been reported, in the western part of Grand Bahama, a beach and gambling resort east of Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Dillette said he did not have details on the death, but he said that several serious injuries were also reported. He said major flooding had been reported in and around Freeport, the main town on Grand Bahama, and on neighboring Abaco island. Grand Bahama is one of the most developed islands in the chain and government officials said they worried that damage there could be the most extensive.
Well before making landfall in Florida, Hurricane Frances made its presence known.
Officials in Osceola County, south of Orlando, reported tornado sightings on Saturday morning. And beaches along the Eastern Seaboard as far north as New Jersey were closed as early as Thursday because of dangerous, churning surf.
Parts of Palm Beach County were recording gusts of 90 m.p.h. by midmorning Saturday, and a band of powerful squall lines pushed through in the midafternoon, with hammering rain that reduced visibility to zero. At least 459,000 homes and businesses were without power, according to Florida Power and Light. Because of the storm's girth, hurricane-force winds were expected to extend up to 105 miles outward from the eye.
One region nervous about flooding was the area south of Lake Okeechobee, one of the nation's largest lakes, which provides water to the Everglades and infamously overflowed after a 1928 hurricane, causing hundreds of deaths. Forecasters said that if winds moved across the lake in a southerly direction during the storm, they would push water to the south and threaten a dike built after the 1928 catastrophe.
In Fort Pierce, north of Stuart, a row of expensive homes along the Intracoastal Waterway were shuttered or boarded up and abandoned. Jim Hicks's white Neo-Georgian home was the exception, and Mr. Hicks said he was nervous as he opened his front door a crack and peered out at the white-capped water and palm-frond-cluttered street.
"I couldn't get anybody to put the plywood on," said Mr. Hicks, who said he moved to Fort Pierce from Detroit in December. "I'll wear my motorcycle helmet if it gets to that."
To the north, in Vero Beach, Wayne Watkins walked along an abandoned U.S. 1 holding his mixed poodle, Petey. "He likes his morning walk," Mr. Watkins said as the wind practically buckled his knees. "So he got it. "
Mr. Watkins added: "I was in Nam in 68, 69, so this is cake city."
Though shelters were busy, many were not full by midafternoon, suggesting that many coastal residents had fled the area or found refuge with friends and relatives. Six of Palm Beach County's nearly two dozen shelters were full by 10 a.m., an official there said. One of them, William Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens, was filled with 1,200 people who spent the night 5 to 15 in a classroom with desks piled off to the side.
"We are starting to go buggy," said Mildred Mauney, 81, who with her husband Carl, 83, evacuated from her mobile home in Palm Beach Gardens on Thursday. "Just getting on one another's nerves."
Further up the coast in Titusville, near Cape Canaveral, some residents took advantage of the delay in the arrival of the storm to go fishing in the wind-whipped Indian River. Gina Denny and her fiancé, Rick Wrubel, both of the nearby town of Mims, were fishing as the moment when they expected to be getting married. The site they originally selected, on Captiva Island, was devastated by Hurricane Charley three weeks ago, and though they chose a new venue in St. Augustine, their relatives scattered before the arrival of Hurricane Frances.
"I'm walking around with the wedding rings in my pockets,'' Ms. Denny said. Asked what she would do now, she smiled and said, "I have no clue. It's been one thing after another.''
A total of 325 shelters were open in Florida, housing more than 70,000 people as of Saturday morning, according to the states emergency operations center in Tallahassee. About two dozen shelters in Georgia and South Carolina were also accepting evacuees from Florida. The Red Cross opened a shelter in Kingsland, Ga., to accommodate some of the many Floridians who fled north in advance of the storm. Others were reported to have spent the night in their cars at rest stops in Georgia.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had 4,500 workers prepared to help with recovery efforts, three times the number that it dispatched to Florida after Hurricane Charley. An additional 1,500 of the agency's workers planned to continue working with victims of Hurricane Charley as soon as the latest storm passed. Hurricane Charley pounded parts of the state on Aug. 13, leaving at least $7 billion in damages and causing 27 deaths.
Governor Bush sought to reassure victims of Hurricane Charley that they would not be forgotten in the wake of Hurricane Frances.
We are not going to divert one penny or one ounce of energy from people who are still recovering from the storm that devastated them just three weeks ago, he said, adding that tropical-force wind and torrential rains would probably affect areas that were already battered by Hurricane Charley.
Michael Brown, the director of FEMA, appeared with Gov. Bush at the morning briefing. Mr. Brown said the agency was prepared to deliver a million meals a day to Florida residents after the storm, as well as several hundred truckloads of water and ice.
The American Red Cross said it would mount one of its largest relief operations ever. According to the organizations Web site, 82 shelters in 23 counties were already in operation, providing refuge for more than 21,000 people. And Red Cross officials planned to open more shelters.
Seventeen hospitals along the coast and in the states central region had evacuated or were in the process of evacuating, and hotels were booked solid in at least 15 counties.
Though the storms wobbling at sea made its exact path unknowable, it was expected to move northwesterly across the state, becoming a tropical storm before arriving north of Tampa and weakening to a tropical depression by the time it moved over the Panhandle on Monday.
If the storm parked itself over the state long enough for two cycles of high tide, that could mean two storm surges of 5 to 10 feet, forecasters said. Tornadoes also remained a possibility, as did flooding of up to 20 inches in many areas, especially near the coast.
By 11 a.m., wind gusts were so high in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties, with the storm's western eye wall approaching the coast, that radio newscasters were urging people to retreat to safe rooms in their homes for the rest of the day.
As the day wore on, officials pleaded with the antsy masses in shelters to stay patient and stay put, a frustrating exercise especially during brief periods when the winds lulled.
Most neighborhoods of Fort Pierce, which was expected to take an almost direct hit when the storm arrived, were empty and silent, with trees and other debris strewn across streets, signs blown over and power lines down, though in some poorer neighborhoods, people could be glimpsed opening doors and taking in the scene. Mayme Davis, whose daughter and two-week-old granddaughter were staying with her in a modest concrete-block house near downtown Fort Pierce, said she was worried about the mossy live oak branches overhanging her roof.
"We asked the landlords to cut the trees but they said no," Ms. Davis, who had not boarded up her windows, said. "They're pretty, but they're old and they're going to come down."
In a wealthier neighborhood by the Indian River, Carson McCurdy was leaving his dock after trying to better secure his boat. "We need this," he said, adding that the expected storm surge could have a cleansing effect on the waterway. "It's a renewal."
Last modified: September 04. 2004 12:00AM
