Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies

Outages left many simmering

Sunday's severe storms put about 9,000 homes in the dark, causing discomfort for folks enduring a sweltering night.

TAMPA - David Smith slept with his dog on the linoleum floor to keep cool. Zenaida Abreu blew through a straw into her aquarium to manufacture oxygen so her fish wouldn't die. Francisco Rodriguez fanned his children with a piece of cardboard as they tried to sleep.

Scenes like these played out in thousands of households throughout Tampa Sunday night after fierce storms knocked out power. Tampa Electric estimated 9,000 homes lost electricity. By noon Monday, 1,000 homes still were without power, 18 hours after the storm hit.

With nighttime temperatures in the 80s, people couldn't sleep. And they couldn't eat because they couldn't turn on the stove. So they just fanned themselves with newspapers and waited.

"I thought I was back in Cuba," said Mara Alcalde, who finally dozed off at 5 a.m. drenched with sweat. "I never thought that here in the U.S. I would spend the night like that."

Alcade's next-door neighbors, the Rodriguezes, walked into their Grady Avenue home in northwest Tampa about 9 Sunday night to stifling heat and darkness.

"No candles, no matches, no flashlight," Rodriguez said. "We couldn't do anything."

Rodriguez opened up a front window to let in the weak glow of a streetlight. Then the family used their hands to find their way to the bathroom and to their bedrooms.

Rodriguez spent a good part of the night fanning his cranky children, ages 12, 10 and 5, with a collapsed cardboard box.

Tampa Electric crews were dispatched throughout the area to restore power in South Tampa, Plant City, Town 'N Country and Dade City.

"The wind and rain, tree limbs coming down over wires, lighting. It was a big storm," said Tampa Electric spokesman Ross Bannister.

Lunchtime came Monday and still there was no power on Grady Avenue. Then, about 3 p.m., the air conditioner in the Rodriguez home growled. The family cheered and flipped on a ceiling fan, for good measure. Rodriguez's wife, Lisette Romero, threw a pot of rice and corn and some pork on the stove. Dinner would be their first meal all day.

Two doors down, Roger Abreu and his wife were stuffed with McDonalds. They ate breakfast and lunch there.

The Abreus had two grandchildren over Sunday night for what was supposed to have been a sleepover. But it grew too hot so they had to drive them back to their mother's house in the heavy rain.

Every hour, Zenaida Abreu used a straw to blow bubbles in the aquarium to keep the couple's four fish alive.

Monday afternoon, the power was on and the fish were swimming happily.

Severe thunderstorms are possible at least through Wednesday as moisture from a tropical wave in the Gulf of Mexico collides with warm air along Florida's west coast.

The rains are welcome news to the area, which has seen below average rainfall during spring.

"The way it's playing out, June will end up somewhere around normal," said Barry Goldsmith, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Ruskin.

The average rainfall for June is about 51/2 inches.

- Dong-Phuong Nguyen can be reached at nguyen@sptimes.com or 813 226-3403.