Residents, 20,000 of whom must evacuate today, go on a spending spree, and utilities brace for the worst. A few old hands refuse to panic.
By JENNIFER LIBERTO and ROBERT KING
Published August 13, 2004
The last time the Weeki Wachee River rose and claimed Clara Wright's quaint little log cabin home, she took a ride on a refrigerator.
Not this time.
"I've been through this before, and I'm not staying," said Wright, 87, who had to be rescued from her fridge by boating neighbors during the no-name storm of March 1993.
She spent Thursday tying down her boat and shed, and taking valuables indoors before heading to Spring Hill.
As Hurricane Charley move toward the Tampa Bay area, coastal residents living in Aripeka, Hernando Beach, Weeki Wachee, Bayport and Pine Island started boarding up homes and tying down watercraft to prepare for the kind of flooding and wind damage this area hasn't seen in 11 years.
In Hernando County, about 20,000 people - including most residents who live west of U.S. 19 and mobile home dwellers countywide - will be forced to evacuate their homes beginning at 6 a.m. today. Roads such as Shoal Line Boulevard could be 5 feet under water from a storm surge forecast to reach 11 feet, according to the Hernando County Emergency Management Department.
All public schools and government buildings will be closed today.
Panic set upon some Hernando County residents, who flocked to stores to stock up Thursday.
All three Wal-Mart Supercenter parking lots spilled over with customers pushing grocery carts filled with canned goods, water and batteries. Only a few lonely bottles of Evian sat on long shelves at the Wal-Mart on U.S. 19.
Bottled water and batteries also sold quickly at the Publix at Mariner Commons. Store manager John Allan said extra shipments of storm supplies had been trucked in. And the store was planning to open at 6 a.m. today - two hours early - to make sure customers could get what they needed before the storm hits.
At home improvement stores, generators, plywood and duct tape flew off the shelves. An orange sign at Home Depot warned customers "Hurricanes are Here" while touting red plastic gas cans for $3.97, as well as a host of items - chain saws, wet-dry vacs, Igloo water coolers and ice chests - on what could have been dubbed "hurricane row."
Customers bought $729 generators as if they were $2 loaves of bread. Two hundred had been sold by Thursday afternoon, and another truckload was expected to roll in that night.
Marilyn Frontiero, 60, of Spring Hill bought a $700 generator to insure against potential power outages. She wanted to make sure she could use her microwave. A day earlier, her husband bought a dozen sheets of plywood and wood beams to board up windows.
"They tell you to get ready," said Frontiero, who moved from New Hampshire in 1997. "They've told us to get ready before, and nothing has happened. But I have a bad feeling about this one."
As people scrambled to gas up their cars, some stations ran out.
Where there was fuel, lines were long. Cars stretched onto Mariner Boulevard at the Hess Station at Mariner and Northcliffe Boulevard. For most of the afternoon, all 20 pumps at the Race Trac at Deltona and Cortez boulevards were occupied.
Joanna Conrad, 72, of Weeki Wachee was among those who waited in line for a $20 fillup. She lives alone with a cat named Bud and was talking of heading north.
"If I get scared, me and my cat will go," Conrad said.
Residents weren't the only ones preparing for a hit. Local utility companies refueled and checked backup generators that serve important facilities, such as hospitals, and prepared teams to recover downed power lines and poles.
"We see this as a very serious storm and potentially very damaging to our service area," said Aaron Perlut, Progress Energy spokesman. "This could be a multiday restoration effort."
Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative officials advised Hernando County residents to consider all fallen wires energized and to be careful with generators, spokesman Ernie Holzhauer said. Nine people in South Florida died from electrical surges caused by improperly connected generators during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
The Hernando County Public Works Department spent Thursday sandbagging pumping stations in Hernando Beach and vulnerable stations on the east side of the county.
Hernando County Utilities director Kay Adams advised residents to buy and set aside a supply of drinking water, and also to fill bathtubs and buckets for wash water and for flushing toilets.
"All the water and sewer facilities are battened down and ready," Adams said.
Hernando County's waterfront communities bustled Thursday like a Saturday afternoon in February, as business owners and residents brought as much as they could inside and tied down anything outside that could float away with a flood.
"We'll get 40 to 50 mph winds, and we can survive that. It's the high tide," said a nervous, pacing Sterling Marina owner, James Stering, between phone calls.
During one of those calls, he yelled to the caller: "I've got a marina and a roofing business, and I'm trying to save my a-- out here."
Some longtime waterfront residents waved off any fear, citing decades of hurricane experience.
Although Dr. Chan Springstead's three-story home on Eagle Nest Drive has born up to 37 inches of floodwater, the retired doctor was far more concerned about missing his Saturday flight out of Tampa. He plans to spend the next month traveling in Europe.
"I've been here since this whole hurricane thing started," Springstead said with a chuckle. "I'm just going to close up and pull the furniture in. I don't think there's anything downstairs that I can't replace."
A few residents, including the refrigerator-riding Ms. Wright, said they were actually looking forward to the hurricane to spice up the weekend.
"During the last storm when I was sitting up on the fridge, looking at the water rushing in like a tidal wave across the neighbor's yard, it was so exciting to watch," she said.
Staff writers Dan DeWitt and Duane Bourne contributed to this report.
