PUNTA GORDA - With a fearsome howl, Hurricane Charley slammed ashore at the mouth of Charlotte Harbor on Friday and cut a swath of destruction through Southwest and Central Florida, demolishing buildings, snapping palm trees and tossing airplanes around like toys.
The Category 4 storm pounded Lee and Charlotte counties with winds of more than 145 mph. Then it pushed inland, wreaking still more havoc.
"It was flat rocking and rolling," said R.W. "Bill" Caldwell III, a former Gulfport resident who rode out the storm on the Lee County island community of Boca Grande. "It was absolutely ferocious."
Hardest hit was idyllic Captiva Island, where 160 homes were destroyed, according to a preliminary survey by Lee County officials.
Two fatalities were reported, both from traffic accidents, but emergency officials were still trying to assess whether more people were killed or injured. Gov. Jeb Bush estimated the property damage would exceed $15-billion, but the state's chief financial officer, Tom Gallagher, urged caution.
"Anyone who gives you a number is making it up," Gallagher said.
About two hours after Charley's 3:45 p.m. landfall near Captiva, President Bush declared a major disaster in Florida, making federal aid available to Charlotte, Lee, Manatee and Sarasota counties.
The damage could have been far worse. Forecasters feared the storm surge would hit a nightmarish 15 feet, swamping Lee and Collier's heavily populated coastal areas.
The surge "is going to be the main killer," said Max Mayfield, director of the hurricane center in Miami, before Charley hit. "This is the nightmare scenario that we've been talking about for years."
But the highest surge reported in Charlotte Harbor was no more than 7 feet, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Ernie Jillson. State meteorologist Ben Nelson said it reached 13 feet in some areas.
Reporters on the scene, however, found little evidence of a storm surge on the mainland.
The storm found few people home along the state's low-lying coastal areas. About 1.9-million people had been advised to leave, resulting in the largest evacuation since Hurricane Floyd threatened the Atlantic coast in 1999.
About 1-million people in the Tampa Bay area were told to leave their homes. Some people drove east toward Lakeland and Orlando, only to find themselves in the path of the storm.
In landlocked DeSoto County, part of a civic center in Arcadia being used as a shelter for 1,400 people was badly damaged. When the evacuees tried to cross the street to shelter at a high school, a wind gust of 104 mph knocked 14 of them down and injured them.
The storm left hundreds of thousands of people without power throughout the state.
"We must remember this will be a dark night for many people," state emergency operations director Craig Fugate said. "Help is coming. Hang on."
As Charley's initial targets, Charlotte and Lee caught the worst of it. The storm smashed hundreds of homes and businesses, tipped over a row of recreational vehicles and knocked out power at three hospitals.
Charlotte County was particularly unprepared. Its emergency operations center, built in 1995, was rated only for 110-mph winds. When Charlotte County Sheriff William Cameron learned that Charley had surpassed that limit, he moved more than 60 deputies, emergency personnel and reporters to a stronger building at the county airport.
But Cameron himself didn't leave until Charley ripped the roof off. Neither he nor the six deputies with him were injured.
Charley was quite a vandal, tossing a tree into Punta Gorda's historic City Hall, peeling part of the roof off Cape Coral Hospital and blowing the doors off of a new state veteran's nursing home in Port Charlotte. It caused extensive damage to four fire stations. After Highlands Regional Hospital in Sebring lost power, hospital officials said 55 patients would need to be moved if electricity could not be restored.
As the storm hit, all three hospitals in Charlotte County lost power. State officials called for 200 ambulances to evacuate patients to other hospitals across South Florida.
Jim Singer, 62, of Punta Gorda, had been watching the televised storm warnings for days and was convinced Charley was aiming at Tampa Bay. That's why he didn't evacuate his home, built in 1914.
Then Charley changed course and hit his neighborhood dead on. All around him, newer homes were blasted apart. A mobile home park and a motorcycle club next door were flattened. He lost part of his roof, but that's all.
"The main thing is, we didn't lose our lives," Singer said.
Why did the northbound Hurricane Charley jog slightly to the right, making landfall in Charlotte Harbor instead of Tampa Bay? For the same reason Tropical Storm Bonnie petered out as it neared the Panhandle earlier this week: it bumped up against a low-pressure cold front hovering over the northern Gulf of Mexico.
In the upper atmosphere the cold front, known as a trough, proved stronger than forecasters had anticipated, meteorologist Nelson said. As Hurricane Charley pushed north it bumped into the trough and turned.
"Sometimes there are just little wobbles or variations in the track movements," said National Hurricane Center meteorologist Michael Tichacek. "It's only a few tenths of a degree of movement. If it happened out over the water you wouldn't notice it, but over land it makes the difference between whether it hits your house or my house."
More troubling to Charlotte County officials was the fact that in a matter of hours Friday, Charley grew from a comparatively mild Category 2 hurricane to a far more powerful Category 4. Forecasters thought it might grow to a Category 3 at most.
"This magnitude storm was never predicted," grumbled Charlotte's emergency management director, Wayne Sallade. "(Forecasters) told us for years they don't forecast hurricane intensity well and unfortunately, we know that now."
Veteran National Weather Service forecasters were clearly surprised by Charley's power. As the meteorologists in the service's Ruskin office watched the storm's image on their radar screens grow to a Category 4, their jaws dropped.
"Dude," one said, "that is a monster."
Charley's path of destruction stirred memories of Hurricane Donna, which hit Fort Myers in 1960 and killed 50 people as it tore through the interior of Florida through Daytona Beach and then up the east coast up to New England.
Busch Gardens in Tampa closed, as did Orlando theme parks Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando and SeaWorld.
Before the storm slammed ashore, James Morgan, 66, and his wife Pat, 62, evacuated their Punta Gorda home to hole up in an aluminum hangar at the Charlotte County airport, where they keep a small plane. Soon the sky turned milky white and the building began to vibrate. Then it started peeling apart, and the couple were pelted with flying debris - screwdrivers, toolboxes, stray airplane parts.
They wrapped themselves in carpet and hunkered down side by side in a pair of chairs in a corner. As soon as the storm let up a bit they jumped into their battered Cadillac and drove pell-mell to the airport's biggest building, which was doubling as the county's emergency operations center.
"If you want to meet your Maker ..." Morgan said, then paused. "Well, I'm not tight with the man, but I'm closer now than I've ever been."
Don Paterson of Punta Gorda rode out the hurricane in his mobile home. It began to rock, a flying microwave oven hit him in the head, and then the refrigerator fell on him. He spent the rest of the storm hiding behind a lawn mower. His home was demolished.
"Happy Friday the 13th," he sniffed.
As the gulf churned like water in a washing machine, the surf began to climb over seawalls and onto the streets at Fort Myers Beach.
"We're going under," said Lucy Hunter, the hotel operator at the Pink Shell Beach Resort and Spa on Fort Myers Beach, where six employees took shelter in the hotel's center. "When the ocean decides to meet my bay, that's a lot of water. It's already in my pool."
After the storm charged ashore it plowed right up State Road 17 toward the farming community of Arcadia. Rebecca Williams, a clerk at the Best Western Inn, watched in terror as the wind ripped the siding off the building.
"It's crazy," Williams said. "I've been rushing around, trying to make sure all of our guests are okay, but it's been pretty scary. ... We had a tree growing in front of the hotel that had been there for 60 years. Now it's gone. There's not even a shred of it left."
Retired steelworker James Reagan, 80, lived in a mobile home on about 7 acres of land at the outskirts of Arcadia. He and his Chihuahua, Cheetah, evacuated to Okeechobee on Thursday, and then tried to return home late Friday.
But as Reagan drove through a devastated Arcadia while holding his dog in his arms, he said, "Lord, Lord, I started crying up there in Arcadia. I knew I didn't have nothing left." Sure enough, when he pulled into his driveway, he found just rubble where his home used to be.
Reagan, a widower, borrowed a reporter's cell phone to call his daughter in Indiana. "This is your dad," he told her as a dusky pink sunset faded to night. "I'm still living. I got nothing."
At the bridge leading across to the affluent island community of Sanibel, near Charley's first landfall, a construction trailer had been blown in front of the toll booth. The toll booth itself leaned shakily sideways.
Scores of anxious homeowners filled the two-lane road, trying to get home. But as darkness fell, authorities turned them all back, saying deputies were still surveying the damage.
"It could have been worse," said Lee County Cpl. Roman Serrano, as he waved drivers away. Then he added: "But it was bad enough. Somebody's hot tub is in the middle of the road over there."
Times staff writers Joni James, Lucy Morgan, Alisa Ulferts, Monique Fields, Jay Cridlin, Carrie Johnson, Tom Zucco, Wes Allison and Christopher Goffard contributed to this report, which includes information from the Associated Press.
