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LANE DeGREGORYWith no roof, no power and no insurance for her farmhouse east of Wauchula, a widow doesn't know who to ask for help.
WAUCHULA - Her staircase is a waterfall. Rain is streaming into the second story, dousing beds and dressers, splashing down the stairs. The water is pooling at the bottom, forming a lake around a toppled bookcase.
"That came crashing down last night after the roof went," Zoe Richardson says Saturday afternoon, pointing at the wooden shelves. "I don't know if the wind blew it down or the rain washed it this way. But as you can see, that's the least of my worries."
Richardson, 66, is standing in ankle-deep water in her living room, surveying what's left of her house. Her granddaughter is upstairs, hauling dripping clothes from her closet. Her son is on his knees, drilling a hole in the floor to drain the water.
All the windows are still boarded up. The chimney is a pile of bricks by the kitchen door. The storage trailer is on its side. The barn blew away. And the upstairs of her house is one big skylight. Where the roof was last night, only shards are still clinging. Even the blue tarp her grandson so painstakingly tied on this morning is flapping in an afternoon squall.
"We thought, after the hurricane, the worst was over," Richardson says, wiping rain streaming down her forehead. "But this is much more rain than we had last night. This is making everything so much more impossible."
A recent widow who still runs her family's cattle business, Richardson has lived in her two-story farmhouse just east of Wauchula since 1962. She raised her kids here. The house was built in 1935, so it has survived plenty of storms, she figured.
Friday afternoon, when Hurricane Charley started churning inland, and sheriff's deputies evacuated the mobile home park across the street, Richardson never thought of leaving. She invited her grandkids over to wait out the storm. They played Scrabble until the house started shaking.
"When the barn blew away, I pulled them all behind the sofa and we buried ourselves with pillows," Richardson says. "It got so bad so fast, we really weren't thinking about saving anything but ourselves."
Wauchula is a tiny town east of Bradenton, whose main street crosses U.S. 17. About 6,000 people live there year-round, with migrant workers swelling the population each fall. Though rescue workers say no one in Wauchula got hurt during the hurricane, the storm felled power lines and oak trees, crushed mobile homes and sheared the faces off two-story concrete block buildings, leaving them looking like dollhouses, gaping open-faced at the roads.
Richardson thinks she'll be without power for at least a week, maybe more. She has a gas stove and warmed a can of chili for her grandkids Saturday afternoon. She poured it into paper cups, so she wouldn't have to wash dishes. Because the power is out, so is her well pump. She had filled her sinks and tub with water before the hurricane, "but the rain poured into all that," she said, "along with pieces of the roof and broken windows, so that didn't do us any good."
She has no insurance. She doesn't know who to ask for help. She has started calling around, asking neighbors who might be able to rebuild her roof. But they all have their houses and barns and yards to take care of.
All along her street, broken window panes are scattered like steppingstones along the soggy yards. Trees are covered with what looks like cotton candy - wads of pink insulation blown from mobile home walls. Fences are flattened. Metal awnings are wrapped around leaning power poles.
Just before the hurricane hit, Richardson's granddaughter, Kelly Cummings, walked the property, checking on the horse and dogs. The chicken had broken out of its coop and flown to safety. But an egg was wobbling in the straw. Cummings picked it up and saw a tiny beak poke out. She helped the chick crush the rest of the shell and pulled it into her hand.
"I don't know where that chicken got off to. It still hasn't come back," Cummings said, carrying another load of wet clothes to her car. When she returns, she's carrying the tiny chick. Its feathers are wet and matted from the rain. It's shaking in her hand. "I guess we get to keep it," she says. "And guess what I named it?"
Richardson doesn't guess.
"Charley."