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Tiny town struggles to cope

After Charley, families wait in the rain for hours at City Hall to get basic supplies, food and water.

BOWLING GREEN - They waited outside City Hall - 20 people, then 40. By 4 p.m. the line snaked down Main Street and turned the corner onto U.S. 17.

"One family at a time, please. Just take what you need," the woman from the Red Cross kept saying. "Be very honest, please. We're running very low, please. You can all come back tomorrow."

Mayor Randy Mink didn't know where it came from. But two days after Hurricane Charley smacked this tiny town, help had finally arrived in Bowling Green. "Most every property here is damaged. Lots of folks lost their trailers, their roofs," he said from under City Hall's mangled awning. A rural community just north of Wauchula, Bowling Green is home to about 3,000 people, most of them migrant workers. All morning Sunday, they'd been showing up at the police station, asking for ice, begging for water.

Just after 2 p.m., tractor trailers started showing up outside the one-room City Hall. The volunteers with the Red Cross and Salvation Army and who knows where else started unloading water and cat food, diapers and toothbrushes, graham crackers, tissues and lettuce.

"Two gallons to a family. Please, take only what you need," Red Cross volunteer Phyllis Haan said again and again. "We're in desperate need of baby items," she told another volunteer. "Don't give out more than a half-pack of diapers to each mom."

Pop-Tarts and tea candles, green tomatoes and chili peppers - by 5 p.m. more than 100 people had packed their blue plastic bags. A woman with long, dark hair and a soaked T-shirt had been waiting in the rain for her turn. When she finally got inside, she saw empty boxes and a few cans of cat food.

"You need water or ice?" Haan asked her.

"Yes, yes," the woman said. "Whatever you can give me, I need. I got four kids. Two are babies. I got nothing. I need everything."

The Red Cross worker gave her two gallons of water, a handful of tomatoes, then fished the last half-pack of diapers from under a table. The woman walked back out into the rain, took three bags of ice from the tractor-trailer, then turned and said thank you again.

"Now you come back tomorrow," Haan told her. "And bring that bag back. We'll have more in here tomorrow."