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

When hope's all that's left

Neighborhood by neighborhood, people share food, seek sanctuary, pass the hours, rebuild -- salvage sanity.

LEE COUNTY

Roy Brown never intended to feed half the residents of Fort Myers Beach, but somehow that's exactly what happened.

On Thursday afternoon, more than 40 people jammed into the parking garage of the Beach Theater, a pink stucco building on the slim barrier island's main drag. They munched burgers from Brown's grill.

"Seeing all these people, it makes me a little choked up," said Brown, 43, who has lived on Fort Myers Beach for 14 years. "So many people lost so much."

While much of Lee County is back to normal, the barrier islands still are a shambles. Many evacuated residents returned to damaged homes.

Brown rode out Charley with his girlfriend, theater manager Karen Cook, 41, and 20 friends at the theater. Then he set up a charcoal grill in the theater's garage.

He drove along the beach, inviting others to an impromptu barbecue. People turned up in droves, most bringing the contents of their freezers to share. Brown cooks every day from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

"It gives people hope," said Dave Hill, 31. "And it's nice to have someplace where you can see all your neighbors."

And the theater remains open. Thursday night, it showed free movies to residents: Collateral, The Bourne Supremacy, The Princess Diaries 2 and The Manchurian Candidate.

On Pine Island, the next spit of land to the north, William Wicks and Totty Centa are living in the darkened sanctuary of St. John's Episcopal Church.

Wicks, 61, recently had quadruple bypass surgery. Centa, 75, had her gall bladder and pancreas removed. Neither could survive without air conditioning, which makes this shelter a godsend.

The days are long. They page through the Fine Cooking magazines Centa brought with her.

"We talk about Chinese food, Italian food, seafood," Wick said.

"Especially Dungeness crabs," added Centa with a dreamy smile.

At the roofless Punta Gorda home of Carl and Gladys Hildebrandt, a generator powers the refrigerator and microwave. It trips out if they plug in the stove. Carl heated up oatmeal for breakfast Thursday but had cold Spam the night before.

They sleep on the living room floor because it's cooler than in bed.

They have no running water. They put a bucket where their mailbox was, and the mailman returned Wednesday, filling it with pre-Charley bills.

They scoop water out of a neighbor's pool to flush their toilet. They wash in the spa in their lanai.

Friends bring bottled water and ice. Gladys sprays their garbage with bleach to douse bad smells. They drive to Venice to buy gas for the generator and their car.

Rain trickled through their shredded roof until Habitat for Humanity stretched a large blue tarp over the top of their home Wednesday.

The couple feels fortunate that they have a fixable house. Carl waits for an insurance adjuster. They have no clue when power or phone service will return.

Now Gladys wants to return to Pennsylvania after 17 years in Florida. But Carl won't go. They will rebuild.

"At least we can be in our home," says Gladys, 62, who works at a local oyster restaurant. "Other people don't have that."

The cargo was precious and gold in color, but it was slowly melting.

"These buildings are blown way beyond repair," said Andrew Taylor, an executive at Peace River Citrus Products in Arcadia. "We're in a race against time to pump that product out and get it to Bartow."

The product was 3.5-million gallons of frozen, concentrated orange juice stored in tanks and insulated by buildings 45 feet tall. Charley's winds grabbed the aluminum siding and peeled it like an orange, exposing the 20-degree concentrate to Florida's relentless summer heat. With no power for refrigeration, workers had to move $30-million of frozen concentrate before it soured.

Partial power came back Thursday, and crews salvaged a great deal. They transported some out but fear portions spoiled.

The toll on the state's agriculture is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. De Soto, one of Florida's top three citrus-producing counties, was hit hard.

As Taylor paced in his plant's parking lot last week, tanker trucks moved in and out salvaging the juice. A few miles away, hundreds who make a living off orange trees were feeling bruised.

On the outskirts of Arcadia, Galindo Robledo ate a store-bought Popsicle as he walked with two friends to bathe in the Peace River. The men survived Charley with only the jeans and T-shirts they were wearing.

Robledo and many neighbors could be without jobs this fall. He works on tomato farms now, but he and other workers planned to pick oranges this October. Now, the fist-sized green fruit blankets the ground in area groves. He doesn't know how he's going to find money to send back to his parents in Mexico.

Bruce Klein didn't wait for the winds to die before racing to his Friendship Foliage plant nursery south of Zolfo Springs, dodging debris as he drove.

He found tens of thousands of ornamental plants destroyed.

"Disaster," Klein, 39, said as he surveyed ruined plants Thursday. "I looked around and just got sick. It took a wind from hell to do all this damage."

Klein's nursery, open since 1986, will be closed for a year.

Hardee agriculture is devastated, particularly the 54,961 acres of citrus groves. The county is Florida's seventh largest citrus grower but also big in dairy, poultry and vegetables.

Sixty to 80 percent of the citrus crop was blown off trees. Thousands of citrus trees were uprooted. In Wauchula, hardly an orange can be found on a tree.

"This is worse than any freeze I've seen," said Jack Eason, 68, a grower with about 400 acres. "Any way you look at it, it's bad."

The migrant workers who tend crops already are back to work in places. But Israel Cortez, who owns six day care centers, turned away migrants trying to drop off children because his buildings are damaged.

A former migrant worker, Cortez, 47, says he will be closed at least a month.

"The migrants are hit very bad," Cortez said. "They don't like asking for help. ... Now they don't even have a place to send the kids when they work. They can't afford not to work."

Bruce and Joann Smith consider themselves lucky. They own a small Wauchula farm with cattle and poultry. Their barn is heavily damaged but their animals are unhurt.

"We thank the Lord," said Bruce, 54, who also drives an ice cream truck. "The chickens aren't laying any eggs. But everybody's fine."

Except for the donkey, Harley Davidson.

"He won't come up to me," Bruce said. "He thinks I done caused the hurricane. So he's staying mad."

Anthony Turk hated the cold so much he retired from the Sheboygan, Wisc., fire department as a 41-year-old lieutenant to move to Florida.

He embraced the climate here so completely he never installed air conditioning in his mobile home in Haines City and always kept a deep suntan.

Turk, 66, was confident he could handle even Florida's scariest weather. He was shooting video of Hurricane Charley just before he died of a heart attack.

"My dad was fearless," said his daughter, Lori Narez.

Though Polk's southern border is 50 miles north of Punta Gorda, thousands of homes are damaged, tons of citrus is ruined and tens of thousands were without power last week. Six of the state's 25 storm-related deaths were in Polk.

Narez flew in from her Maryland home after the storm and hasn't seen her father's video. She heard about it from a sheriff's detective investigating his death.

Turk's confidence turned to fear as he realized the storm was far more powerful than expected.

It tore off his screened-in porch. When rain started coming in through his roof, he grabbed a box of personal documents and took shelter in one of his vans, Narez said.

"He must have thought the whole place was going to go."

She and her sister, Tami Cordes, tried to call him the morning after the storm. At first they told each other he must have lost telephone service. Two police officers later came to Cordes' house in Wisconsin with the news of his death.

Though devastated, Cordes and Narez have laughed a lot in the last week. They talked about how their father collected and took apart vans, boats and motorcycles.

"He loved his stuff, all his toys," Narez said.

He was a big, strong man who preferred Shasta orange soda to beer. He refused to wear anything more formal than a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt, denim shorts and deck shoes.

"We found about 10 pairs lying around in the bottom of the closet," Narez said. "There must have been a big sale at Kmart."

Reuel Turnbull doesn't need water or food, air conditioning or telephone service. After several difficult days, the 76-year-old resident of Poinciana has those necessities.

What he needs is a roofer.

He and scores of neighbors have blanketed their homes in what has become a disaster flag of sorts: Smurf-blue plastic sheets. The tarps hide roofs without shingles, tar paper and, in some cases, plywood.

On his street alone, half the houses have roof damage. One street over, 30 of 40 homes rely on plastic to keep out the afternoon rains.

The roof over the gym and cafeteria at Poincianna High collapsed. When school reopens Monday, meals will be shipped in from other county high schools and served under a large tent.

Turnbull's neighborhood is typical in Poinciana, the hard-hit south Osceola community. But the 300-plus licensed roofers in the county have yet to visit this subdivision.

"They're busy getting commercial stuff fixed," said Jo Thacker, a county public information specialist. "We're at the point now where no one can get a roofer to come. It's everyone for themselves."

For Turnbull, that means waiting for his insurance carrier to assess the damage.

"He hasn't even set up an appointment to come see the house," Turnbull said.

Turnbull, his wife Laura, 81, and some visiting relatives rode out the storm in the dining room and a hallway.

"The house looked like it was shaking," Mrs. Turnbull said. Winds flung roof shingles by the hundreds into the Turnbulls' swimming pool. Water puddled in the home's light fixtures. The garage ceiling collapsed.

Turnbull shrugs. "We're not so bad compared to our neighbors."

The procession of hurricane victims begins at 6 a.m. They come past the building constructed upside down on purpose, past the fake volcano and past the place to play glow-in-the-dark golf.

Carrying soap and towels, they seek showers, not the entertainments of International Drive in Orlando. These head to the shrimp-colored YMCA Aquatic and Family Center, nearly hidden behind the Radisson Barcelo Hotel.

Eleven facilities in Orange County - six YMCAs, two gyms, a church, a homeless center and a health care center - offer free hot showers to hurricane victims.

It's a big help, since the county's 400-plus lift stations stopped moving sewage when the power went out. When the lift stations died, sewage backed up into people's bathtubs and sinks.

The YMCA's Nick Pierzchalski estimates about 50 victims use the facility's showers in the morning; another dozen or so come during the day.

"They usually come right before work," Pierzchalski said. "A lot of them talk about how hard they got hit and how nice it is to have a shower.

"It's weird," he says. "The only thing I lost was my cable."

There will be no hot dinners today, nor any place to shower or rest. At noon, when the church door shuts behind them, Dana and Darna Sterling will be homeless.

Shelters have closed. Those with nowhere to go were transferred to Tuskawilla United Methodist Church on Tuesday. It bought the Sterlings some time, but not enough of it.

"It ain't like we made Charley come," said Dana Sterling, 39. "You expect for your government to help you out when you're in a situation like this."

Before Charley, the Sterlings were in bliss. They moved here from Atlanta two months ago, lured by beaches and tourist attractions, and settled into a two-bedroom apartment.

On Aug. 7, a surprise arrived: a 3-pound, 11-ounce baby girl. Tainiah, still in the hospital, wasn't due until late September.

"She looks just like me," Dana Sterling said, grinning. "Like I had her. Head full (of hair)."

Then his smile faded. His baritone voice softened.

"I have nowhere to bring my daughter," he said. "Everything was looking good ... and now this."

The county is opening a resource center to help families like the Sterlings.

They will have to work fast. The hospital is releasing Tainiah Thursday and the Sterlings must take her home.

They just wish they knew where home was.

The ceiling gave way Thursday in Tanya James' apartment in the oceanside community of Edgewater.

A sheet of plastic over the damaged roof couldn't keep out the water. Now her living room is filled with beige foam insulation.

"I don't look at it as a bad thing," James said. "There are people who don't even have a home. I'm fortunate for this little hole.

"I've got somewhere else to go."

She started cleaning up the foam, first with a hand vacuum, then with a broom, then with soap, water and a wash towel. She scrubed the floors and refrigerator. She tried to return her apartment to its original state, but realized she couldn't. James and her 4-year-old daughter, Sariah Sciarrillo, won't return. Not to live.

She broke the news to the preschooler, whose magnetic ABCs dot the refrigerator she cleans so meticulously.

"She's handling it really good," James said. "As long as she's got snacks and toys, she's good."

So it's off to James' grandmother's house, her temporary shelter.

"Things happen for a reason," she said. "Maybe something good will come out of this."