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Florida Power works to restore electricity, home and boat owners estimate damage and everyone deals with debris.
By WES ALLISON and MIKE BRASSFIELD
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 19, 2000
Hurricane Gordon may not have been much, but to Bendita Mitchell and her neighbors in Indian Rocks Beach, the storm was more than a minor inconvenience.
Mrs. Mitchell, 89, said she saw a windborne rock cleave a power line near her home Sunday afternoon. Her electricity was finally restored as night fell Monday.
"It's been rough. We can take a bath in our own perspiration, that's about it," Mrs. Mitchell said Monday afternoon. "All these dinners that you stash away, and I can't cook anything. We have no power to cook with. No electric lights, no fan, no air conditioning, no nothing. I didn't realize how much we depend on electricity."
Mrs. Mitchell's hardship was the exception, but she was far from alone. As Gordon spun up the East Coast on Monday as a messy thunderstorm, officials assessed the damage to waterfront homes, sea turtle nests -- even Cedar Key clam farms.
The storm left about 200,000 Florida Power Corp. customers without electricity at one time or another. About 2,000 still had no power Monday evening, a company spokeswoman said. Its crews were working into the night. Most of those who were still without power had lost the service line running to their homes.
In Citrus, 325 people went home after waiting out the storm in shelters. In Pinellas, officials counted 51 single-family homes, 32 mobile homes, 27 multifamily homes and 24 businesses that sustained minor damage.
In Hernando County, residents raked palm fronds from their lawns, counted their blessings and scratched their heads over a 250-foot barge that broke from moorings in Pinellas' John's Pass and drifted all the way to Hernando Beach, where it ran aground with 4 or 5 tons of rock on board.
In Cedar Key, where officials expected a direct hit Sunday only to get little more than a bad storm, clam farmers crossed their fingers and waited for a chance to check on their crops.
Though the storm brought only an inch of rain to the area -- not enough to kill the clams by dropping salinity levels -- the farmers worry that Gordon's 3- to 4-foot storm surges might have sent their bags of young feeding clams tumbling along the sea floor. Also, rough currents could have buried and suffocated the clams under a deluge of sand.
"Some folks have gone out today to look at the leases to see how they fared, but I don't think they'll truly know for the next few days," said Leslie Sturmer, the aquaculture extension agent in Cedar Key for the University of Florida. "They'll be concerned that the current or the wind might have pulled them up. . . . We might see a little bit of damage, but overall, I think we're okay."
The Florida Insurance Council Monday put early estimates of flooding and minor wind damage in the state at less than $10-million with average claims of less than $1,500.
"The majority we're seeing are roof leaks or situations where the roof fell on a house or a cage (fell) over a swimming pool," said State Farm spokesman Tom Hagerty. "We're not seeing severe losses."
Those homeowners who were hit by Gordon were doubly unlucky in terms of out-of-pocket expenses. That's because Gordon was upgraded to a hurricane, albeit briefly, as it skirted by off the coast of Tampa Bay.
During tropical storms, homeowners have to pay a standard deductible of $500 for damage. Once a system develops into a hurricane, however, insurers can charge a higher deductible for damage caused by wind even if the system is downgraded to a tropical storm before it makes landfall, as Gordon was.
For most insurers, a hurricane deductible is typically 2 percent of the value of an insured house valued at more than $100,000.
The storm wasn't bad news for everyone.
Rental firms scored some extra business from folks seeking power washers, chain saws and other gear for the cleanup.
"Pumps have been the one (most popular) thing, because people have been pumping sand out of pools, especially on the beach," said Jeff Tretter, a salesman at THG Equipment Sales and Rental in Clearwater.
St. Petersburg sanitation workers were busy collecting fallen tree limbs Tuesday, although many citizens collected the yard debris themselves and dropped it off at one of the city's six brush disposal sites.
In Hillsborough County, residents shouldn't expect extra pickups or exceptions to weekly yard trash limits, said county spokesman James Ransom.
If you have extra storm debris that can't wait, Ransom suggested taking it to one of Hillsborough's three disposal sites: 8001 W Linebaugh Ave., 13000 U.S. 41 just north of Big Bend Road, and 350 Falkenburg Road. Users must bring their current tax bill and photo identification.
Even as municipal crews and homeowners picked up fallen branches and ripped out ruined carpets, they were thankful.
"We really dodged a bullet as far as I'm concerned," said Mike Maximo, community services director in Madeira Beach, where 15 to 20 houses flooded. "We're thanking the Lord that it wasn't in 50 miles closer and that we didn't get substantial amounts of rain."
- Staff writers Saundra Amrhein, Jeff Harrington, Jennifer Farrell, Leonora LaPeter and Jim Ross contributed to this report.