| LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Tim Stewart didn’t worry much about Hurricane Charley when he first heard about it.
He’d moved the potted plants indoors so they wouldn’t get smashed against the house. He moved the lawn chairs onto the screened-in porch so they wouldn’t blow away and turned the patio table upside down and left it poolside.
After all, the storm wasn’t supposed to be that bad. It was churning toward Florida — everyone knew that — but it was headed farther north than Punta Gorda, a tiny area near where the Peace River flows into the Atlantic Ocean.
Almost as an afterthought Stewart ran by his office at Burnt Store Presbyterian Church at about 2 o’clock to unplug the computers and back up the main hard drive onto a floppy.
The sky was still sunny. As far as he was concerned, Tampa was at much greater risk than Punta Gorda. That’s what the newscasters were saying. Rain. Wind. He’d seen it all before.
Two hours later, indolently listening to the VIPER weather, Stewart heard that the hurricane was getting stronger, shifting from a Category 2 storm to a Category 4. It was “wobbling right,” the television voice said. A few minutes later, the change in the storm’s direction was described as sharp. And then, dramatic.
Within 40 minutes Stewart was hunkered down in the family room with his two pups, Bernie and Sunshine. Bernie was jittery, stuck like velcro to Stewart’s leg. Sunshine, true to her name, stayed calm.
Stewart’s wife, Karen, had gone north for a few days to help her mother down-size to a smaller home. She’d called earlier and they’d agreed Punta Gorda wasn’t at much risk.
They were wrong.
“It was like the gates of hell itself came right over the house,” Stewart said days later in a telephone interview, while a Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) representative was checking water damage inside the Stewarts’ house after the storm tore off the shingles.
“I wasn’t so much terrified, as, well, there was a feeling of utter helplessness. … It was furious-sounding. Some people say it sounded like a locomotive, but I don’t know what a locomotive sounds like. It was horrible. Fury. Evil. And then it intensified. Then it doubled in intensity,” he said.
He stayed away from the windows until one blew out in the bedroom. To stop the water from driving into the house, he sliced an inflatable raft and snapped it into place with a window screen. It didn’t exactly waterproof the room, but it did cut down on the blowing rain.
It was about then that water began pouring onto the bed, flowing through and around a ceiling light fixture. He grabbed a bucket but it was pretty much a lost cause.
The wind quieted as the eye of the storm settled over Punta Gorda. Stewart took a phone call from his son in Orlando, assuring him he was OK. And then the backside of the storm angled in, from exactly the opposite direction as the first wave.
By 5:30 the storm was over. But the aftereffects were only beginning.
Stewart ventured into a different world when he stepped outside. Hot power lines lay tangled in the road. Telephone poles were flattened on the asphalt like pickup sticks.
His brick house was pock-marked where shingles from the neighbor’s roof battered it. About 80 percent of his own roof was exposed down to the wood. No shingles. No tar paper. The screen around the swimming pool was blown out, but the metal frame was, amazingly, still in place. The pool’s heating unit was gone.
The yard was full of debris—branches, leaves, trash. Of the six trees that had stood in the yard, three were down and the other three were standing at a 45-degree angle. The chain-link fence was twisted toward the ground.
The power went out. The water went off. The phone service stayed spotty for days.
The Burnt Store Church suffered about the same fate — no power, no water, no telephone. A tree fell on the building. The wind blew the roof off the library. Trees were strewn every which way on the 26-acre campus that Stewart would like to use as a relief site for folks in his out-of-the-way neighborhood. One of these days.
About 1,200 people attend Burnt Store, but Stewart hasn’t heard from too many of them yet. “Many of the members live in manufactured homes, sort of pre-fab. And much of that housing was flattened. We’re still trying to find people,” he said. He’s opened up the church daily just in case folks come by.
About 80 showed up for worship Aug. 15 in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. The lack of electricity didn’t matter much. There was electricity of another kind.
“We’re OK,” said Karen Stewart, home from her trip. “There are people a lot worse off than we are. Some are better. But we’re OK.” Amazingly, she added, there are only four reported deaths in Charlotte County, something of a miracle, given the odds.
What would help now? She has a ready answer: Money and chocolate chip cookies — lots of both.
Tim has tarped the roof. The bedroom window was replaced. Punta Gorda got another 1.5 inches of rain a couple days after Charley rolled through, and more water poured into the bedroom. The pool is supplying water to bathe and flush the toilet. A friend who is not so fortunate has moved in for a few days.
The worst part may be that the heat index seems stuck at 105 degrees. And the air conditioning doesn’t work.
There’s a lot of standing in lines, Tim Stewart said.
The Jaycees passed out ice from a van. Red Baron gave away free pizzas in a nearby parking lot. Wal-Mart set up shop and distributed oil lamps, oil, toilet paper, batteries, diapers, paper towels, all free.
For now, Stewart said, he isn’t too worried that Burnt Store can’t respond to the needs. All around, individuals are helping neighbors in a variety of ways. He’s sure his parishioners are doing the same—those who can—from their living rooms, kitchens and porches.
“Right now,” he said, “everybody is digging out.”
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