Port Charlotte damage becomes clear

PORT CHARLOTTE — With Hurricane Charley beating on his door, Jim O’Connor huddled in his bathtub clutching a 2-year-old Scottish Terrier named Angus.

Outside, the storm’s 140 mph winds shredded his neighbor’s home and O’Connor, a Realtor in Port Charlotte, figured his would be blown away too. Crouched in the tub, O’Connor was terrified.

“I was just hoping for the best, but it was awful. The wind was just screaming,” he said this morning, hours after the storm blasted a handful of neighborhoods a few miles north of the city’s downtown. “The pressure dropped so much I could actually feel my ears pop.”

O’Connor, Angus and their home survived – though the storm did take the garage door, several windows and a shed in the back. Many in north Port Charlotte weren’t so lucky.

As daylight came Saturday, the damage to neighborhoods just off of U.S. Highway 41 became sickeningly clear. Dozens of homes and businesses had been blown apart. Others had their roofs ripped off like pop tops.

O’Connor’s neighbor’s newly remodeled home looked like it had been put through a blender. Though the four outside walls remained, the roof was gone, interior walls were crushed and furniture smashed apart. The woman who owned the home left before the storm arrived.

“They would have been killed if they’d been in there,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

The storm’s strength was impressive.

It blew U-Haul trailers around like they were cardboard boxes. O’Connor watched one lift up and sail into his yard. It drove mud through broken windows splattering his living room wall. Just down the street, it took a car-sized bit of sheet metal and dropped it onto power lines. A few blocks north, it dropped an airboat on top of someone’s garage.

Charely knocked down streetlights, trees and just about anything else it got near.

The canals running through the neighborhood, littered with furniture, roof beams, storage sheds and other debris, looked more like city dumps.

Tom Sutphin watched the storm rumble through from his home on Azalea Avenue. In fact, he videotaped Charley as it passed by.

“The whole house was shaking,” said Sutphin, who works for a hurricane window manufacturing company. “It was like a freight train coming through.”

Early Saturday, residents walked slowly through the neighborhood, pointing, at times crying. The area – dark since the storm passed through – remained without phone service or power.

Wires and electric lines hung across – or dangled threateningly over – streets making some impassable.The lack of phone service, meanwhile, turned a non-descript Sprint building on U.S. 41 into one of the busiest places in the neighborhood. Outside the building were two pay phones that residents used to call friends and family members to fill them in on the storm.

That’s where Sue Marcoline came to deliver the news about her neighborhood just off Edgewater Drive.

“It looks like everything’s gone,” she said. “The whole neighborhood. None of them are livable.”