On this day at about this very time I was experiencing the full wrath of God!!! Hurricane Charley was making landfall on the west coast of Florida near a place called Charlotte Harbor... It was a Category 4 hurricane which was intensifying rapidly as it approached the shoreline... Josh Johnson, John Walker, and myself were huddled inside a parking deck connected to a retirement home less than one mile from the water... The cement was shacking violently as 150mph sustained winds continued to pummel our shelter... Across the street at a nearby hospital a wind gust of 180mph was recorded... I have never seen anything like it in my entire life! As fast as the wind ramped up it decreased ten times as fast!!! In about 60-90 seconds the winds decreased from 150mph to almost a dead calm as the 6 nautical mile eye of Charley began to pass right over us... This is by far the most amazing meteorological event my eyes have ever seen!!!
As we ventured out of our "safety zone" the air above us seemed to be falling right on top of our heads.... We walked down the street with the sun starting to shine and our ears beginning to pop... The eye formed a stadium effect and I swear it was like sitting in the middle of the Rose Bowl... The damage was already horrible as the three of us began to get lost in the moment... All of sudden I saw Josh started to point down the street as you could see the back side of the eye wall coming right at us... You could see debris starting to get picked back up in the air as the winds increased rapidly! We RAN back to our shelter and by the time we got back the wind was blowing near full intensity! The winds ramped back up to 150mph + and to be honestly the back side seemed worse than the front... Everything from trees to pieces of houses to even bricks were flying right in front of us.... We even saw a port a pottie flying down the road until it hit a tree and exploded... John saw a stop sigh slice right through a tree like it was a knife going through butter... To be honest, words cannot describe what the three of us saw!
One of the most amazing things with Charley was how fast it hit... At about 3pm we saw tropical storm force winds. At about 4:30 the eye came directly over us. And at about 6pm it was basically over! Charley was moving at about 20 knots which was fast enough for us to see an eerie sunset as the back side of the hurricane continued to move towards Orlando, which by the way had well over 100mph winds... I'll save the specifics of this storm for another day but I wanted to at least post something about this extremely powerful hurricane! There were so many other things going on that I feel like I could write a 500 page book about that one day alone... Again I'll touch on a lot these interesting side stories another day! When it was all said and done, Charley went down as the second costliest US hurricane for its time at about 15 billion dollars... Charley also went down as the strongest hurricane to hit the US since Category-5 Andrew on August 24th 1992... As bad as it was for the people of Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda can you imagine how bad it would have been if it would have hit Tampa??? 70 more miles north and I feel the dollar damages would have rivaled Hurricane Katrina...
Check out Mike Theiss Video in Charlotte Harbor about 1 mile from our location: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvPdQPnSstY
*All Images are copyright of Greg Nordstrom*
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