Just give some thought to John and his wife who recently visited Australia as they are/were in the eye of the storm/hurrican living in the pan handle of Florida. I hope that his non appearance on this board means that they have moved out of harms way for a few days! Hope to hear that things are OK with you both John.

Liz

I believe that John and Brenda were not in the path of the hurricane. Charley went up through the middle up the state of Florida after coming ahore at Fort Meyers. Perhaps they've decided to holiday somewhere.

lizF,

If John and Brenda are living in Miami, they should be OK. Charley, probably accurately named after my old Dad, hit the east coast of Florida well north of Miami at Daytona Beach.

The panhandle, I believe is that part of Florida which runs west across the top of the Gulf of Mexico towards Alabama and Mississsippi.

If they live in Miami, they may still be recovering from Hurricane Andrew which decimated that area esp. near Homestead.

So unless they were vacationing near Port Charlotte, they should be OK.

AndrewDavid

They live in Fort/Port Lauderdale ( sorry about the spelling) which I know is north of Miami and which, as you so rightly point out, is south of all the action. But having lived through numerous cyclones I know how much the press can get wrong most of the time.
Also, silly me, they would of course be living in the middle of the pan - or at least around the rim of the pan, and not the handle, more like where you would get the fat splatterings when frying eggs! Thanks for putting me on the right track there.

Liz, I know what you mean about press getting cyclone damage wrong - once when visiting in Sydney I saw a TV report on a cyclone in North Qld - the footage used was of a cyclone in Fiji. Just had an email from a guests with some very graphic pictures of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Charley - she and her husband were visiting her parents on Anna Maria Island which I think is in Tampa Bay when they were evacuated - they drove to a Holiday Inn in somewhere called Winter Haven and the hurricane turned around and hit the motel. Devastation - she said Polk County is a mess and the town of Arcadia nearly wiped off the map.

It's been about 4 years since Cairns area has been hit and the last one was a Category 3 - in the meantime there's been a lot of beachside development from retiring babyboomers from "down south" - hate to think what'll happen to these places with a cyclone combined with a tidal surge.

I just got my trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas of the USA and trust that the hurrican went right where the bacon would be and left the outer edges alone - nasty little blighters though. Still I would like to hear from J and B so that I just know that all is OK - perhaps there is power outages all over.
Pat you are so right about the influx of people up here and what will happen in the future. I can just see what will happen around my area if we return to weather that we used to have up to the 70's with 4 or 5 cyclones per year, king tides and monsoon rains. I remember when most of the Sunshine Coasts and the Gold Coasts used to be lakes after surges and I cannot see why they won't again. But then I am not an Engineer same as I can't work out which end of a pot is what I guess.

Thanks for the kind thoughts Liz! Brenda and I are safe and sound. We live on the extreme western edge of the Ft. Lauderdale area - about 100 miles/160 km "as the crow flies" from where the storm came through. Some dead trees blew over here along with the occasional garbage can blowing down the street but we're lucky considering what the people to our west are going through.

The news reports this morning say 16 dead, 200+ still missing, several thousand homeless and 1.1 million without power. We have close friends in Arcadia, which received a direct hit. We spoke on the phone with them as the eye was passing over. Shortly afterwards, they lost their out building, boat and a portion of their roof. However, they were not injured and still have a home that is safe to live in.

The region that was hit has a large percentage of elderly and retired folks. Many of them lived in elaborate mobile home parks. There were 31 parks in Charlotte county, some of them with over 1000 mobile homes. All 31 parks were decimated. Many of the missing are believed to be elderly that may be buried in the rubble.

If there's any good news to come out of this, it's that the systems necessary to get help to the people that need it are in place and working properly. Hurricane Andrew in 1992, taught us some good lessons about how to deal with catastrophes like this. Extra police & the National Guard are in place to keep order, food & water supplies are already there and utility crews from all over the southeast US are on the way to restore power.

It's going to take many months for these people to get their lives back to normal. Thousands of people have lost absolutely everything. If any of you reading this can donate to the Disaster Fund of the American Red Cross (https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.asp) or a charity of your choice, I'm sure it would be appreciated.

John in Miami