THE US: As soon as the wind died down, people wanted to go home. But it wasn't that simple. In outlying island locations, where homes are not connected to the county sewer, going home would have meant wading through knee-deep co-mingled water and raw sewage. Tom Savage reports from Florida
Undeveloped areas like Pine Island (where my son has a home) had so many power lines down that its only road was unsafe. The line men and clean-up teams were going in first, so that when residents were eventually allowed to return to their homes, disease and accident would not create new problems.
The devastation in areas like Punta Gorda, but also in less damaged cities like Fort Myers, was only the first problem. The ongoing threat was heat. Take the average August heat of a Florida day, add the standard humidity and you get a "heat effect" of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Turn off the power, and the absence of air-conditioning allows that heat effect to move swiftly from a discomfort to a danger, particularly to the very young, the very old and to pet animals.
Organisations like Convoy of Hope and the Seventh Day Adventist Succour team have arrived with food and water, but ice there is none, although morning radio commentators were yesterday promising that one plant near Daniel's Parkway would be releasing a couple of trucks full later in the day.
In the meantime, they warned people to drink all of the time; particularly plain bottled water, and to step into their shower or pool to lower body temperature.
The problems caused by tropical heat are behind the reluctance of police and other civic authorities to allow older people to leave air-conditioned shelters in favour of trailer homes without such air-conditioning. They have a real fear that heat stroke, contaminated water and makeshift cooking arrangements could add to the current death toll of 16.
What immediately strikes an Irish visitor to south Florida in the aftermath of hurricane Charley is how dependent America is on electricity. Powering the vital air-conditioning in a Floridian home with anything other than mains electricity is not possible. So when the power outages happen, as they frequently do, even in normal summers, suffering through the sweaty discomfort of the ensuing few hours can at least be mitigated by drinking lots of heavily iced beverages. When the ice runs out, and the power outage is likely to last several days, if not a full week, the real danger for the vulnerable becomes clear.
Journalists working on the story of the hurricane have found themselves personally involved to an untypical degree. More parents retire to Florida than to almost any other state in the US; and so today, reporters on radio programmes found themselves discussing clusters of communities isolated by flooding and damaged roads, knowing their parents in some cases were involved and in other cases their own residences were in the areas under discussion.
Local radio stations have provided a superb service, alerting people to easily overlooked dangers, such as the possibility of contamination of the tap water supply. Fridge and freezer owners have been urged to throw out everything - even bottles of mustard and mayonnaise, with warnings that such products are notoriously vulnerable to contamination when refrigeration fails.
What south Florida does not need is an outbreak of food poisoning to further compromise the health of elderly hurricane survivors. An additional hazard in this sub-tropical paradise is that rising flood waters tend to flush out of their covered habitats snakes, bobcats and other dangerous wild life, which normally cohabit the space fairly peacefully with humans; thus the final danger facing displaced residents returning to their homes after the hurricane is the presence of hungry, frightened animals.
The hurricane has obviously - if temporarily - changed the look of local neighbourhoods. Signage has been torn off premises, trees have been downed in their thousands and in some places entire buildings have been demolished.
What's not fully appreciated is that hurricane Charley has obviously - and permanently - changed the actual coastline. Beaches have been swept away, and in one case a single island named Upper Captiva, which was originally created by the earlier hurricane of 1909, has now been divided into two separate islands.