Hurricanes Charley & Francis

More hurricanes.

The central gulf coast of Florida was also hit by a couple of hurricanes this year.

Our friends, Terry and Shad, on Pine Island were spared a great amount of damage but still lost skirting and screening.

Many homes on the north end of Pine island (and Punta Gorda and Captiva Islands) were damaged beyond repair, tilting, tipped, or had their roofing pulled off allowing water to run inside.

Lots of Federal Emergancy Management Agency (FEMA)-provided blue-tarped roofs keeping the rain out of houses until the roofers can do their job.

These tarps have a "life" of about 6 months. It's been 5 months since the hurricane and there is still a tremendous number of homes awaiting new roofs. We talked to a person who said that one roofer has 8,000 homes in backlog!

This is a boat sling which tipped while carrying a boat. Maybe trying to get the boat safe before the hurricane hit?

Along our travels we examine ancient Indian mounds. We wonder how this five-story mound of hurricane debris will be regarded a thousand years from now.

It's full of sofas, stoves, TV's, wood, roofing, and lots of blue tarps. Can't burn it, and it won't decompose very fast. In this area, it seemed as if 7 out of 10 vehicles was a loaded dump truck.

We marveled at the 2 frond palms which had almost all their fronds ripped from the tree and the pine (?) shown here that was highly susceptible to having all it's branches stripped.

And these light poles are indicative of many power poles and billboard supports which have a lean to them after the heavy winds and rains of the hurricanes.

These are pictures of the shoreline of North Captiva Island which after the hurricane has become North and Northest Captiva because a channel was cut through the island.

The shoreline has bare trees where almost all the branches and greenery were stripped. We saw a lot of that in the heavy wind areas. Terry told us that these areas used to have lush green foliage down to the ground.