FROSTPROOF, Fla. — A blue tarp still covers the tattered roof of the wood-frame home that was lashed by not one but three hurricanes last year. When 62-year-old Bobby Curtis, who has had two open-heart surgeries, feels up to it, he whittles away at the downed tree in the backyard, leaning on his cane as he wields a chain saw.
"We've got to get shingles," says his wife, Nell, 66, "we've got to get a roof and we've got to cut up the tree."
So are the Curtises, retirees from the local orange-processing plant, ready to face yet another hurricane season?
The Alabama-born woman laughs merrily. "Oh no," she says. "We ain't even through with last year's storms."
With the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season only two days away, tens of thousands of Floridians are still trying to cope with the consequences of 2004, when four hurricanes within six weeks -- Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne -- slammed into their state.
The hurricanes caused 123 deaths in Florida and more than $42 billion in property damage, much of which has not been fixed.
"You still fly over parts of Florida and see blue tarps, roofs that have not been repaired yet," said Craig Fugate, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. More than 10,000 families who lost their homes in the 2004 storms remain in temporary housing, he said.
"As we get ready for this hurricane season, they are in travel trailers, mobile homes they are going to have to evacuate" in the event of a hurricane, Fugate said in an interview in Tampa.
Perhaps no municipality in Florida was affected as broadly by the 2004 hurricanes as Frostproof, a pretty town of 3,000 nestled between lakes in central Florida's citrus belt, midway between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. The eye of Charley came within 10 miles, the outer wall of Frances' eye passed through town, and the center of Jeanne scored a direct hit.
No one was killed. But according to Stella C. Heath, who took over as acting city manager when the incumbent resigned between storms to take a job elsewhere, public and private property worth $43 million was destroyed or damaged.
"In a place of a little over 2 1/2 square miles," Heath said, "that's a lot of damage."
Nine months after Charley, the first and most powerful of the 2004 hurricanes, more than 1,000 homes in and around Frostproof still had plastic protecting their roofs from wind and rain, she said. One, a single-story house painted white and brown, belonged to the Curtises.
"We tried, we didn't get any help," said Nell Curtis. "Insurance didn't cover the roof. We have to take care of that ourselves." Contractors wanted at least $7,000 to remove the downed tree, "but we can't afford that," she said. So Bobby Curtis, who has three plastic valves in his heart, hacks away at the mass of branches and foliage when he feels well.
"He don't give up," his wife said. "He keeps plugging."
These days, Frostproof's public works department operates out of a storage shed in a citrus grove because its building imploded in Charley's 115-mph winds. The American Legion post has been condemned. The Police Department's building might also need to be condemned, Heath said, but it remains in use.
"They have nowhere else to work," she said.
Such resilience, she said, was typical of how people in Frostproof have dealt with the legacy of three hurricanes.
After Charley, the mayor resigned, blaming storm-induced stress for bringing on a heart attack. The police chief wanted to retire, but Heath persuaded him to stay until the 2004 hurricane season was over.
Paying for the cleanup, repairs and rebuilding had left the municipal coffers perilously low, said Damon Nicholson, 38, a paramedic who was elected mayor a month ago by the City Council. The town was counting on a check for about $400,000 from the federal government to replenish its emergency fund in time for any hurricanes this year, he said.
"A lot of people are not looking forward to this hurricane season, especially after the high number of predictions," Nicholson said.
The coming season could be another punishing one. Government researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have forecast seven to nine Atlantic hurricanes in 2005, with three to five likely to become major storms with winds above 110 mph. Two or three hurricanes were expected to hit somewhere in the United States, the meteorologists said.
The unrelenting tropical storms of last August and September did have one clear benefit. "We learned a lot of lessons," Gov. Jeb Bush said during a statewide conference on hurricanes this month in Tampa. "We are already beginning to adopt better practices as we prepare for this year."
To encourage Floridians to be ready, the governor last week approved the state's first sales-tax holiday on emergency supplies, including flashlights, generators and ice chests. The 12-day reprieve from state and local sales taxes begins Wednesday, the first day of the 2005 Atlantic storm season, which continues through November.
