FEAR

[Cookiely]

Sep 25, 2005

For Some, Gleam Off Sunshine State
By LINDSAY PETERSON
lpeterson@tampatrib.com



TAMPA - One clear thought struck Jessica Sager as she sat in her living room, watching the despairing crowds in New Orleans.
"I saw those people with no water, thirsty, hot, begging for help," she says, "and I thought, 'That could be us.' I saw myself and my kids in that place."
And it hit her.
She wanted out.
Born and raised in Pinellas County, with the home her father left her 20 years ago, the 36-year-old never worried about the weather. Even after fleeing three times during last year's punishing storm season, she felt safe when she got back home.
No more, she said.
Suddenly, the idea that we are in a long period of ferocious hurricanes hangs over her like an anvil on a thread. Any day, she now thinks, she could lose her home, her life, her security. So she's looking west, to New Mexico, "where the weather is comparable, but the threat level is not," she said.
She is not alone with her doubts about Florida.
Marilyn Whetzel is eyeing Arkansas. B.K. Stevens, Tennessee. Darlene Finnell, New York.
"They keep saying it's a trend, and I'm starting to feel it's time to get outta Dodge," said Finnell, who was born in Pinellas County and lives in Tampa.
She is one of more than 60 people who responded to a TBO.com question about whether the hurricanes were driving people out of Florida. More than three-fourths of the people in this far from scientific survey said they were thinking of leaving; some were already making plans.
This second hurricane-torn summer has everyone's attention, says Sandra Schneider, a University of South Florida psychology professor. She specializes in how people make decisions in the face of risk. "No doubt people are more concerned and taking the warnings more seriously," she said. "But everyone reacts differently. Everyone has a different level of tolerance for this kind of uncertainty."
Some people run, some hunker, some just close their eyes.
A lot of people are talking about running. But Schneider questions who will actually go once the threat has passed.
It's a familiar story. It even has a name: "reference dependence."
People refer to their most recent experiences to make major decisions. As experiences recede into the past, so does the resolve to make a change.
People may have said they wanted to leave after last year's hurricane season, but the numbers say most of them stayed, said Chris McCarty of the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research. McCarty and bureau director Stan Smith led a survey this spring of nearly 12,000 people in the areas affected by hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne.
"There's no evidence that large numbers of people are moving away," McCarty said. Some have, but others are moving in to take their place.
"After a while the anxiety wears off, and some of these areas are very desirable," said Paul Spector, a USF psychology professor.
He said his sister lived in a neighborhood wiped out by Charley. Then she moved to Fort Lauderdale. "They freak out at the first sign of a storm," he said. But they didn't want to leave South Florida.
It's not so easy to pick up and move, McCarty said. "People are where they are usually for a reason, a job, their family. Some people just can't do it."
But he said that while sitting around at lunch with co-workers the other day, people began talking about this year's hurricanes and wondering whether they now will have to spend every summer in a state of worry. When he goes home at night, he looks at the massive, three-story laurel oak in his front yard and wonders if he should fork over the $5,000 it would cost to take it down, before a hurricane throws it down on his house.
If the business and economic bureau does the same survey next year, who knows what it may show, he said. "Katrina put a whole different face on things."
After a three or four more hurricane seasons like this one and last year's, he would not be surprised to see an exodus from some coastal areas.
Predictions Not Comforting
Signs are that these powerful storms will continue to stalk Florida and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Weather researchers say ocean temperatures and wind movements during the next 10 to 20 years will produce a long string of destructive hurricanes.
Disasters don't discriminate, though. A lot of people say Florida may be at risk, but so is the rest of the country.
Twenty-five years ago, Fred Corryn, 46, lived near a Michigan town half wiped out by a tornado. Three years later, an ice storm left the region without power for eight days. Soon, Corryn, his wife and two children were in Florida -- because of a job transfer, not the weather. But they haven't looked back.
Return to the North? "THINK NOT," he wrote in an e-mail, even though three hurricanes tore past his Plant City home last year and little by little took apart a white oak tree in his yard.
"You pick up the pieces and go on," he says. He knows he would have lost more than a tree if any of those three hurricanes had been as strong as Katrina. But still, he says he'll take the hurricane threat over snow, ice and tornadoes any day.
"Where would I go?" asked Barbara Mulvihill, a 72-year-old Tampa native. "My mother was one of the Frecker triplets. My grandfather was Mayor William Frecker. This is my home."
They all would evacuate if they had to, but they would come back as soon as they could. They love Florida.
But many people have fallen out of love with Florida, and for them, the hurricanes are the final excuse for a total breakup.
"Florida just isn't the place I want to live anymore," said Marilyn Whetzel, of Zephyrhills. "The traffic is terrible, the cost of living is going up, my taxes are going up."
The hurricanes last year stiffened her resolve to leave. Then her homeowners insurance tripled and her insurance company refused to pay the full cost of repairing her hurricane-wrecked roof.
At 63, after 45 years in Florida, "I am no longer able to economically live in this state," she said. So she is researching Arkansas. That means leaving a job in the biology department at USF, but Arkansas has the right geology for her hobby, fossil hunting. Also, she thinks she could afford it.
Fear Dominates
But many people, such as Jessica Sager, are reacting to basic, raw fear.
"I can't stand the idea of losing everything I've worked for. That's too much dread to live with," she said. "I'd rather start all over somewhere else, where I can have some stability for my kids."
B.K. Stevens, 48, who lives in north Manatee County, was left without power and water for weeks after Charley and Frances last year. Her husband was often away at night.
For years, the couple has talked about retiring to Tennessee. "This is just pushing us to do it faster," she said.
Also, when her husband, an electrical worker who went to Mississippi, described the victims he saw, Stevens saw herself in their shoes.
"What I don't want to be is in my 60s or 70s, having lost everything," she said. "How do you do that? How do people like that start all over?"
Diane Fojt, a trauma specialist with Hillsborough County's Community Crisis Support Team, spent about a week in Mississippi counseling Hurricane Katrina victims. The decay, the starving animals, the stunned, bereft people -- some of them on the verge of giving up -- she witnessed it all. "It's almost surreal to come home and look around and not see destruction everywhere," she said.
She grew up in Tampa, building a life here and a business in crisis counseling. She is not planning to move. But now she knows what it would look like to lose it all.
"It makes you think," she said. "It makes you realize it can happen to you."

This story can be found at: http://www.tampatrib.com/MGBKYWDS0EE.html

[CharleySurvivor]

I can relate to this article. Last year was tuff and seeing what Katrina's done reinforces the thought of leaving.