Terrible how people will exploit a disaster for entertainment, but looks like the same website http://www.whereheavensmeet.com that crafted the now infamous "Hurricane Andrew Coverup documentary" has a sequel. Below is an excerpt:
Who Counts When Bodies Are Counted?
by Jeeni Criscenzo
"There will never be an accurate body count," says Michael Edward about the numbers of deaths from hurricane Charley being reported by the media. He explains, "There are far too many migrant workers here who will never be accounted for, nor will anyone even try to account for them. The same goes for the many elderly who have no family to look for them, and the homeless who lived in cars, campers, and on the streets." He reports that in the Peace River - Arcadia area of Desoto County many migrant farm workers (mostly illegal immigrants) have been found dead under the rubble of their shacks.
Last week, Edward and five other military and law-enforcement retirees set out to do their own assessment of the toll Charley took on their area. They confirmed 390 bodies in refrigerated trucks and vans and restaurant refrigerators in Punta Gorda, Desoto County, Charlotte Harbor, Fort Meyers and the barrier islands. At the time the media was reporting less than 20 deaths due to Hurricane Charley.
Earlier that day, Edward had gone to deliver generator gas to relatives on Burnt Store Road in Punta Gorda past where a mobile home park used to be. He was stopped by FEMA, National Guard, and state police but was eventually allowed to pass. Edward said, "There were MANY, MANY body bags lined up on both sides of the road, far more than we could count as I drove slowly through that one block. There were search dogs and many teams going through the rubble not far from the main road. They hadn't even passed through 50 feet of rubble yet." He estimated that there were at least 20-30 body bags already on both sides, waiting to be put into trucks.
Edward has been keeping a look-out for refrigerator trucks in parking lots with their refrigeration units running but not moving anywhere. He saw a few lined up at an I-75 rest stop south of the Peace River. This was also a bulk "drop-off" station with tons of water and other supplies under tents in the parking area. The driver told him that "they" had loaded one truck the night before and the driver was sent to MacDill AFB. He had no idea what was loaded other than they used a fork lift, as it kept him up. Edward asked him what they could possibly be sending to Tampa/MacDill. His reply was "Bodies, for all I know."
A couple of days ago, it just happened that I ran into the son of a junior officer who had served with me for many years in the U.S. Army Military Police Corps. His son is a RA Officer assigned to the Florida National Guard and was in Desoto County when we met... neither of us at first knowing the common tie between his retired Army father and myself. As fate would put it, we ran into each other trying to free a horse tangled up in some barbed wire on a side road off U.S. 17 south of Arcadia. He had stopped in his Humvee to offer assistance. After we realized our uncanny 'family' ties, I asked him if he knew what happened to all the bodies I had observed a week before in the mobile home parks. I also told him what we had seen when we later returned to that area and asked him, as I had already concluded, if this was a military operation. His reply was "you saw what you saw," and then he proceeded to explain what he had been doing since he arrived early Saturday morning, August 14.
I can relay to every reader that, because of the honor of the 'Esprit de Corps' between Military Police officers, what you are about to read may seem surreal, but it is none-the-less the truth that you will surely not hear in the mainstream controlled media.
By 10:00 p.m. on Friday, August 13, both Washington City and Tallahassee knew of the real devastation and of the many hundreds of local EDS/EMS confirmed deaths in the wake of Hurricane Charley. As a part of the emergency S.O.P, specific MP (specialist) command units were sent to Charlotte County from Ft. Leonard Wood and Ft. Stewart, most arriving just before dawn on Saturday, August 14. Their specific orders were to secure all the mobile home parks from the local and State authorities, and to seal off these areas from all but 'authorized' personnel. By the time JEB BUSH arrived on Saturday, this had been fully accomplished in both Charlotte and Desoto Counties. Every County Deputy, city Police Officer, and all other local Emergency Services personnel had been 'relieved' from their mobile home park duties by the Military Police command and re-assigned to other areas.
As part of the operation, a curfew was set into place beginning Saturday evening for all areas affected by Charley. It remains in effect tonight as I finish writing this report. This curfew had (and still has) a two-fold purpose. The first and most obvious purpose was to control order during darkness, a very legitimate necessity. A multiple fatality tractor trailer and car accident at a US-41 intersection gave strength to the curfew due to traffic lights being inoperable. The second purpose was to carry out search, recovery, and transport operations by 'authorized' Federal teams. While residents were kept off the public streets, perimiters were established and non-residents were denied entrance, the mobile home parks were lit up by Army field generator units, searched, and bodies recovered. Those bodies were then transported out of the area on I-75 in refrigerated trucks marked 'Emergency Response Services' with magnetic signs on the doors. These were some of the very same trucks that brought supplies into the area from Lakeland, Florida. It also serves to illustrate why there were so many refer semi's sitting in Lakeland that were not yet authorized to go to the Port Charlotte area, and why some were sitting for a day or two at a time at the bulk center drop-off on I-75 at the rest stop in Charlotte County. Who - from police to other local and State personnel guarding the streets - would question the presence of these trucks both entering and exiting the area as FEMA 'distribution' points were being constantly supplied 24 hours a day?
This is how it has all been carried out: Bodies were recovered, placed into standard issue body bags (as well as large black 'trash' type bags for body parts), loaded into military 2-1/2 and 5 ton covered troop carriers, sent to either of two secured 'transfer' areas located near I-75, then loaded into the refer semi's for their journey to military installations throughout North America. The truck drivers never knew what their cargo was as they were not only kept away from the actual loading, but each trailer was well sealed and locked. No-one knew the better and there was no suspicion since it all just looked 'routine.' If you want an 'official' body count from the local morgues, don't bother as there are no bodies there other than from hospital and accidental deaths after August 13.
There is nothing clever about how the removal of the 30+ mobile home park bodies was carried out... it's the standard operational procedure for military operations of this type. Whenever a civilian population is involved in the immediate area of recovery, they are isolated by curfews or secure perimeter lines from seeing night operations being carried out. This is nothing new, and every war Veteran should remember seeing this carried out in the field of operations, just as it goes on in Iraq today. But the difference here is that Charlotte and Desoto Counties are not considered war zones.
In order to verify what I was told above, our growing group of Vets spoke with a dozen or so National Guard patrols as they stopped by our neighborhood. While a few were reluctant to say anything to us, some were not hesitant to talk about everything they had seen... from dead fish to a body seen floating down the Peace River. Are any who told us about the bodies revealing national secrets? One Corporal answered that question when he said, "I thought everyone knew about the bodies. Isn't it on the news?" When we told him the 'official' death toll was around 20, he laughed at us and accused us of playing games with him. He genuinely had no idea that the public had no knowledge of the truth. But of course there's no cover-up. As one email I received today put it, since I can't give him a single name of any of the dead bodies I personally saw, then I can't be believed. I guess I didn't realize that I was supposed to check the bodies for picture ID when we stumbled on them that Friday evening. No-one told us that in order for our eyewitness accounts to be believed or to be considered authentic, we would have to know the name and address of every corpse we saw on the side of the road.
A worse tragedy (if anything could be worse than what has already been revealed) in all this 'body snatching' going on is the extremely high death toll of migrant workers. In Desoto County, especially on or near US-17 where the eye of Charley followed to the Northeast, most mobile homes and all sub-standard housing was occupied by migrant fruit pickers and undocumented farm laborers. They didn't legally or officially 'exist' in the first place, so don't expect their deaths to 'exist' either. But, of course, there's no conspiracy. There are only 25 or so official deaths throughout the entire State as a result of Hurricane Charley. If you believe that, I have some swamp land in Florida you might be interested in buying.
The Hurricane Charley coverup
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The Hurricane Charley coverup
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DoctorHurricane2003
Agreed. Any of us who actually experienced the hurricanes this summer in FL...had to deal with the power outages, damage, and loved ones scared and hurt...and the resulting psychological anguish, hate to see this exploitation of the difficult situation to push some fantastic conspiracy agenda for whatever reason.
I remember in the original Hurricane Andrew coverup story, how they claimed that winds reached 250 mph and that the NHC knew all along that the hurricane would hit S. Dade but didn't want to evacuate that area because they needed to get rid of some illegal migrant farmers to give american citizens jobs during the recessed economy of 1992...sick.
I remember in the original Hurricane Andrew coverup story, how they claimed that winds reached 250 mph and that the NHC knew all along that the hurricane would hit S. Dade but didn't want to evacuate that area because they needed to get rid of some illegal migrant farmers to give american citizens jobs during the recessed economy of 1992...sick.
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Matt-hurricanewatcher
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Derek Ortt
hmm interesting...any reasons why they would want to underplay the number of people who perished?
perhaps to keep insurance rates from skyrocketing, thus protecting the long-term "greater good"?
or protecting the implications on Florida's tourism industry or potential retirees moving to the state, thus making economic sense?
i could see how showing 300+ people dead would be good in getting people to get the **** out next time a hurricane threatens...
perhaps to keep insurance rates from skyrocketing, thus protecting the long-term "greater good"?
or protecting the implications on Florida's tourism industry or potential retirees moving to the state, thus making economic sense?
i could see how showing 300+ people dead would be good in getting people to get the **** out next time a hurricane threatens...
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Derek Ortt
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MGC
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What? How would a high death count drive away tourists? You would have to have your head burried you know where not to know that Florida has had killer hurricanes in the past and will have them in the future. I don't believe the death toll was greater than reported. It is too hard to cover up something like that.....MGC
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HurricaneBill
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Exactly! Also, how come there are never pictures of this stuff. If somebody sees it, you'd think they'd be bound to go and get a camera or something.
Also, a massive cover-up? Somebody would say something. All the elderly with no family to miss them? There's a thing called FRIENDS. Even if they were recluses, I'm sure somebody would ponder "I wonder if so and so is all right?"
Migrant workers who were illegal immigrants? Give me a break! These are human lives, not pieces of paper!
It'll hurt tourism? Trust me, it won't. Maybe for a short time, but people will come back.
A high death toll would make us look bad? No! Did we look bad when Floyd caused the highest U.S. death toll since Agnes?
If there was a high death toll, we'd say "See? This is why you should heed evacuation orders. So something like this does not happen."
Plain and simple, Charley was a small hurricane. The fiercest winds were located in a small area around the eye. The area Charley made landfall in had been under a hurricane warning for nearly 24 hours. The storm surge was not that large, thankfully.
The people who stayed behind are not idiots. They took shelter where they could find it. With the supposed death counts, you'd think people were standing out in the blowing winds gawking at the storm.
The media would have reported the cover-up. Think about it, vast amounts of bodies are being hidden. SCANDAL! The media would be on it like cats on tuna fish.
Also, a massive cover-up? Somebody would say something. All the elderly with no family to miss them? There's a thing called FRIENDS. Even if they were recluses, I'm sure somebody would ponder "I wonder if so and so is all right?"
Migrant workers who were illegal immigrants? Give me a break! These are human lives, not pieces of paper!
It'll hurt tourism? Trust me, it won't. Maybe for a short time, but people will come back.
A high death toll would make us look bad? No! Did we look bad when Floyd caused the highest U.S. death toll since Agnes?
If there was a high death toll, we'd say "See? This is why you should heed evacuation orders. So something like this does not happen."
Plain and simple, Charley was a small hurricane. The fiercest winds were located in a small area around the eye. The area Charley made landfall in had been under a hurricane warning for nearly 24 hours. The storm surge was not that large, thankfully.
The people who stayed behind are not idiots. They took shelter where they could find it. With the supposed death counts, you'd think people were standing out in the blowing winds gawking at the storm.
The media would have reported the cover-up. Think about it, vast amounts of bodies are being hidden. SCANDAL! The media would be on it like cats on tuna fish.
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Derek Ortt
I know that my friend (who works in my office) was not lying to me when he told me what he saw. I will take his word as gospel as he had nothing at all to gain. Also, how we are all soon to forget the initial media reports.
Trust me, the death toll was somewhat under reported (likely NOT the 400 though claimed by those writing this article), just as it was in Andrew in some reports (the range for Andrew was 15-88)
Trust me, the death toll was somewhat under reported (likely NOT the 400 though claimed by those writing this article), just as it was in Andrew in some reports (the range for Andrew was 15-88)
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HurricaneBill
- Category 5
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- Joined: Sun Apr 11, 2004 5:51 pm
- Location: East Longmeadow, MA, USA
Derek Ortt wrote:I know that my friend (who works in my office) was not lying to me when he told me what he saw. I will take his word as gospel as he had nothing at all to gain. Also, how we are all soon to forget the initial media reports.
Trust me, the death toll was somewhat under reported (likely NOT the 400 though claimed by those writing this article), just as it was in Andrew in some reports (the range for Andrew was 15-88)
Wouldn't Andrew's toll be around 88 if you tack on the indirect deaths?
I think that's one of the reasons these cover-up theories start. You'll hear the death toll get higher and higher and then they suddenly cut it down by removing the indirect deaths.
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Derek Ortt
tallywx wrote:
perhaps to keep insurance rates from skyrocketing, thus protecting the long-term "greater good"?
Death toll has absolutely NOTHING to do with the insurance rates that people are concerned about and that could conceivably lower the number of people moving to the area.
The rates that people are worrying about are property insurance rates. Has nothing to do with people killed, simply the dollar value of damage. And you can't cover that up.
Yes, there are life insurance rates, but so few people are killed in natural disasters life insurance companies couldn't possibly care less about them, or care where their policyholders live.
How much their policyholders weigh, how old they are, and whether they smoke are about a billion times more important than hurricanes.
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An interesting related article from the St. Petersburg (FL) Times, a reputable source:
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/05/Flori ... l_ta.shtml
Devastation? Yes. Loss? Certainly. But a conspiracy to cover up news of a startling number of deaths from the hurricane? You be the judge.
By ROBERT FARLEY, Times Staff Writer
Published September 5, 2004
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An upended semitrailer in the parking lot bears testament to the destructive power packed by Hurricane Charley.
Inside the adjacent warehouse, in addition to a fishing tackle reconditioning shop, lies the secret to what could be one of the biggest conspiracies in Florida history. Or not.
Despite pronouncements from emergency officials that Charley claimed just four lives in Charlotte County, the women who work here know different.
"Four?" Shop manager K. Sanders shakes her head at the absurdity of it.
"There's a lot more deaths than you think," Pat Graham, 39, tells a reporter solemnly as she brushes dirt from a used fishing reel.
A yellow dog sleeps under her work table. Graham found the dog just before the storm and has adopted him. She calls him Hurricane Charley.
Graham hardly looks up from her work as she relates that her ex-husband heard from none other than a fire marshal that there are two refrigerated semitrailers parked in the lots for the Holiday Inn and Best Western hotels in downtown Punta Gorda. "And they are full of dead bodies," she says. More than 230. And counting.
County officials are keeping it on the hush-hush, she said. "I don't think they want to scare us." Plus, there is tourism to think about.
Sanders then dropped this bomb, a story she heard secondhand from someone who talked to a nurse at Bon Secours-St. Joseph Hospital in Port Charlotte.
"She (the nurse) is upset because they've got 400 body bags filled," she said. "Why aren't people acknowledging the other bodies?"
Sanders paused to let the gravity sink in.
"Look," Sanders said, holding up her forearm. "I've got goose bumps!"
A Port Charlotte man waiting in a gas line heard 60 people died when part of the roof was shorn off the Charlotte Regional Medical Center.
Lynette Donner, 26, spent the storm curled in the fetal position and credits a fallen oak tree for preventing her Punta Gorda mobile home from blowing away. She hears there were lots of deaths, "probably in the hundreds," and that emergency workers are uncovering more and more bodies in the rubble every day.
In a neighborhood nearby, Sean Gurney drinks Bud Light out of a tall can, talking with his friends in his sister's driveway while the sun sets. He's staying here because the hotel he lives in has been condemned. They are discussing the 600 people that, they are convinced, are missing from the trailer parks along Kings Highway. In Punta Gorda, they swear, they are throwing bodies into freezer trucks. One of them has called Howard Stern to report the coverup, but he was put on hold.
"We like to put on the news and see what kind of lies they're telling," Gurney said. "They're hiding it all."
Authorities say none of those reports is true, though part of the roof at the hospital was, in fact, damaged. But no one was killed.
"Well," says Sanders, "what do you expect them to say?"
In the chaotic days after Hurricane Charley, good information was hard to come by. Emergency officials initially overstated the death count. The media did, too. And why exactly did the Emergency Operations Center order 60 body bags if there weren't 60 bodies? Rumors start. They grow in the telling. When they persist they become urban legends. Hurricane Frances will likely generate many more.
How many heard about the guy on the top floor of the World Trade Center tower who "rode the rubble" to the ground and lived to tell about it?
Or after Hurricane Andrew, did you hear about the hundreds of bodies being stored by authorities in refrigerated trucks, in secret, to prevent a panic and to protect tourism? Wait. That one sounds awfully familiar.
That's right, nearly identical rumors of hundreds of deaths from Hurricane Andrew made the rounds from neighbor to neighbor, phone to phone, a dozen years ago. Fifteen people in South Florida died during the storm, and 23 after.
Rumors like these often spread after catastrophic events when people are feeling uncertainty, said Connie Lee Chesner, an adjunct instructor of communication at Wake Forest University. It isn't a matter of people maliciously spreading lies or of gullible people passing it along.
"Sometimes, it's just a process of people trying to connect to one another," said Chesner, who has researched urban myth patterns and motivations.
"People love interesting stories," she said. As they get passed from person to person, the stories get embellished. Ten people dead becomes 50, then 100. New details are added. "Might have" qualifiers are dropped.
A Punta Gorda radio station, armed with a generator, stepped into the information vacuum and became a clearinghouse for storm-related information.
The station's general manager, Mike Moody, heard his share of bad rumors in the days following the storm. Like this one: "There are body bags, filled, lining the streets."
"It was more of somebody said something, like telephone, and it got passed on by word-of-mouth," Moody said. "It's just garbage, basically. It's just Elmer-at-the-doughnut-shop kind of thing. I don't understand the motives."
Moody notes that the station early on started getting its information straight from emergency officials, and so none of the more outrageous rumors ever made it on the air.
Not all the media can make the same claim.
In the hectic early morning hours after the storm, the Associated Press ran a story over the news wire with the following lead:
"The death toll from Hurricane Charley rose early Saturday, when a county official said there had a been "a number of fatalities' at a mobile home park and deputies were standing guard over stacks of bodies because the area was inaccessible to ambulances."
Stacks of bodies. And then this from CNN meteorologist Chad Myers on Saturday morning:
"I've been watching some of the local reports here out of Fort Myers and some of the National Guard guys down there. And this is a little ominous to what we're going to see as day breaks here. National Guard guys this morning said there are stacks of bodies in that mobile home park, that mobile home park in Punta Gorda. They're obviously getting to there right now, officially only three fatalities, but I know we will find more. They've already found them in the overnight hours. There are so many buildings down there that are completely collapsed."
Later in the same report, an anchor notes that CNN has not confirmed reports of stacks of bodies.
AP's Miami bureau chief Kevin Walsh said that, by and large, he's extremely proud of his staff's storm coverage, but acknowledges the "stacks of bodies" phrase was a "mischaracterization." There was a miscommunication, he said, between an editor and a reporter who noted there were deputies standing guard over an elderly couple, two people, killed in a mobile home during the hurricane. Earlier that morning, a county official had said in a news conference that there were 10 confirmed dead, including a number at one mobile home park.
Media reports aside, it's hard for anyone who has seen the devastation, or lived through it, to believe that more people didn't die. That's what makes it easier for people like Sanders to believe there are hundreds of bodies at the hospital or in refrigerated trucks at the Holiday Inn.
Just drive around and look at some of the mobile home parks, Sanders implores, searching a reporter's eyes for some spark of common sense.
To be sure, many mobile home parks look like war zones. Missing roofs. Missing walls. Metal, wood and clothing scattered around yards. Some mobile homes were reduced to nothing more than rubble.
"Trash piles, that's all it looks like," said Sanders, who lives next to a trailer park.
When people see the flattened mobile home parks they assume the death count had to be more than reported, said Ignatius Carroll, a spokesman for Miami Fire Rescue, on loan as a public information officer for the Emergency Operations Center in Charlotte County.
But here are the facts, he said. "We have only had four deaths that were storm-related. They are not sitting in refrigerated trucks."
Four dead in all of Charlotte County?
"The numbers don't add up," Sanders said. "It's impossible."
Graham agrees. She and her boyfriend sat under their carport and watched Charley wreak havoc. It was pretty cool, until they started seeing large objects fly by. Pieces of roofs, wood, metal signs. Graham got scared. They first ran into the kitchen, but when flying branches and debris started smashing into the windows, they fled to the bathroom.
"I'd never want to go through that again," Graham said.
And her house fared pretty well, by comparison. A few broken windows. A lawn littered with debris. An outdoor freezer ended up on the front of her 1993 Grand Marquis. Her neighbors on either side lost their roofs.
"Half the town is gone," she said.
Four dead in Charlotte County? Don't believe it, she said. There's got to be a conspiracy of silence.
Why no outcry from relatives?
"We've got a lot of old people here," she explained. "These old people, a lot of them don't have family or they are probably still up North and don't know."
Graham said she even saw one of the refrigerated trucks in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn.
This came as news to David Caudra, manager of the Holiday Inn. It has been a long week and he has heard a lot of strange stories. But refrigerated semis full of dead bodies? In his parking lot?
"I can tell you right now. . . . No way!" he said, chuckling. "I've been here every day since the storm, and there definitely has been no refrigerated truck here."
The 100-unit Holiday Inn was decimated by Charley. It's probably a complete teardown, Caudra said. The hotel was booked solid and 90 percent occupied when a television reporter warned two hours before the storm that Charley had turned toward Punta Gorda and Caudra needed to get everyone out of there. Now. Hotel employees sent everyone to a nearby shelter. But it wasn't easy. Caudra found one elderly woman hiding in a closet with her dog, hoping to ride out the storm because shelters did not accept pets. Another man insisted he wouldn't leave until the cops told him he had to. They did.
"Go take a look at that guy's room now," Caudra said, pointing to a second floor "room" now exposed to the world. The roof is gone. Metal framing is all that remains of the front wall. The inside has caved in on itself. Had they not evacuated, then you might be reading about a lot of dead bodies, Caudra said.
Over at the nearby Best Western, where the other refrigerated truck was alleged to have been parked, a row of cars in the parking lot sit crushed under a fallen carport. But there are no trucks, refrigerated or otherwise.
What about at the hospital, where Sanders said she heard that a nurse reported more than 400 deaths at that hospital alone?
"You won't get a true story from a hospital administrator," Sanders warned. "They have been put under a gag order by somebody. You need to ask a nurse in the parking lot."
Sue Calleja wore a nurselike uniform as she walked to her car in the parking lot at Bon Secours-St. Joseph Hospital. She works in radiology. Not a nurse, but sufficiently far enough down the corporate ladder not to be considered an administrator.
"All the ones who came in here were treated," Calleja swears. "I don't know of any mass casualties that have come here.'
Katrina Klaproth echoes those sentiments. But then, she might be considered an administrator. She is vice president of marketing for the hospital.
Hundreds of people did in fact come through the hospital's emergency room after the storm, she said. Injured. Less than a handful of people died at the hospital in the days after the storm, most of causes completely unrelated to the hurricane. The reports of hundreds of bodies at the hospital are just untrue, she said.
"I don't know why (the rumors) are so rampant," Klaproth said. "It's disturbing. There are still so many people who haven't gotten in touch with their relatives yet. Families worry."
A reporter notes that that's exactly what someone might be expected to say if they were part of a conspiracy.
"I don't think there's any conspiracy occurring here," she said in an assuring tone.
But she, too, has heard the rumors. First she heard 11 deaths in Charlotte County, later reduced to four confirmed.
But then she started hearing drastically different projections.
"Suddenly it was hundreds," she said.
Where did she hear that?
"Reporters, mostly."
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/05/Flori ... l_ta.shtml
Devastation? Yes. Loss? Certainly. But a conspiracy to cover up news of a startling number of deaths from the hurricane? You be the judge.
By ROBERT FARLEY, Times Staff Writer
Published September 5, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An upended semitrailer in the parking lot bears testament to the destructive power packed by Hurricane Charley.
Inside the adjacent warehouse, in addition to a fishing tackle reconditioning shop, lies the secret to what could be one of the biggest conspiracies in Florida history. Or not.
Despite pronouncements from emergency officials that Charley claimed just four lives in Charlotte County, the women who work here know different.
"Four?" Shop manager K. Sanders shakes her head at the absurdity of it.
"There's a lot more deaths than you think," Pat Graham, 39, tells a reporter solemnly as she brushes dirt from a used fishing reel.
A yellow dog sleeps under her work table. Graham found the dog just before the storm and has adopted him. She calls him Hurricane Charley.
Graham hardly looks up from her work as she relates that her ex-husband heard from none other than a fire marshal that there are two refrigerated semitrailers parked in the lots for the Holiday Inn and Best Western hotels in downtown Punta Gorda. "And they are full of dead bodies," she says. More than 230. And counting.
County officials are keeping it on the hush-hush, she said. "I don't think they want to scare us." Plus, there is tourism to think about.
Sanders then dropped this bomb, a story she heard secondhand from someone who talked to a nurse at Bon Secours-St. Joseph Hospital in Port Charlotte.
"She (the nurse) is upset because they've got 400 body bags filled," she said. "Why aren't people acknowledging the other bodies?"
Sanders paused to let the gravity sink in.
"Look," Sanders said, holding up her forearm. "I've got goose bumps!"
A Port Charlotte man waiting in a gas line heard 60 people died when part of the roof was shorn off the Charlotte Regional Medical Center.
Lynette Donner, 26, spent the storm curled in the fetal position and credits a fallen oak tree for preventing her Punta Gorda mobile home from blowing away. She hears there were lots of deaths, "probably in the hundreds," and that emergency workers are uncovering more and more bodies in the rubble every day.
In a neighborhood nearby, Sean Gurney drinks Bud Light out of a tall can, talking with his friends in his sister's driveway while the sun sets. He's staying here because the hotel he lives in has been condemned. They are discussing the 600 people that, they are convinced, are missing from the trailer parks along Kings Highway. In Punta Gorda, they swear, they are throwing bodies into freezer trucks. One of them has called Howard Stern to report the coverup, but he was put on hold.
"We like to put on the news and see what kind of lies they're telling," Gurney said. "They're hiding it all."
Authorities say none of those reports is true, though part of the roof at the hospital was, in fact, damaged. But no one was killed.
"Well," says Sanders, "what do you expect them to say?"
In the chaotic days after Hurricane Charley, good information was hard to come by. Emergency officials initially overstated the death count. The media did, too. And why exactly did the Emergency Operations Center order 60 body bags if there weren't 60 bodies? Rumors start. They grow in the telling. When they persist they become urban legends. Hurricane Frances will likely generate many more.
How many heard about the guy on the top floor of the World Trade Center tower who "rode the rubble" to the ground and lived to tell about it?
Or after Hurricane Andrew, did you hear about the hundreds of bodies being stored by authorities in refrigerated trucks, in secret, to prevent a panic and to protect tourism? Wait. That one sounds awfully familiar.
That's right, nearly identical rumors of hundreds of deaths from Hurricane Andrew made the rounds from neighbor to neighbor, phone to phone, a dozen years ago. Fifteen people in South Florida died during the storm, and 23 after.
Rumors like these often spread after catastrophic events when people are feeling uncertainty, said Connie Lee Chesner, an adjunct instructor of communication at Wake Forest University. It isn't a matter of people maliciously spreading lies or of gullible people passing it along.
"Sometimes, it's just a process of people trying to connect to one another," said Chesner, who has researched urban myth patterns and motivations.
"People love interesting stories," she said. As they get passed from person to person, the stories get embellished. Ten people dead becomes 50, then 100. New details are added. "Might have" qualifiers are dropped.
A Punta Gorda radio station, armed with a generator, stepped into the information vacuum and became a clearinghouse for storm-related information.
The station's general manager, Mike Moody, heard his share of bad rumors in the days following the storm. Like this one: "There are body bags, filled, lining the streets."
"It was more of somebody said something, like telephone, and it got passed on by word-of-mouth," Moody said. "It's just garbage, basically. It's just Elmer-at-the-doughnut-shop kind of thing. I don't understand the motives."
Moody notes that the station early on started getting its information straight from emergency officials, and so none of the more outrageous rumors ever made it on the air.
Not all the media can make the same claim.
In the hectic early morning hours after the storm, the Associated Press ran a story over the news wire with the following lead:
"The death toll from Hurricane Charley rose early Saturday, when a county official said there had a been "a number of fatalities' at a mobile home park and deputies were standing guard over stacks of bodies because the area was inaccessible to ambulances."
Stacks of bodies. And then this from CNN meteorologist Chad Myers on Saturday morning:
"I've been watching some of the local reports here out of Fort Myers and some of the National Guard guys down there. And this is a little ominous to what we're going to see as day breaks here. National Guard guys this morning said there are stacks of bodies in that mobile home park, that mobile home park in Punta Gorda. They're obviously getting to there right now, officially only three fatalities, but I know we will find more. They've already found them in the overnight hours. There are so many buildings down there that are completely collapsed."
Later in the same report, an anchor notes that CNN has not confirmed reports of stacks of bodies.
AP's Miami bureau chief Kevin Walsh said that, by and large, he's extremely proud of his staff's storm coverage, but acknowledges the "stacks of bodies" phrase was a "mischaracterization." There was a miscommunication, he said, between an editor and a reporter who noted there were deputies standing guard over an elderly couple, two people, killed in a mobile home during the hurricane. Earlier that morning, a county official had said in a news conference that there were 10 confirmed dead, including a number at one mobile home park.
Media reports aside, it's hard for anyone who has seen the devastation, or lived through it, to believe that more people didn't die. That's what makes it easier for people like Sanders to believe there are hundreds of bodies at the hospital or in refrigerated trucks at the Holiday Inn.
Just drive around and look at some of the mobile home parks, Sanders implores, searching a reporter's eyes for some spark of common sense.
To be sure, many mobile home parks look like war zones. Missing roofs. Missing walls. Metal, wood and clothing scattered around yards. Some mobile homes were reduced to nothing more than rubble.
"Trash piles, that's all it looks like," said Sanders, who lives next to a trailer park.
When people see the flattened mobile home parks they assume the death count had to be more than reported, said Ignatius Carroll, a spokesman for Miami Fire Rescue, on loan as a public information officer for the Emergency Operations Center in Charlotte County.
But here are the facts, he said. "We have only had four deaths that were storm-related. They are not sitting in refrigerated trucks."
Four dead in all of Charlotte County?
"The numbers don't add up," Sanders said. "It's impossible."
Graham agrees. She and her boyfriend sat under their carport and watched Charley wreak havoc. It was pretty cool, until they started seeing large objects fly by. Pieces of roofs, wood, metal signs. Graham got scared. They first ran into the kitchen, but when flying branches and debris started smashing into the windows, they fled to the bathroom.
"I'd never want to go through that again," Graham said.
And her house fared pretty well, by comparison. A few broken windows. A lawn littered with debris. An outdoor freezer ended up on the front of her 1993 Grand Marquis. Her neighbors on either side lost their roofs.
"Half the town is gone," she said.
Four dead in Charlotte County? Don't believe it, she said. There's got to be a conspiracy of silence.
Why no outcry from relatives?
"We've got a lot of old people here," she explained. "These old people, a lot of them don't have family or they are probably still up North and don't know."
Graham said she even saw one of the refrigerated trucks in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn.
This came as news to David Caudra, manager of the Holiday Inn. It has been a long week and he has heard a lot of strange stories. But refrigerated semis full of dead bodies? In his parking lot?
"I can tell you right now. . . . No way!" he said, chuckling. "I've been here every day since the storm, and there definitely has been no refrigerated truck here."
The 100-unit Holiday Inn was decimated by Charley. It's probably a complete teardown, Caudra said. The hotel was booked solid and 90 percent occupied when a television reporter warned two hours before the storm that Charley had turned toward Punta Gorda and Caudra needed to get everyone out of there. Now. Hotel employees sent everyone to a nearby shelter. But it wasn't easy. Caudra found one elderly woman hiding in a closet with her dog, hoping to ride out the storm because shelters did not accept pets. Another man insisted he wouldn't leave until the cops told him he had to. They did.
"Go take a look at that guy's room now," Caudra said, pointing to a second floor "room" now exposed to the world. The roof is gone. Metal framing is all that remains of the front wall. The inside has caved in on itself. Had they not evacuated, then you might be reading about a lot of dead bodies, Caudra said.
Over at the nearby Best Western, where the other refrigerated truck was alleged to have been parked, a row of cars in the parking lot sit crushed under a fallen carport. But there are no trucks, refrigerated or otherwise.
What about at the hospital, where Sanders said she heard that a nurse reported more than 400 deaths at that hospital alone?
"You won't get a true story from a hospital administrator," Sanders warned. "They have been put under a gag order by somebody. You need to ask a nurse in the parking lot."
Sue Calleja wore a nurselike uniform as she walked to her car in the parking lot at Bon Secours-St. Joseph Hospital. She works in radiology. Not a nurse, but sufficiently far enough down the corporate ladder not to be considered an administrator.
"All the ones who came in here were treated," Calleja swears. "I don't know of any mass casualties that have come here.'
Katrina Klaproth echoes those sentiments. But then, she might be considered an administrator. She is vice president of marketing for the hospital.
Hundreds of people did in fact come through the hospital's emergency room after the storm, she said. Injured. Less than a handful of people died at the hospital in the days after the storm, most of causes completely unrelated to the hurricane. The reports of hundreds of bodies at the hospital are just untrue, she said.
"I don't know why (the rumors) are so rampant," Klaproth said. "It's disturbing. There are still so many people who haven't gotten in touch with their relatives yet. Families worry."
A reporter notes that that's exactly what someone might be expected to say if they were part of a conspiracy.
"I don't think there's any conspiracy occurring here," she said in an assuring tone.
But she, too, has heard the rumors. First she heard 11 deaths in Charlotte County, later reduced to four confirmed.
But then she started hearing drastically different projections.
"Suddenly it was hundreds," she said.
Where did she hear that?
"Reporters, mostly."
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hurricanetrack
- HurricaneTrack.com
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Cover-ups
Well, I was only 5 miles from Punta Gorda very near the Peace River and I did not see any dead people anywhere- but I did not stick around long enough to find out.
However- in the future, perhaps I can stick around an area like this- when it happens again- and look for the piles of dead migrant workers. They have to be somewhere- and they cannot be covered up within 24 hours- so if they exist, I'll find them in the future.
Also- weathervine and the guys from BNVN.com (Jim Edds, et al) never told me of anything like that story reports. But they too were probably not looking in the right places- if hordes of dead migrant workers indeed existed.
Initially I was very sick to think about how many people probably died in Punta Gorda. I was thinking about the storm surge and had actually envisioned a huge water line of debris piled up at the end of Charlotte Harbor- with 1000s of bodies. But that did not happen- the surge was not too bad since the RMW was not too big as well as other factors, I'm sure.
Still- with all the damage, you would think that more people died than the media reported. But the media is not the only source of info- I bet if someone dug deep and researched just how many people died from Charley- it would be higher than the media told us. But the media moves on to other stories- and other hurricanes- so there's no long-term update. If a good investigative reporter were to dig deep enough- they could find that yes, a lot of people died, but probably not enough to warrant any thoughts of a cover-up.
This would make a good topic for Art Bell- or even Mike Watkins show....
However- in the future, perhaps I can stick around an area like this- when it happens again- and look for the piles of dead migrant workers. They have to be somewhere- and they cannot be covered up within 24 hours- so if they exist, I'll find them in the future.
Also- weathervine and the guys from BNVN.com (Jim Edds, et al) never told me of anything like that story reports. But they too were probably not looking in the right places- if hordes of dead migrant workers indeed existed.
Initially I was very sick to think about how many people probably died in Punta Gorda. I was thinking about the storm surge and had actually envisioned a huge water line of debris piled up at the end of Charlotte Harbor- with 1000s of bodies. But that did not happen- the surge was not too bad since the RMW was not too big as well as other factors, I'm sure.
Still- with all the damage, you would think that more people died than the media reported. But the media is not the only source of info- I bet if someone dug deep and researched just how many people died from Charley- it would be higher than the media told us. But the media moves on to other stories- and other hurricanes- so there's no long-term update. If a good investigative reporter were to dig deep enough- they could find that yes, a lot of people died, but probably not enough to warrant any thoughts of a cover-up.
This would make a good topic for Art Bell- or even Mike Watkins show....
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HurricaneBill
- Category 5
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- Joined: Sun Apr 11, 2004 5:51 pm
- Location: East Longmeadow, MA, USA
MGC wrote:Yea. the dead bodies from Charley are stored next to the dead bodies from Andrew which are stored next to the dead alien bodies from Roswell.....MGC
You forgot Jimmy Hoffa.
Honestly, look at the damage caused by tornadoes. Doesn't it surprise you that so many people can survive them?
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CharleySurvivor
- Category 1
- Posts: 308
- Joined: Thu Sep 09, 2004 3:38 pm
- Location: Tampa, FL formerly Port Charlotte FL
For someone who lives in Charlotte County and rode Charley, I can tell you there is a higher death number then reported. I have no proof but you hear and see lots of things when you live in the area. The amount of illegal migrant workers is very high here, a lot higher then people might think.
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Well well, so what I initially took for an outlandish story may not be so out there after all. very interesting hearing the accounts of people from that area who have nothing to gain by being fanciful. As I used to be investigative news editor of a minor newspaper, I may head down there next break I get and poke around a bit.
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