Mean Season

For Robert Colangelo, a good night's sleep in September meant five hours without a telephone in both ears. He was second in command at a Federal Emergency Management Agency action center in Orlando, Fla., for several weeks during the U.S. mainland's meanest hurricane season in 118 years. "I'm in my hotel room at 11 o'clock at night, trying to talk to my wife in Chicago and to my dad, who's very ill. Meantime, my cell phone's ringing; it's my people out there, and I've got to deal with that. And I do." His "people" were the FEMA employees-up to 4,500 regulars and reservists from 25 states-whose government service oaths compelled them to make the misery of 17 million Floridians their own. They fanned out across the state and stood arm-in-arm with its residents for repeated beatings. Four major hurricanes struck in six weeks, from mid-August through late September.

During that time, Martin Mayeaux spent most days airborne with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration crew from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. NOAA flew airplanes into the hurricanes to gauge their intensity and path. "A lot of us haven't been home but two or three days in the last three or four weeks," the flight director said during a mission through the outer bands of Hurricane Ivan as the storm approached Pensacola, Fla., Sept. 15.

After Charley on Aug. 13, then Frances, Ivan and Jeanne in rapid succession between Sept. 5 and Sept. 25, the Sunshine State was anything but. From the Panhandle to the Keys, not one of Florida's 67 counties was untouched. At least 110 people were killed. One in five homes were damaged or destroyed. Insured property losses exceeded $20 billion, the total payout for 1992's Hurricane Andrew.

NOAA was busier than ever with hurricane measurements. Several crew members exceeded their limit of 120 flight hours in 30 days and needed medical waivers to continue flying. Two aircraft were pushing their annual budget limits on flight hours and a third surpassed its limit by 6 percent. "The strain, of course, was the long days and being away from home," says James McFadden, program chief at NOAA's Aircraft Operations Center at MacDill. On two occasions, when forecasts showed storms heading for Tampa, the agency had to move its three hurricane hunter airplanes-with crews-to safety in New Orleans. "Now they were away from their families and their homes," McFadden recalls, "and there was anxiety."

The storms left a path of death and destruction from the Caribbean thousands of miles north to Vermont-requiring 500 more FEMA representatives in 14 other states, for a total of 5,000 nationwide. Never in its 25-year history has FEMA been stretched so far or so thin, Michael Brown, undersecretary of Homeland Security for Emergency Preparedness and Response, told reporters in the aftermath of Jeanne. "This is probably our largest deployment ever," Brown said. "It's just a logistical challenge for us."

Snafus happened. Bad weather delayed delivery of critical supplies. After Jeanne, hungry victims waiting for a truckload of meals in coastal St. Lucie County got a truckload of nails instead. In adjacent Martin County, a tractor-trailer carrying water for victims of Frances overturned on Interstate 95. Food, water and medical gear had to be airlifted into parts of the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Ivan, which flattened a quarter-mile section of the Interstate 10 bridge over Escambia Bay.

Managing four disasters at once presented financial challenges, too. In Florida alone, FEMA took almost 870,000 registrations for help and doled out almost $543 million in aid through Oct. 8. About 155,000 people had sought help at 31 disaster recovery centers statewide. FEMA also had shouldered most of the cost for clearing 25 million cubic yards of debris. Frances still was churning offshore in early September when Brown warned in a CNN broadcast that the agency's budget was "a little tight." Before the month was out, President Bush had gone to Congress three times for supplemental storm appropriations totaling $12.2 billion. Two-thirds of the money was to cover FEMA's costs for the four storms. Before this year, the most the agency had spent on a natural disaster was $7 billion, after the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California.

The most unusual challenge was keeping an unprecedented relief effort going while twice being forced to evacuate the Orlando action center. It was a first for FEMA. After Hurricane Charley hit Charlotte Harbor on Florida's southwest coast, the action center sprang up virtually overnight to dispatch help to stricken communities, review applications for financial assistance and oversee reconstruction of public infrastructure. An empty office building suddenly was brimming with people-about 1,400 FEMA reservists and local hires, along with representatives from more than two dozen federal agencies and their state government counterparts. Many were sent to Atlanta before Frances struck the southeast coast, and then fled again 20 days later to avoid becoming victims of Jeanne.

By the time Ivan blew through, Colangelo had been on duty in Orlando for a month, working night and day. "We consider this like a war, and these waves of attacks are coming in, and we get hit, and we regroup, and we hit back," he said during a tour of the facility Sept. 17.

"I've never seen such dedication," Colangelo said. "I have to tell these people, 'You need to take a day off . . . you need to chill out.'" Reviewing his own timesheet-more than 200 hours for a two-week pay period-he added, "And I have to speak to myself about that, too."