My lifelong friend Mickey works for the Federal Government and she is in Florida. I am posting her newsletter. Water! Water! Everywhere!!

I am in Ft. Meyers, Florida with 37 people from Bureau of Reclamation. We are helping the Corp of Engineers (COE) with their ?BLUE ROOF? mission for the victims from hurricane Charley. Because so many people had roof damage or maybe even lost their entire roof, the COE supplies a heavy blue plastic and contractors temporary install this until a permanent work can be done. The contractor is paid by the square foot. My crew measures the house, figures square footage, ( including pitch, additions, etc.) and then signs off on the invoice that the contractor uses to get paid. Sound easy? It?s a lot easier than the debris we did last year in Virginia but it still involves 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, plus 1-2 hours travel time just to get to where you get your assignment for the day. Hotel rooms are hard to come by so finding one close to where you work is near impossible. Finding the list of homes that you are responsible for inspecting in a day can be a real challenge, also. So far, there have been over 19,000 roofs completed with more to come. A contractor with a crew of 4 men can finish 4 houses a day. There are several contracting companies here and I know one has 150 crews doing nothing but blue roofs. One of my people can inspect 10 - 15 homes on a good day if the houses are all in the same area and easy to find. I have sent picture along but they may not show up too well in black and white.

Now that I have told you about a typical day, let me tell you about a not so typical one. Saturday, Sept. 25th, everyone had to report to the office at noon for a head count. Once we knew everyone was present, they were told to go to their hotel rooms and stay put until hurricane Jeanne passed. They called it ?hunker down?. Instructions were given about what you should stock up on, what to do if you are in the eye of the storm, what channels to watch on TV with local news, and basically just how to weather out the storm. Everyone had to check in with their immediate supervisor at 5 pm on Sat. and then again at 8am and 5pm on Sun. The supervisor reports to me and I in return call the COE to say everyone in my crew is accounted for. The COE knew we were stressed about being in a hurricane so they made an extra effort to ease our worries and make sure we were all safe. Although I didn?t have a COE person holding my hand during the night when it got really scary.

Riding out the storm was interesting to say the least. We started getting wind by 1 Sat. afternoon that has never stopped, only varied in speed. At 10 pm, Jeanne?s eye hit land on the east side of Florida with computer models predicting it to run north up the coast. But Jeanne had her own plan. By 1am Sunday morning, Jeanne was still headed due west with 15 of us in her path. Luckily she started inching north, narrowing missing us but headed toward the rest of my crew that had moved closer to their work in Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda. Everyone survived and now have their own story to tell their families, friends or anyone else who will listen how they rode out hurricane Jeanne. At 3am, I went out on the deck to see if I could do a ?on the spot reporting for CNN?. It wasn?t really that bad but we only had a category 2 here. I had taken picture of our court yard which has a pool, bar and lots of palm trees before and during the storm. I don?t know how well you can see the palms bent by the wind. I also took picture of the beach Sat. afternoon with people playing in the calm water and then how close the water got to the hotel at high tide around noon today. Every room on the first floor has been closed and under reconstruction due to water damage since Charley. They are almost finished and I was afraid all their work was in vain but we were very lucky here at Ft. Meyer Beach. Other parts of the area were not so lucky. I imagine that a lot of those blue roofs in other parts of the state have blown away. The real challenge here may be to get every thing covered before another hurricane hits. We started out afraid we might run out of work before our time was up, now we are concerned if we can get all our work done before we leave.

This is Mickey Starr reporting live from the hurricane stricken state of Florida. :>)