38 Dead in Worst Florida Twister Attack

By MIKE CLARY

Feb. 24, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — A line of ferocious thunderstorms roared out of the Gulf and across central Florida in the predawn darkness Monday, spawning up to 10 tornadoes that killed 38 people in what authorities called the deadliest outbreak of twisters in the state’s history.

The El Nino-related storm, one of a series to pummel the state this winter, struck while most Floridians were in bed. Hundreds of homes, many of them trailer homes, were leveled. Cars were tossed into living rooms.

With several people still missing, authorities said that the death toll could rise.

In Osceola County, south of Orlando, an 18-month-old toddler was ripped from his father’s arms by the winds and disappeared. The child “got sucked out into the tornado,” said Osceola County Fire Chief Jeff Hall. His body was found Monday afternoon.

More than 250 people were reported injured by the twisters and power was knocked out to about 135,000 customers.

Many of those who survived were badly frightened. “You could feel the wind and the suction coming through and I just told the kids, ‘Hang on, hang on,’ ” said Ann Graulich, who took refuge in a closet after the roof of her house blew away.

Especially hard-hit were two trailer parks in this city just 10 miles from Walt Disney World, Universal Studios and other major tourist attractions. The theme parks escaped damage and were open for business as usual Monday.

But 13 people died at the nearby Ponderosa Park, a trailer park and campground just behind the stadium that is the spring training home of the Houston Astros. One Ponderosa Park resident died after he apparently was blown over a fence and across a culvert onto the Florida Turnpike. The north-south thoroughfare was shut down just after 1 a.m. Monday as police and volunteers cleared the roadway of the body and debris, including several tents.

“What are you supposed to do now? Especially when you are 73 years old?” asked Josephine Wolfe with tears in her eyes. She said she was pinned under a kitchen table when the storm flipped the trailer in which she and her husband, Ned, have lived at Ponderosa Park for 19 years. “Look, it ruined our new truck--it only had 700 miles on it. We’re not rich.

“We’d have been better off if it killed us.”

Before Wolfe and her husband--his face raw with cuts, scrapes and bruises--were allowed by officials to poke through the wreckage of their home, he turned to reporters to lament: “No money, no ID, no nothing--we lost everything.”

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the people in Central Florida,” said President Clinton, who dispatched Federal Emergency Management Agency director James Lee Witt to the stricken area. Clinton plans to visit the area Wednesday.

Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles and Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) toured several of the hardest-hit areas, where damage is sure to climb into the tens of millions of dollars. “My feelings right now go out to family and friends of those who lost their lives,” said Mack, “and those who must have been filled with terror last night.”

The thunderstorms that produced an estimated six to 10 tornadoes roared in from the Gulf of Mexico as Sunday turned to Monday, moving across the state in a diagonal line. The first twister was reported before midnight near Daytona Beach on Florida’s east coast, where one man died inside his trailer.

Next, 11 people died near Sanford, north of Orlando, and storms then touched down in the Buenaventura Lakes area of Osceola County, where six were killed. Also battered was the Orange County town of Winter Garden, where an apartment complex blew apart. More than 100 mobile homes were damaged or destroyed in Orange County, which includes Orlando.

The Kissimmee twisters struck about 1 a.m. “When we got here, there were people running, real panicky,” said Deputy Chief Don Adams of the Osceola County Volunteer Fire Department, still on duty at Ponderosa Park at mid-morning Monday. “It was just chaos.”

With morning light, firefighters and police, employing dogs trained to hunt for dead or injured, picked their way through the shattered community, where trailers were overturned with wheels in the air, large oaks and pines were snapped and uprooted and huge sheets of metal siding were crumpled like paper. Littering the ground was the evidence of lives turned topsy-turvy: family photos, shoes, stuffed animals, a hair brush.

“I can’t believe this damage,” said Doris Fisher, 75, who appeared stunned and confused as she walked among the debris clutching a plastic bag of medicines and a bottle of prune juice she had recovered from her home. “I had friends who died here. The Lord help us.”

By midmorning, relatives who had not heard from Ponderosa Park residents were showing up to look for them. As one crying woman waited, Adams consulted a list of handwritten names in vain, and then suggested that the woman check with two nearby hospitals, the emergency shelters and the morgue.

The killer tornadoes that blasted this area are just the latest and most brutal assault by a spate of extraordinary weather believed connected to El Nino, the warm-water Pacific phenomenon that has made storms more intense in various sections of the United States, including California. The Tampa area has recorded more than 30 inches of rainfall in the last three months, 4 1/2 times normal. Rainfall in the Orlando and Daytona Beach areas is also triple and double of normal, respectively, and rivers throughout Central Florida are at flood stage.

From the magnitude of the wreckage, one National Weather Service forecaster, Bob Ebaugh, estimated that the tornadoes may have produced winds of more than 200 miles an hour.

Tornadoes and violent storms are normally rare in Florida’s winters. “We may see one or two storms like this in a given winter and this year this is probably our eighth or tenth to take a track like this,” said Scott Spratt, a National Weather Service forecaster in Melbourne, Fla. “Obviously, this is not a typical year and El Nino is affecting our weather down here.”

The northern edge of the storm system also lashed parts of Georgia with up to five inches of rain.

Although Central Florida residents were warned throughout the day Sunday to expect severe storms, tornadoes are near impossible to predict and their behavior is capricious and hit-or-miss. Where one home is torn apart, another just feet away remains unscathed.

“I heard the wind, but nothing happened to our trailer,” said Cliff Smith, 53. “A half hour later, the police ordered us to evacuate and I went out and found people wandering around in shock.”

Jerry Rivera and companion Mary Ann Ott, both 49, returned to their intact 32-foot trailer home in Ponderosa Park on Monday to retrieve their three cats, marveling at their good fortune. “I heard it coming and we ran to the hallway where I got on top of her [Ott] on the floor,” recalled Rivera as he stood on the street outside the trailer park cradling his fat, gray cat Samantha. “I was thinking, ‘This is it.’ But we were spared. I don’t know why. We were the lucky ones.”

In what previously was the most severe outbreak of tornadoes to strike Florida, 17 people died in the Panhandle region in 1962.

The same number of people died in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew struck south Florida. Property damage in that storm was far more widespread and exceeded $30 billion, one of the most costly natural disasters in U.S. history.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story from Miami.

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Deadliest Tornadoes

Nation’s deadliest tornadoes, not including Monday’s:

Date: May 31, 1985

Deaths: 90

Location: Ohio, Pennsylvania

Date: March 28, 1984

Deaths: 67

Location: North and South Carolina

Date: April 3-4, 1974

Deaths: 350