I've got the hurricane blues/Baby, you hit me like a hurricane.
Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who represents the hard-hit Palm Beach area -- where a half-million people are without power -- said Sunday that a $3.5 billion measure to cover relief costs and to bolster Army Corps of Engineers beach re-nourishment projects will be presented to Congress. The governor urged congressional leaders to make the relief money a stand-alone bill -- simultaneously taking a broadside at the previous hurricane relief package, which he said was tacked onto legislation that also paid for drought projects in South Dakota.
Braving high winds, Troy Taynton of Satellite Beach, Fla., checks the damage to his neighbor's home that was caused by Hurricane Jeanne.
(Red Huber -- Orlando Sentinel Via AP)
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Jeanne Batters Florida: Hurricane Jeanne is the fourth hurricane to hit Florida this year, tracing almost the same course as Hurricane Frances followed.
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Projected Path: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's predictions for the storm and weather forecasts for major cities in the eastern United States.
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Jeanne Wrecks Barefoot Bay: It only took a few minutes to make a mess of the Barefoot Bay retirement community, a sprawling mobile-home park.
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"It's Washington, and it's a month before the election," he said.
The storm that had Bush worrying about election-year money games was stronger than Frances by a long stretch. Jeanne carried 120-mph sustained winds and 140-mph gusts, compared with Frances's 105-mph onslaught. But its effects will be less widespread than the massive Frances, which spread clouds over the entire state for much of three days and left 6 million people without power.
Still, Jeanne's winds and rains were making life miserable over hundreds of miles of Florida as it headed toward Georgia, cutting a triangle of destruction that stretched from Cape Canaveral to the north and Palm Beach to the south, and into towns across the interior of the state. Florida Power & Light officials said some areas will not have electricity for three weeks, and 70,000 people on the Panhandle are still without power because of Ivan, which hit Sept. 16.
Rain and wind pelted Orlando with such ferocity that residents stayed inside for much of the morning, fearful of venturing out. More than 120 miles inland from Jeanne's first landfall at Stuart, signs were toppled and roofs were torn apart in Haines City, which has been hit by three hurricanes this year.
"I don't know where that came from," said Frank Brady, 85, as he pointed out two 10-foot slabs of roofing in his Haines City driveway. "I don't think it's mine."
Ironically, the drumbeat of hurricanes may have helped lessen the effect of Jeanne in some ways. Officials in soggy Vero Beach said the drenching from the remnants of Hurricane Ivan, which primarily affected the Panhandle and southern Alabama, saturated piles of debris. That made the refuse heavier and less prone to be tossed into the air by Jeanne's winds.
But such graces were minor consolations in a state in which "broken" and "tattered" are descriptions now as commonplace as "sunny" and "beautiful."
"I'm tired of this," said Eddie Pass, 69, an Oyster Bay, N.Y., native who works as a salesman at Carl's Buick-Pontiac-GMC in Stuart. "It's crazy. I came down to paradise. It makes you think: 'What am I doing here?' "
Staff writer Shankar Vedantam in Haines City and special correspondents Catharine Skipp in Stuart and Milton R. Benjamin in Vero Beach contributed to this report.
