Even 20 years later, one of Brevard's worst hurricane seasons still haunts
Some say 'things happen in threes.' But in 2004, our hurricanes happened in four, with two by far the most destructive.
Hurricane Charley barely bruised us. Frances seemed Biblical in nature. It spun over the Space Coast for almost two days, mauled manufacture homes, ravaged roofs — including on an iconic church — and swiped ungodly volumes of sand from beaches. Ivan didn't do much here. Then Jeanne, the fourth hurricane in six weeks, finished off the roofs and wood frames Frances had frazzled. A Palm Bay man drowned when his pickup truck ran into a deep flooded roadside ditch.
But things could have been much worse, especially on the barrier island, were it not for years of dredging and pumping sand onto Brevard beaches.
At the 20 year mark of that historic hurricane season, FLORIDA TODAY decided to take a look back at how the 2004 storms swept Brevard out of its complacency, in a year national media dubbed us "the plywood state." Much of the story can be told in the indelible images that still leave marks on the county's collective consciousness.
Looking back at Brevard's 2004 hurricane season
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The lessons were many.
"We're learning more that hurricanes, they tend to group," said Stetson University Professor Jason Evans, a national expert on sea-level rise. Evans says the 2004 storms also taught us that because of climate change hurricane impacts are getting more extreme, way beyond what homes, stormwater and sewage systems built under outdated codes were designed to handle.
"We know that the rain storms are getting stronger and are getting more intense," Evans said.
The 2004 hurricane season was a wakeup call for Florida, which had been hit with just three major hurricanes in the previous 30 years. "It really raised the public awareness. Florida really hadn't been hit by hurricanes in a while," Evans said.
"We got this hurricane amnesia here in Florida."
Charley barely nips North Brevard
In mid August 2004, Brevard barely flinched when Hurricane Charley skimmed the northernmost segment of the county with minimal damage, after pummeling Port Charlotte in Southwest Florida.
Brevardians for decades had come to expect as much: Many a major storm has threatened the Space Coast, but no Category 3 or higher hurricane has ever made landfall here in almost 170 years forecasters have been keeping records.
In any given year, the chances of hurricane-force winds of 115 mph or greater in Brevard is only about 1 percent, according to the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University.
And Charley was no exception, with a light breeze by Brevard that again made most here shrug in indifference.
Southwest Florida had no such luck. Charley's 145-mph winds hammered Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte, damaging 12,000 homes.
With Brevard barely scathed, the late Bob Lay, then Brevard County Emergency Management Director, headed to Charlotte County to help officials there deal with the devastation. He got some quick real-life lessons on dealing with the aftermath of a disaster.
Those lessons immediately went into play as Frances was forming and Lay was on his way back to Brevard.
Frances' windy wakeup call
Just weeks after Charley spared us, hurricanes Frances and Jeanne delivered a harsh one-two punch more than 100 miles south of the Space Coast.
But even though the eyewalls of two hurricanes, a Category 2 and 3, respectively, were far away, their outer bands were more than enough to teach Brevard a lesson: any brush with a hurricane can be bad.
In one of the most memorable structural injuries that year, the wrath of Hurricane Frances ripped the cross-topped steeple off the First Baptist Church in Cocoa Beach. Frances flipped the spire upside down, sending the steeple stabbing through the church's roof like a sword — almost as if the Lord was trying to send us a message.
Frances was a blustery, lengthy, dry storm that took out or ripped apart countless "structurally unsound trees" in Brevard. That added future missiles for Jeanne.
"Frances just stayed and stayed," Lay told FLORIDA TODAY on the three-year anniversary of the storm. "That's the hurricane to take forever to get here and took forever to leave here."
Frances wrought an estimated $277.6 million in damage in Brevard, with about $100 million of that to military and space facilities on or around Cape Canaveral.
NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building, which at the time hosted the space shuttle, lost 820 4-by-16-foot panels or more than 52,000 square feet of its surface, according to a report at the time by then Kennedy Space Center Director Jim Kennedy. "The external tanks and forward and aft skirts for the solid rocket boosters that were inside the VAB appear to be unharmed," Kennedy wrote.
Pool on edge drew many a TV camera
It looked like a magic trick. Beach erosion from Hurricane Frances was so bad along Shell Street east of State Road A1A in Satellite Beach that a large portion of Ron Faulisi's pool was left seemingly levitating in mid-air from the side of his oceanfront deck. A hastily installed 4x4 timber helped prop up one corner.
The house, built in 1961 but renovated since then, become a "go-to" shot for TV news crews looking to show the extent of beach erosion there. It was the fourth time sand beneath the pool had been undermined. Unlike much of Brevard's beachfront, the area in front of the house — which Faulisi bought in January 2004 for $725,000 as an investment property — never had beach renourishment because of concerns about a rare worm that lives along Satellite Beach's rocky shore.
"I saved a few worms and a few turtles, and I'm going to lose my pool and maybe my house," he told FLORIDA TODAY at the time.
Hurricane Ivan spares Brevard
Next came Hurricane Ivan, in mid September, but it wasn't much to speak of in Brevard: just the typical surge, wind and rain. But on Sept. 16, Ivan came ashore as a Category 3 storm just west of Gulf Shores, Alabama. Eight deaths in the western Florida Panhandle (7 in Escambia County and 1 in Santa Rosa County) were the direct result.
Although there wasn't much impact in Brevard, federal aid workers who had been brought in to install blue tarps across Frances-damaged roofs pulled out of Florida as Ivan approached. Portions of the Interstate 10 bridge system across Pensacola Bay were severely damaged due to the severe wave action on top of the 10-15 foot storm surge. Storm surge occurred all the way to Tampa Bay, about 500 miles from Ivan’s point of landfall.
Even after it had pushed inland and head toward the mid-Atlantic states, Ivan wasn't done with Florida. The storm's remnants looped back south over the ocean and made a second landfall in Southeast Florida, though by then it was mostly a rain event. After returning to the warm Gulf waters it regained enough strength to become a tropical storm again as it made landfall yet again, this time in Louisiana.
Jeanne jostles a 'weary' Brevard
Hurricane Jeanne slapped Central Florida on Sept. 26, taking about the same path as Frances, but at a quicker pace. In many cases, it was tough to tell which storm caused the damage locally.
The week leading up to Jeanne's landfall was marked by large surf that added to the 20 feet of beach erosion already started by Frances. Storm surge, the water a hurricane piles on top of tidal levels, ranged from 4 to 7 feet with Jeanne, comparable to Frances.
But winds compounded Brevard's troubles in many areas. Near Patrick Space Force Base, much more sand blew over the area between the ocean and State Road A1A. Winds were worst in the southern part of the county and stronger as they were closer to where the eyewall of Jeanne came ashore, in the Fort Pierce area. Gusts of 122 mph were recorded in Vero Beach and 117 mph at Sebastian Airport, federal forecasters said. An unofficial gust near Fort Pierce was cited at 126 mph. Sustained winds were about 82 mph in Sebastian and 80 in Vero Beach, comparable to what southern Brevard County experienced.
Jeanne would rip off roofs of structures weakened by Frances.
Damages would have been much worse were it not for stronger building codes that kicked in after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida in August 1992, and subsequent building code updates since then. After the 2004 storms, most homes constructed since Florida's 2001 building code revision suffered little or no damage. The 2001 code required things such as nailing instead of stapling roof shingles, reinforced connections between a home's roof and walls, and features such as hurricane shutters or shatterproof windows to defend against flying debris.
But older structures took a beating.
Jeanne's damages in Brevard reached an estimated $320 million, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration writeup, with the Barefoot Bay mobile home community hit among the hardest.
Jeanne's strongest winds swept across the coast south of Cape Canaveral and Brevard's southern coastal communities. Grant, Micco and the south part of Palm Bay were hit much harder than North Brevard.
A Palm Bay man drowned when his pickup truck ran into a deep flooded roadside ditch.
Despite all the flooding in 2004 and since, Florida has fallen short on stormwater management, Evans, of Stetson University, says, with too much development on floodplains, without enough storage capacity for stormwater.
"I think with the wind codes, we've actually done pretty well," Evans said. "But what I don't think we've done very well.. is really in terms of flooding."
What's the latest prediction for this year's hurricane season?
The Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University predict 23 named storms in the Atlantic basin this season, compared to an average of about 14 named storms since 1991. This year's prediction includes 12 hurricanes, compared to an average of about seven since 1991.
Contact Waymer at (321) 261-5903 or [email protected]. Follow him on X at @JWayEnviro.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Two decades later, Brevard absorbs the lessons of Frances and Jeanne
