This is the hurricane season so be careful you’re not blown away!

Rescuers raced into southwest Florida yesterday to search for victims and help survivors of Hurricane Charley, a devastating storm that levelled buildings and left up to one million without power…

Hurricane Charley killed at least 15 people in Florida and flattened oceanfront homes, making thousands homeless before it roared north and struck the coast of South Carolina yesterday.

The strongest storm to strike Florida in a dozen years knocked out electrical service to an estimated two million homes and businesses as it crossed Florida from the southwest coast at Punta Gorda to the Atlantic at Daytona Beach.

“I could hear the nails coming out of the roof. The walls were shaking violently, back and forth, back and forth. It was just the most amazing and terrifying thing,” said Anne Correia, who spent two hours in a closet in her apartment in Punta Gorda, 120 kilometres (75 miles) south of Tampa.

After tearing across Florida, Charley’s generally northward course took it across open ocean, missing the Georgia shore, before it made landfall for a second time on South Carolina’s Grand Strand resort region. The area was nearly empty after a mandatory evacuation of some of the area’s 180,000 tourists and residents.

Still A Hurricane

The storm still packed winds of 75 mph (120.675 kph), considerably weaker than its sustained speed of 233 kph (145 mph) Friday but still enough to classify it as a hurricane.

No exact death toll was available but 10 deaths had been confirmed in Charlotte County, where Punta Gorda is located, said Wayne Sallade, the county’s director of emergency management. There were five confirmed storm-related deaths elsewhere in the state, bringing the total death toll to 15.

“Not hundreds. I would hope that it would be limited to dozens, if that,” Sallade said. Deputies were standing guard over bodies because they were in areas not immediately accessible by ambulances.

President George W. Bush said he would visit Florida today to see the damage. He already had declared storm-struck counties a major disaster area.

His brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, completed a helicopter tour of the region, saying, “Our worst fears have come true.”