Blowing in the Florida wind

By Daniel Lak BBC, Punta Gorda

Florida has just experienced the worst storm to hit the state since 1992. Sixteen people were killed and tens of thousands more were evacuated. Many have now returned to find they have lost not only their homes but also all their possessions as Hurricane Charley pursued its path of destruction.

Houses collapsed and trailer parks became heaps of twisted metal

This was not the first time I have rushed to the aftermath of a tropical storm with a camera crew and a satellite telephone.

For 12 years, I covered South Asia for the BBC and I grew to dread the annual cyclone season and the accompanying trips to sodden coastal areas of eastern India or Bangladesh.

There we would see tens of thousands of families who had lost everything, people to whom survival was almost a curse. No-one has insurance along the shores of the Bay of Bengal.

So I found myself wondering, as I went to Punta Gorda in south-west Florida, where Hurricane Charley made landfall last week, about the nature of suffering in America.

Does a natural calamity devastate here as it does in South Asia?

After all, people in the US have insurance, savings, salaried jobs, and a culture that stresses self-reliance and re-inventing yourself after setbacks.

Not much to lose

I suppose I was wondering if I would have the same sense of helplessness and anger that I had felt when confronted with absolute loss in South Asia.

There I learned to temper my reactions with the thought that say, a villager in Bangladesh who loses everything may not have actually lost all that much in material terms - a house, some land, livestock, a few possessions.

But if he and his family survive and aid agencies are on hand to help, then there is a chance that his subsistence life can be pieced together again.

This is a discomforting notion, but it is also true. The world's hundreds of millions of poor people really do not have that much to lose in material terms.

Americans, on the other hand, do.

I know that far too intimately now, after a few days wandering around the ruins of peoples' lives in Punta Gorda.

Favourite things

The average American family has thousands of personal possessions: books, knick-knacks, kitchen utensils, photographs, pharmaceuticals, computer paraphernalia, music systems, CDs, containers, cushions, rugs, linens, soaps, furniture, paintings, decorations, tools, toys, videos, televisions, radios, paper goods, clothing, shoes, sporting goods, fishing gear, firearms, home improvement supplies, hobby materials... and so on.

And when a tropical storm as intense as Hurricane Charley hits, and homes literally explode as they did in Punta Gorda, those possessions swirl away on the screaming winds, later coming to rest somewhere else.

Mixed and matched with other peoples' things, trapped in trees, growing soggy in pools of water, floating away on the ocean currents.

Strewn all around the utterly devastated trailer park that was my broadcasting site in south Florida earlier this week were peoples' possessions, mingled and mangled in the aftermath of the storm.

That list I ran through a minute or so ago, that was from my notebook, things that lay along my path as I walked for a while around the grounds of the park and wrote down what I saw.

Each object, each thing, had a place in someone's home, a shelf or a corner or a bit of wall space where it sat for a reason, placed there to define something that was important to its owner.

Salvage

Now it was rubbish, the leavings of Hurricane Charley, of little use to anyone as it rusted or crumbled in the open.

The volume of material possessions is a nightmare for insurers too

Families searched for seemingly unusual things when they returned to their wrecked homes.

I watched a husband, wife and son ignore largely undamaged power tools and kitchen items, as they fossicked through the rubble, pulling out what remained of a collection of coloured glass perfume bottles.

Nearby, a woman kicked and broke intact china plates as she bemoaned the loss of a chess set bought during a holiday in Mexico. Not a single piece could be found.

A young boy, perhaps 10 years old, cried and fumed as he stood in the middle of what used to be his bedroom.

All he wanted, he told me, was his baseball card collection, 700 cards painstakingly gathered up. Who knows where they had ended up.

Perhaps it is wrong of me to dwell on such things.

Perhaps I should be commending the Florida authorities for a successful evacuation of the hurricane area. Or telling tales of survivors who rode out the storm in trailer homes that pitched up and down and undulated along the winds.

But I cannot stop thinking about how what we own and accumulate often defines us. And how what happens when a catastrophe hits makes a mockery of a lifetime of accumulation.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Thursday, 19 August, 2004 at 1100BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.