Bye, Utah, hello — hurricanes

Tom White is on the line from Sebring, Fla., talking about a hurricane season that has defied all odds — and hoping the trend will not continue.

A month and a half ago, on Friday the 13th, Tom and his two youngest sons, Sean and Jason, bid adieu to their home in Park City, bound for Florida, where Tom, a native Floridian, has accepted a job to drive tugboats.

Their destination was their new home in Sebring, a city located almost smack in the middle of the state.

Hours into their trip, they got word that hurricane Charley had slammed into the Florida gulf coast, finding land west of Sebring and almost right on top of places where many of the White's relatives live, including Tom's brother, whose name — appropriately or inappropriately — is Charles.

"We were already on the road and I couldn't even talk to anyone in the family because they didn't have power," remembers Tom. "I didn't even know if Florida was still there. I thought to myself, 'Dadgum, Tom, what have you done? Have you maybe made a little mistake here? Is your timing a little off?' "

Tom knows hurricanes. As a youngster growing up in Miami he remembers lying in the hallway of the family home listening to roof tiles "sail like torpedoes through the windows and smash into the walls."

In August of 1992, he was living in Homestead, west of Miami, when Andrew, the granddaddy of all hurricanes, struck the Florida coast. Andrew caused $26.5 billion in damage across the southeast United States, but what Tom remembers is walking outside the morning after and seeing a 2-by-4 stuck in the trunk of a palm tree 15 feet off the ground. "That 2-by-4 was flying through the air so fast that it went right through the tree, in one side and out the other," says Tom. "Nobody would believe it if they didn't see it."

Thoughts of Andrew and other hurricanes past accompanied Tom and his sons on their cross-country drive as Charley pounded their intended destination.

By the time they got to Florida on Thursday, Aug. 19, they were met with uprooted trees, downed telephone poles and roofless trailer parks — Charley's residue.

But Florida was still there and everyone in Tom's family was OK and so was the house Tom and his wife, Laraine, who has stayed back in Utah to tie up loose ends, had already agreed to buy.

Tom and the boys were in their new home about a week before rumblings of the next hurricane, Frances, began surfacing.

By the weekend of Sept. 4, Frances hit Florida, coming ashore at Port Charlotte on the gulf coast and sideswiping Sebring as it made its way northward.