TAMPA, Fla. — On Aug. 13, 2004, Hurricane Charley had Tampa Bay in a bullseye. A major shift to the right put former ABC Action News reporter Don Germaise and photographer Tim Jones, where they never expected to be in the eye of the storm.
Charley made landfall as a major category-four hurricane with winds at 150mph near Cayo Costa, just west of Fort Myers.
Germaise became well-known as "hunker down" Don for his coverage of Charley. It was also the beginning of Denis Phillips' signature look: his suspenders.
Looking back on twenty years, many viewers may not know that chasing hurricanes was not Germaise's favorite part of the job, and through all the coverage, they got lucky "dodging a lot of bullets."
For most of the forecast, this was "Tampa's storm," according to Phillips.
Then, about six hours before landfall, Phillips made the call on live TV; Charley was making a significant turn to the East.
All of the live trucks at the Holiday Inn in Punta Gorda were damaged, except for the ABC Action News satellite truck, which allowed Germaise and his team to report the first live shots and images of the destruction.
Although the technology to predict storms is better, Phillips said there are no guarantees on where a storm might make landfall.
Germaise said once Phillips told him the storm was coming for him, they "stopped covering the storm, and we went door to door knocking on the hotel room doors to tell people they have to evacuate. They have to get out of there. And a lot of people said, well, 'Where are we going to go?' I suggest 'start driving inland because you're not going to want to be here.' About an hour after we did that, the sheriff's office came up and started knocking on doors. But we got people out of here an hour early just by doing that. They listened, and we saved some lives that day."
A state report says hundreds of frail elderly nursing home residents were stacked side by side, head to toe in a small church with no working air conditioning or refrigerator during Hurricane Helene.
