Wilma Leaves Millions Without Power

After seeming to weaken following its weekend rampage through Mexico, Hurricane Wilma surprised some southern Florida residents and meteorologists when it found renewed energy from the warm waters of the Gulf. The storm walloped the Florida coast on Monday with a quick but powerful punch -- knocking down trees, flooding low-lying areas, and leaving millions of residents without electricity as it steamrolled its way into the Atlantic.

Wilma made landfall south of Naples, Florida, just before dawn on Monday as a Category 3 storm -- with 125-mile-per-hour winds and "fierce horizontal rain." By mid-morning, the storm was downgraded to a Category 2 when winds "slowed, modestly, to about 110 miles-per-hour," the New York Times reported.

Many Florida residents, frustrated and tired after suffering through the eighth hurricane in the last 15 months, have been left standing in seemingly endless lines, waiting for basic necessities such as gas, water, ice, groceries, and money. Damages in Wilma's wake have been estimated by some analysts to be upwards of $10 billion, which would rank it among the 10 most expensive storms to hit the U.S., Reuters noted.

Since Monday, Bookselling This Week has attempted to contact the numerous independent booksellers in the south Florida region with limited success. As of press time, telephone lines were still out in the Miami region and a number of calls to bookstores with working phone lines went unanswered, as store owners wait for power to be restored before returning to their businesses.

In Boynton Beach, on the East Coast of Florida, Denise Evans, manager of Pyramid Books, reported, "They said it was a Category 2, but it seemed more like a 3! At first, basically we got the eye of the storm. But once that passed -- that back wind ... it was something else."

Evans said it was one of the worst storms she had ever experienced. In the Boynton Beach area, "there are a lot of downed power lines and poles, and there are a lot of people without telephones. Gas is scarce."

The bookstore suffered minor water damage and remains without power, said Evans. "That's basically it. We're still standing. We held up pretty good."

On the West Coast of Florida, Sanibel Island reopened on Wednesday, as did the Sanibel Island Book Shop, said Ginny Fellows. "We were closed from Thursday until [Wednesday]," she said. "There was a mandatory evacuation." She said the store has some water damage that has put "our electricity on the fritz."

In Miami, though phones are out, Mitchell Kaplan, ABA president and owner of Books & Books, in Coral Gables, Florida, contacted ABA staff via cell phone to inform them that he and his family are fine and the stores suffered only minor damage. As is the case throughout a great portion of southern Florida, at the time, the stores had no electricity.

As of early Wednesday, BTW was unable to reach booksellers at the following stores in areas plagued by lack of utilities: Miami Museum of Science Store in Miami; Palm Beach Bookstore in Palm Beach; Rex Artist Supplies in Miami; University of Miami Bookstore in Coral Gables; and Cypress Paperback Exchange in Fort Myers. --David Grogan