Talk of the bay

Charley and Frances mean long days, odd calls at AAA South

With hurricanes Charley and Frances tearing through Florida, emergency road service operators at AAA South have been flooded with calls from stranded motorists.

"It has been insane," said Desiree Caban, assistant manager of the St. Petersburg call center that dispatches wreckers for most of Florida.

At its busiest the center fielded a record 1,700 calls an hour. AAA set a single-day record of 14,614 calls on the Tuesday after Labor Day, including 4,900 requests for tow trucks.

Floods, evacuation orders and shuttered gas stations cut the number of wreckers normally available in half and severely limited where they could be driven. Meantime, operators were juggling more than double the call volume for a busy day. With two and three hour waits for service common, emotions were frayed.

Some requests, however, were off the wall. A St. Petersburg woman wanted a tow truck to rescue her car from flooded Shore Acres and deliver it to her sister's place on the mainland. A Gainesville woman who had had her car towed to a repair shop that had not opened for three days because of downed power lines in the parking lot insisted her car somehow be retrieved and towed to another repair shop. Several callers wanted vehicles fished out of the middle of sprawling RV parks that were underwater themselves.

Many operators worked 10- to 14-hour days. Some had no power at home and all but lived at work, once AAA brought in cots, offered limited meals and provided day care.

Staffers, however, remain haunted by the memory of one caller who drove into a ditch and said his car was filling up with water. The operator quickly alerted 911, but while waiting for help, the caller was cut off in midsentence when the line went dead.

"We never found out what happened to him," said Caban.