By Mark Curnutte
Enquirer staff writer

PUNTA GORDA, Fla. - Nancy Overman kept an anxious watch over her driveway Tuesday afternoon.

It wasn't potential looters that worried the Northern Kentucky native. She was on the lookout for her insurance adjuster.

Her concrete-block and stucco home of 19 years was heavily damaged Friday when Hurricane Charley slammed into Charlotte Harbor, up the Peace River and onto Arcadia.

"We feel helpless until the adjuster gets here," she said. "We don't know what to do."

The fourth day after the Category 4 hurricane was one of waiting and almost futile cleanup.

Jim and Nancy Overman, 60, picked up and left Northern Kentucky almost 20 years ago. She is a fifth-grade teacher. He quit his job at United Parcel Service and started his own business - concrete specialty landscape decorations - in Punta Gorda. The business was also damaged.

"It was supposed to be Category 2. It was supposed to go north or south of us," Nancy Overman said.

"The next thing we knew, it's a Category 4 and headed right for us."

Like most of their neighbors, the Overmans spray-painted the name of their insurance company on their garage door. And after removing the door to free her car, they spray-painted the name on a board and leaned it against the house.

Jim, their adult son, was visiting when Charley hit. The three took cover in a bathtub and covered themselves with a mattress.

"The wall behind us vibrated," she said.

Winds reached 145 mph, cutting a several-miles-wide swatch of destruction through Punta Gorda and neighboring Port Charlotte.

The eeriest part of the two-hour ordeal was when the eye of the Hurricane passed over the area.

"It was calm, beautiful blue sky and sunny," she said.

Then they heard the wind coming again, the volume even greater than the first half of the storm.

"We got back in the tub," she said.

Nancy Overman next remembers looking at her watch: 7 p.m. Their first move was to use a leaf rake to clean the broken glass off their living room carpet. A corner of their master bedroom was open to the sky. Loose tiles threatened to fall from the roof.

They tried to call relatives, including Jim's brother, Paul Overman, in Fort Thomas.

"Every couple of hours, you could get a cell call out; and then it was just like every other word," she said. "I kept saying: 'We're alive. We're alive.#"

Four days later, she grieves. Tears fall frequently in a conversation. Jim Overman chooses not to talk about the experience. He spent Tuesday afternoon cleaning debris out of their pool. Nancy's sister, Janice Perkins, and her husband, Allen, had driven over the weekend from Melbourne, Ky. They brought a dozen sheets of plywood in the bed of a pickup.

The Overmans and their son spent Friday night in the house. Convinced that their property would be safe from looters because of the presence of National Guard troops and police, they have been staying about a half-hour down Interstate 75 at her sister's house in Fort Myers.

There is plenty of built-in perspective. The house next door was finished just six weeks ago for a couple moving down from Maine. They're also thankful to be alive.

Nancy Overman acknowledged that severe weather is the flipside to the warmth of the Florida sun.

"You expect tropical storms. You've heard about hurricanes. But you think you're like the teenager who drag races. You know the dangers, but it's always the other guy who gets hurt."

The Overmans will stay and rebuild if they can. The process could take up to a year.

E-mail mcurnutte@enquirer.com