Baby boom hits Florida after '04 hurricanes

Hospital maternity wards report spikes in birth rates in wake of storms

	Allan Woolard and his girlfriend, Edie De la Cruz, look at their newborn baby Michael at Florida Hospital in Orlando, Fla., July 1. The couple says their child was conceived last year when three hurricanes hit the Orlando area.
Phelan M. Ebenhack / AP

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updated 5:47 p.m. ET July 7, 2005

ORLANDO, Fla. - Allan Woolard and his girlfriend, Edie de la Cruz, woke early the morning after Hurricane Jeanne whacked their neighborhood. They wanted to see the damage, and there was plenty: trees, roofs, porches, power lines — all wet, all on the ground.

Their house, miraculously, was untouched. Still, Orlando’s roads were flooded, and the electricity and phones were out. To pass some time, they broke out the water bottles and crackers, and started a puzzle.

When they finished it, they played bingo. When they finished that, they talked — and talked, and talked, until dusk thankfully fell. Allan lit some candles. Edie fidgeted. She was feeling a little bored. So was Allan.

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They traded looks.

And ...

Nine months after all those rounds of bingo, Allan and Edie are enjoying their first baby — a 6-pound, 2-ounce boy, whom they named Michael. Like many Florida couples during the hurricane blitz of 2004, they did more than take refuge in the closet.

'It really was romantic'
“It really was romantic,” Edie, a 39-year-old medical technologist, recalled recently, hours after her son was born. “We’d just gone through a traumatic storm, and we’d helped each other through it, and — well, it gave us a real feeling of closeness.”

Says Allan, a 41-year-old forklift operator: “Our power was out for three days. What else were we going to do?”

Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne brought much heartache to Floridians in 2004. Families were split up, careers interrupted, marriages postponed; businesses, schools, post offices and hospitals shut down for weeks, even months.

Some Floridians, however, say there has been a blessed aftershock this summer: a bumper baby crop, the “hurricane baby boom” of 2005.

Hospitals across central Florida are reporting double-digit spikes in births, a phenomenon many obstetricians, nurses and parents attribute to three hurricanes that crisscrossed the region in August and September.

In Orlando, which was slapped by Charley, Frances and Jeanne, deliveries at Winter Park Memorial were up 26 percent from May 20 to June 7, compared with the same period in 2004.

The Florida Hospital in Orlando saw a 24 percent spike in May; Central Florida Regional, in nearby Sanford, and Health Central, in the neighboring city of Ocoee, reported similar increases.

And in Daytona Beach, deliveries shot up 25 percent at the Halifax Medical Center in late May, and 21 percent for the month of June, according to Kate Holcomb, a hospital spokeswoman.

Halifax, it turns out, was ready; enrollment in its birthing classes had risen 50 percent by early May, and so, expeditiously, noted Holcomb, “we had ordered a few extra diapers.”

CONTINUED : Stuck in the dark

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