DAPHNE, Alabama — Thirty-five years after Hurricane Frederic tore through Baldwin County, Charles and Kaye Desmond still swap stories about the storm that nearly separated them and the days afterward when their Lake Forest subdivision home became the unofficial power hub of the neighborhood.
A race against the storm
In 1979, Charles drove trucks for a freight line and had just dropped a load in Houston when his company ordered every driver to hold trucks east of the storm until Frederic passed. Charles and four coworkers who also called the Mobile area home weren’t willing to wait it out in Texas. They told their supervisor that if the company wouldn’t let them drive the trucks back, they would rent a car and make the trip themselves. The company relented, but not without a catch: a cooler manufacturer loaded the outbound trucks with empty ice chests to make use of the trip, even though the lightweight cargo wasn’t heavy enough to properly ballast an 18-wheeler for high winds.
No interstate, no shelter from the wind
Rather than take the interstate, the drivers stuck to Highway 90, a route that offered no real protection once the wind picked up. Despite the lighter-than-ideal loads and the exposed highway, the five drivers made it back to the Mobile Bay area with roughly half a day to spare before Frederic made landfall. Charles and Kaye were living in Daphne’s Lake Forest subdivision at the time, and while the storm caused only modest damage to their house, it did something more valuable for their neighbors: it left their power line largely intact while everyone else went dark.
The house that kept the neighborhood cold
Word spread quickly that the Desmonds still had electricity, and soon their garage looked more like a small appliance store than a home. At the peak of it, the couple counted a dozen neighbors’ chest freezers plugged in and running off their line, daisy-chained together with cord after cord. Kaye remembers their own washer and dryer working overtime to help other families get clean clothes, a favor that ultimately wore out both machines and left the couple needing replacements once the crisis passed.
Seeing the damage from the air
In the storm’s aftermath, roads throughout the area were blocked by downed trees, work crews and law enforcement, making it nearly impossible to get around Baldwin County by car. The Desmonds got a different view of the destruction instead. A family friend who flew for an area oil company offered to take them up for a look at the damage from above. Kaye and her sons went up on one flight, while Charles and his daughter took a separate trip. What they saw from the air, Kaye recalled, was a landscape that looked completely flattened below them.
More than three decades later, the Desmonds’ account remains one of many oral histories still being collected from the Alabama Gulf Coast about Hurricane Frederic, a storm that reshaped how Baldwin and Mobile county communities thought about hurricane preparedness for a generation.