1 Places that Disasters Leave Behind 1 Bruce Janz September 10, 2004 In 2004 Orlando Florida was hit with an almost unprecedented series of storms and hurricanes. Within less than a month, Hurricane Charley and Hurricane Frances hit, and Hurricane Ivan made a near miss. Billions of dollars of damage resulted from these disasters, and several dozen lives were lost. It is tempting, in the case of extreme events, to either regard them as having no need of interpretation, or as a kind of rare window on the workings of a community. 2 In this paper I want to examine the public construction of meaning of the hurricane, particularly in Orlando, and compare it with the construction of the hurricane in a community that was also on the path of the hurricane, Ft. Myers, as well as another disaster situation I am familiar with, which was the bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. I am particularly interested in place-making, that is, the ways in which places gain or fail to gain meaning at times of stress. I will suggest that opportunities for place-making were lost in Orlando, and were more fully realized in both Ft. Myers and Nairobi, because the events around Hurricane Charley were framed differently by the media. Hurricane Frances, though, was treated differently in the Orlando press A word of explanation is needed at the beginning. In speaking of a disaster as “constructed”, I do not mean to minimize its impact on people and communities. “Construction” refers to the rhetorical ways in which we choose to understand the world. Hurricanes and bomb attacks happen, of course, and they are not made up. Certainly their effects are profound, disruptive, and in many cases fatal. However, we have choices of interpretation in these cases. One might, for example (and some did)