Relief efforts stretched statewide.

Florida Rural Legal Services lawyers have plenty of experience helping clients deal with crises.

But after Hurricane Frances battered Florida's East Coast, employees of the Ft. Pierce FRLS are now without an office to call home and have their own disaster to overcome.

The seawall behind the rented office near the Intracoastal Waterway broke, sending a muddy mix all over the floor. Then, the ceiling collapsed, so in poured even more water. There's no power, no phone service, and no way to stay--yet their clients' needs can't wait.

"We just heard from our landlord yesterday, and he will have to totally redo the building and that will take months and months," Christine Larson, deputy director of FRLS, said September 15, 10 days after Ft. Pierce felt Frances' fury.

"One of my employees is sleeping in a tent in her yard. They are all heroic and under stress," said Larson, who added that all 13 counties in the FRLS service area have been declared disaster areas by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Meanwhile, the Ft. Pierce staff will commute to the West Palm Beach satellite office--including one paralegal who must travel 70 miles. Some closed files were damaged, but, mercifully, open files were spared water damage and have been moved. In the same building in West Palm Beach, Bill Fraser, director of litigation of the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County, has offered to take in FRLS employees that won't fit into the FRLS satellite office across the hall.

A similar blow was leveled on the Kissimmee office of Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida.

"During Charley, the hurricane ripped our roof off and completely drenched everything in the office," said Bill Abbuehl.

"The office will have to be gutted. We have had to move out and now have a temporary location several blocks away. We hope to move into our temporary location by the end of the week," Abbuehl said September 17.

"It will take at least eight months or so to get the building renovated enough that we can reuse it. Everything was damaged: computers, copy machines, and client files. We even had to send client files to a place in Atlanta to dry them out, to freeze-dry them and send them back to us."

Yet more episodes in the horrific hurricane season of 2004 that brought three killer storms ashore in Florida in just 35 days, causing dozens of deaths, leaving thousands without homes, millions without power, and racking up billions of dollars in damage.

First Charley struck Southwest...