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In Florida, life without air conditioning can be suffocating

Air conditioning is so essential to survival in Florida that we call it "air." Same as oxygen. Without it, you die. Slowly. Suffocating on your own sweat.


So, in essence, air conditioning invented Florida.

"Florida as we know it would not exist without air conditioning. We'd probably still be a state of 4 or 5 million instead of 19 million," said Raymond Ostby Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg who has written about the effect of air conditioning in Florida.

No air, no Disney World, Arsenault said. Simple as that.

A Floridian, John Gorrie, is often credited as the "father of air conditioning" and the ice machine. Think about it: The motel ice machine and anemic room air conditioner are descended from the same man.

But more often, New York-born Willis Carrier is regarded as the "Father of Cool" for inventing the mechanical air conditioner in 1902.

Air conditioning didn't become part of the average Florida home until the 1950s with the advent of the window unit. That was followed by central air in the 1960s and the heat pump, which provides warmth and cooling, in the 1970s. Before that, air conditioning was used as a selling point by movie theaters, motels, restaurants and cities.

Sarasota was once promoted in song as "the Air-Conditioned City." Now every Florida city is air-conditioned.

Until something goes wrong.

Hurricanes knock out the electricity for weeks. The compressor inside the AC unit self-destructs. If you live in Florida long enough, you will experience the loss of air.

And when that happens, you're right back in Florida circa 1920. Chanelle Wallace took that trip back in time in 2004 when she spent two weeks without electricity thanks to Hurricane Charley.

It was too hot to sleep, too hot to eat, and no escape. No air-conditioned motels, no air-conditioned restaurants, no air-conditioned movie theaters, no air-conditioned shopping malls.

"We were constantly sweating, hot and miserable," said Wallace, 27, of Winter Park.

The only thing close to the agony she experienced of living without air was giving birth to her daughter. Except the pain of childbirth is something you get over and forget, she said: "I'll never forget the heat."

This time of year, it's nonstop calls from residents such as Wallace to air-conditioning repair businesses such as Orlando's Greens Energy Services, whose slogan is "We'll come to your rescue."

"It's crazy. It's like controlled chaos," said Bill Green, company vice president. "It's just constant from the middle of May to the middle of September. We run calls 24 hours, seven days a week."

During the peak season, Greens adds staff to field the 70 to 80 calls a day from people whose air has stopped working. The voices on the other end are desperate, urgent, pleading, irritable. You can almost smell the sweat through the receiver.

"I can hear the pain in their voices," said Green, a 37-year-old Orlando native who has never known life without air.

Like everybody else, Green has come home, turned on the air — and nothing.

"For me, it's torture," he said. "I couldn't live like that, and I often wonder how people used to live in Florida without air conditioning."

They wore loincloths and sat on porches beneath overhanging roofs, fanning themselves with cardboard paddles from funeral homes and churches.

In retrospect, this made them more sociable, more neighborly, less isolated. The lack of a sense of community in modern-day Florida is often blamed on air conditioning and automatic garage-door openers.

"They aren't on their rocking chairs on their porches. They are in their living rooms watching television," Arsenault said.

Arsenault said this from North Carolina, where he was sitting outside on a porch, escaping the summer heat. That's the other way Floridians used to survive before air conditioning: They left the state. or 407-420-5392

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