Flash  Beach Grille

The mural represents a satellite image of a hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean & Caribbean Basin, which then visually segues from this bird’s eye view into a perspective from the beach with crashing waves and wind-blown trees.

The theme of this image is Hurricane Francis as a category 4 with maximum sustained winds of 145 miles per hour on its way to landfall in Florida.

It was a category 2 when it hit Martin County.

We chose to start on the exact date of the 5th anniversary of the historical ‘summer of storms’, when Charley, Francis, Ivan and Jeanne all passed through Florida.

The eyes of Hurricanes Francis on September 4th & Jeanne a few weeks later, came right over the Hobe Sound area!

This is the first 2-story mural in the project, the first to go around the corner of the building and the first to depict a local historical event.

The palm trees painted were chosen to reflect palm types from neighboring buildings.

Find the “hidden” elements:

- a replication of the instantly recognizable stylized wave of Japanese artist: Kohusai 

  (1760-1849) (His most well known work: “36 Views of Mount Fuji”, includes the

  famous “Great Wave off Kanagawa, dated from the 1820’s)

- a Mickey Mouse icon somewhere in the state of Florida....

- the initials of all HSBR office staff and their family members

It was fun to have the Brown & Mosenthin families all participate in personalizing the mural with their initials, painted and mosaic shells.

Many pedestrians passing by and motorists who stopped, commented on their remembrances of those storms and expressed their hope that this image will be the last and only hurricane we see here in town!

We all thought it was an appropriate, eye-catching & humorous tongue-in-cheek topic for the stately face of an insurance building!

We think its on its way to being renamed ‘the hurricane building’...

Other Hurricane Information:
Frances was the sixth named storm, the fourth hurricane, and the third major hurricane of the 2004 Atlantic hurricane season.

Frances was the first hurricane to impact the entire Bahamian archipelago since 1866, and led to the nearly complete destruction of their agricultural economy. Frances then passed over the central sections of the state of Florida, in the U.S. only three weeks after Hurricane Charley, causing significant damage to the state's citrus crop.

The storm then moved briefly offshore Florida into the northeast Gulf of Mexico and made a second U.S. landfall at the  Florida panhandle before accelerating northeast through the eastern United States and back into the Atlantic Ocean while weakening.

Very heavy rains fell in association with this slow moving and relatively large hurricane, which led to floods in Florida and North Carolina.

A total of 49 lives were lost from the cyclone.

Damages totaled US$12 billion (2004 dollars).

Three weeks later, Hurricane Jeanne, a category 3 -  landed within 3 miles of the same location.

The total number of deaths associated with these 4 storms was 3,181.

Final property damage from these storms in the United States was $ 45.8 billion.

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