Hurricane devastates the Gulf Coast region
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By Felicity Barringer and Andrew C. Revkin New York Times - Published: September 17, 2004
MOBILE, Ala. — Hurricane Ivan carved an asymmetrical path of destruction through the southeast Thursday, killing 20 people and devastating the eastern Alabama coastline and the western end of the Florida panhandle with tornadoes, 130 mph winds and floodwaters that inundated homes and cut off Interstate 10 in Mobile and Pensacola.
The storm, rated a Category 3 hurricane when it finally reached land over the small Alabama community of Gulf Shores in the early morning hours, tore off roofs, uprooted trees and tossed boats onto once-dry land, positioning one vessel on Dauphin Island in the approach lane to a Bay Bank ATM machine.
In Florida, tornadoes spawned by the hurricane killed four people in Blountstown, northeast of Panama City. In Bay County, a 77-year-old woman was found dead 75 yards from her bay front home in a pile of debris. In the same county, an 84-year-old man was found dead of head injuries after a tornado sliced off the roof of the building he was visiting to check on his daughter's business.
Hurricane Ivan was the third hurricane in a month to scar Florida's landscape and kill its residents. Pensacola on Thursday joined Florida communities like West Palm Beach and Punta Gorda as synonymous with a litany of hardship including wrecked homes, scrambled marinas and uprooted trees. "It's sad," Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Thursday. "I don't know quite why we've had this run of storms. You just have to accept that."
The storm surge that had pumped waves to 55-foot heights in the Gulf of Mexico sent floodwaters into communities south and east of Mobile. In southern Louisiana, the swampy parish of St. Bernard's, on the toe of the shoe-shaped state, was partially flooded. Across the Gulf coast, more than 1.5 million customers — or as many as 5 million people — were without power as the winds slowly subsided.
In Gulf Shores, on the eastern side of Mobile Bay, water lapped through washed out shops and homes, branches were ripped from sodden tree trunks and wild animals ran free from the local zoo. Water swamped the Down Under dive shop, lapping above the level of the plywood boards hammered into place to protect the building.
White-capped waves crested in the parking lot of Souvenir City. One resident, Steve Horvat, joked that he now had beachfront property. "The problem is some people say it looks like a houseboat," he said.
President Bush declared a state of emergency Thursday in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and was expected to add Florida to the group once the requisite paperwork was filed.
As it neared the coast, approaching directly from the south, the storm took an eastward jog, delivering a ferocious blow to Alabama and Florida, but only grazing the Mississippi shore, whose high-rise casinos had closed in anticipation. The Grand Casino in Biloxi left behind a flashing sign reading: "All bets off till Ivan folds."
And for New Orleans, from which residents had evacuated en masse Tuesday and which imposed an unusual and unenforced 2 p.m. curfew Wednesday, Hurricane Ivan was the disaster that wasn't. The storm did little more than whip up ocean waves over the concrete banks of Lake Pontchartrain's south shore, to the awe and delight of nearby residents who frolicked in the overflow.
After reaching land and pivoting to the northeast, the storm quickly lost much of its power, but pushed bands of drenching rainstorms into Georgia and the Carolinas, knocking out power as far away as the suburbs of Atlanta. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for as far away as North Carolina, which suffered heavy flooding last week from the remnants of Hurricane Frances.
The Carolinas and Georgia could be in for more trouble next week from Tropical Storm Jeanne, which reached the Dominican Republic on Thursday afternoon.
The signs of the Hurricane Ivan's passage northward along Interstate 65 toward Montgomery, Ala., were the absence, in places, of the usual green-and-white exit markers, which had been punched over and lay nearly invisible in the wet grass.
To the west, in Gulf Bay, Ala., Pam Weekley, a resident of the Homestead Inn, was sweeping away small tree limbs from the door to her room and gazing at the power line that was all but severed and the tree that had just missed the one-storm motel.
"It was very bad last night," she said. "The wind sounded like a freight train — that must have been a tornado. The wind would die down for a bit and I would say my prayers. Then the wind would come up again and I'd hear the trees snapping." And, she said, her voice still carrying a hint of fear, "the skies were so dark."
Roads around Mobile were a maze of downed pines and oak limbs, drooping power lines, and splintered telephone poles that prompted some drivers to improvise routes. Mobile County sheriff's deputies drove the long road and causeway toward Dauphin Island, a heavily developed spit of barrier beach lying partway across the mouth of Mobile Bay to find the smell of leaking gas permeating the air and a dozen or fewer residents who stayed for the storm perversely proud of their defiance of nature and government evacuation orders.
The road to the island was studded with rocks ranging from cantaloupe to watermelon size. Dunes of oyster shells and weed and driftwood expelled by the bay blocked the route. Then the officers had to skirt a spot where two thirds of the pavement on one side had been chewed away.
And a group of exhausted pelicans, which had sheltered from the storm behind roadside concrete blocks, slouched down against the persistent gusts in the middle of the road, folding their heads and long beaks back amid their plumage, like the closed blade of a pocket knife.
About 400 troops from the National Guard were being deployed Thursday with about 70 of them sent to Gulf Shores.
Early this morning the police were the only people out in Gulf Shores as water ran about three-quarters of a mile up the island from the beach. Sgt. Dennis King remained on the island with a skeleton crew of police.
"It was eerie when the eye of the storm went over," he said. "You could go out and look up and see the stars."
He said the perimeter fence of the Alabama Gulf Coast Zoo had broken and some animals escaped. "Look around every now and then and you will see a deer from the zoo," King said. "We don't know if the snakes and such are still in their cages."
But it was in storm-weary Florida, in the dangerous northeastern quadrant of the hurricane, that some of the greatest devastation could be seen.
Wind and water damage was extensive in Pensacola, with many streets blocked by downed trees, roof after roof de-shingled or partially ripped off, and power lines dangled from collapsed or crazily canted poles across the city. Floodwaters rippled through a section of downtown.
About 1,700 people hunkered down overnight at the Pensacola Civic Center, which was converted into a Red Cross shelter, The Associated Press reported. But evacuees had to be moved from floor to floor as water seeped through the walls, partially flooding the arena and third floor of the five-story building.
"It was a force to be reckoned with. This building was rocking and rolling all night long," Sandie Aaron, manager of the business that operates the building, told the wire service. "We kept thinking, 'A couple more hours, a couple more hours.' I was never so glad to see the sun come up today — or at least daylight."
Rick Outzen, 47, a resident and city councilman in the nearby city of Gulf Breeze, Fla., said that the Gulf Breeze landing of the Bob Sikes Bridge to Pensacola Beach is washed away, denying access to the only direct route to the barrier island. He also said one wall of an AmSouth Bank in Gulf Breeze was ripped off.
"I don't know how long it is going to take us to get up and going," Outzen said. "This is worse than what I had hoped for."
In New Orleans, where more than 1,000 city residents, many of them elderly, took shelter in the Superdome, less than an inch of rain fell, the gusts of wind touched 40 mph and the flooding at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain did little more than lap at the bottom of the set-back levee. Kelly Andras, 26, said, "This is a whole lot better," than she had expected when she evacuated her home a mile from the lake. She added, "I thought I wasn't going to come home to a home, so this is great."
Along coastal Route 90 in Mississippi the visible damage was light, but not far beyond the Alabama border, the evidence of destruction mounted: downed traffic lights, trees lying across roofs, an abandoned truck up to its axle in water at the roadside.
In Gulf Shores, Ala., the beachfront Crown Pointe condominiums had an ocean-facing wall stripped off — dollhouse-style — to reveal a bedroom with a made bed, several fully-fitted kitchens and a dining room that somehow still had four chairs upright around a table.
Another condominium had been reduced to a low pile of broken sticks while the concrete base of another was rumpled like cardboard.
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