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STEVE BOUSQUET, ALISA ULFERTS and CRAIG PITTMANHundreds of thousands are told to flee as the governor urges residents to take the hurricane's 160 mph winds seriously.
TALLAHASSEE - Panhandle residents spent Monday scrambling to get ready for what may be the strongest storm they have ever faced.
Hurricane Ivan, a Category 5 storm packing 160 mph winds as it battered west Cuba late Monday, could make landfall Thursday in northwest Florida, which has not seen a storm that powerful in the last century.
Officials ordered an evacuation of hundreds of thousands of homes, even though some areas lacked shelters strong enough to withstand Ivan. Military officials sent hundreds of planes zooming to safety inland, and oil and natural gas companies began ferrying hundreds of workers to shore from offshore rigs in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
"This is not the time to be defiant or to let people know that you're a macho man," Gov. Jeb Bush told Panhandle residents, urging them to heed evacuation orders. "This is a Category 5 storm. Trust me, it is a powerful, powerful force of nature that you shouldn't be messing with."
Ivan's projected path still could change to the west or east. Its speed and direction depend on everything from the warmth of the gulf to a subtropical front hovering over Texas and Louisiana.
Even though current indications are that hurricane-force winds will come no closer than 180 miles away from the Tampa Bay area Wednesday, some cautious residents and business owners decided to keep the plywood over their windows for another day or so.
But signs of normalcy were returning. Schools that let students spend Monday at home will reopen today. So will most government offices. People turned away from the Weather Channel to check what else was going on in the world.
August and September have brought a string of tropical weather torments to Florida. Tropical Storm Bonnie drizzled over Apalachicola on Aug. 12, then Hurricane Charley flattened southwest and Central Florida on Aug. 13 with its brutal winds, and then Hurricane Frances dumped torrential rains all across the state 10 days ago. There are still about 195,000 homes and businesses without power, and so far more than 7,000 people have filed flood claims with the National Flood Insurance program as a result of those storms.
The record for flood claims in Florida is 1995, when about 12,000 Floridians filed claims totaling more than $400-million. That was the last year that any hurricane made a direct hit on the Panhandle. In August 1995 Hurricane Erin, a Category 1 storm, hit the Pensacola area, and in October a Category 3 storm, Hurricane Opal, hit it again.
The topography of hilly, heavily forested northwest Florida differs markedly from the state's far flatter peninsula. As a result, hurricanes produce different effects there.
State emergency management director Craig Fugate said Gulf Coast hurricanes have been known to spawn powerful twisters far to the east of a storm's center.
"We've historically seen more tornadoes in that right quadrant, well away from the center of circulation," Fugate said.
On Monday night, Ivan was plodding toward the north-northwest at about 9 mph, with forecasters predicting that changing weather patterns over the Gulf Coast may make it turn north and then to the northeast, curving it into landfall in the Panhandle.
Bush urged Floridians not to focus strictly on where Ivan's eye is projected to land, because hurricane force winds are predicted to extend as much as 100 miles from the center.
"That is the entire Panhandle," the governor said. "The first admonition, if you will, is, don't get fixated on the line of the storm that you see on your local TV stations. . . . The impacts of this go way beyond that line."
Ivan promises to be so powerful that it's even forcing some emergency operations officials to evacuate their headquarters in favor of someplace safer.
"Our center is three blocks from the water and it's a 50-year-old building," said Bay County spokeswoman Catherine McNaught. The county plans to move its emergency center to the Florida Highway Patrol headquarters 15 miles inland.
Bay County does, however, have shelter space available in Panama City-area schools. Gulf County has the opposite problem. Its brand-new emergency operations center is capable of withstanding the most powerful hurricane, but it has no usable shelter space because none of its shelters meet the state's new, more stringent standards.
That means Gulf County evacuees who don't have a friend or family member nearby will have to leave the county. Franklin County is in the same fix. Still, after seeing what Ivan did to the Caribbean, many Panhandle residents were ready to go.
"I'm getting the hell out of here. This thing's too big," charter boat captain Jerry Weber said as he steered his 41-foot vessel up the Apalachicola River out of harm's way. "It doesn't matter where it comes ashore, not at this size."
On Pensacola Beach, Mark Sigler and his son stacked sandbags across the driveway of their steel-reinforced dome house that's supposedly designed to withstand hurricane-force winds.
They weren't sticking around to find out.
"It's stupid to stay unless you like camping in a disaster area," Sigler said. "There's no reason to be out here."
As Ivan blasted through the Caribbean over the weekend, it killed at least 68 people, most of them in Grenada and Jamaica. Some residents in St. Petersburg's Jamaican-American community said Monday that they had been trying unsuccessfully all weekend to contact relatives to find out what happened.
Others, such as Yvonne Thompson, said relatives phoned them with a mix of good and bad news. Thompson said her niece "called to say that we're all right but the roof is gone and they're underwater, the house is flooded."
In the Cayman Islands there were conflicting reports on casualties, with ham radio operators on the islands reporting that in one community "99 percent of structures have been damaged or destroyed."
"In lower-lying areas there have been reports of people having to climb onto kitchen counters to escape the seas that came flooding into their houses," Cayman Net News reported on its Web site, adding that it had a foot of water in its own offices on North Sound Road, in Grand Cayman.
Cox Lumber Co. chairman Linton Tibbets, who is from the Cayman Islands, said the St. Petersburg-based company's truss factory in the islands was inundated by up to 5 feet of water.
Ivan hammered western Cuba's tobacco-growing region late Monday, knocking down trees and power lines and triggering coastal flooding and more than a foot of rain.
In Tampa, 82-year-old Al Arteaga twisted the antenna on his portable radio, trying to follow the storm on Radio Progreso from Havana. He fretted for his sister, who lives in Cuba and sought refuge with relatives in suburban Havana, and worried that recent travel restrictions imposed by the government may hurt efforts by Americans to aid Cuba's recovery.
Despite Ivan's obvious power, some people along the Gulf Coast were willing to gamble that it wouldn't hit them. Along Mississippi's 75-mile-long coastline, managers of some of its floating casinos allowed employees time off in shifts to get their houses secured. But the ships weren't shutting down.
"It's been business as usual," said Rick Quinn, manager of the Copa Casino in Gulfport.
In New Orleans, which is largely below sea level and extremely vulnerable to hurricanes, Lynn Harrington filled her grocery cart and figured her chances of survival in a posthurricane world.
"My boyfriend says that if you have cigarettes, toilet paper and lots of booze, you can trade for everything you need," she said.
The last Category 5 hurricane to hit Florida was Hurricane Andrew, which blasted through the Homestead area south of Miami in 1992.
- Times staff writers David Adams, Curtis Krueger, Marcus Franklin, Saundra Amrhein, Michael Sandler and Bill Varian and researchers Carolyn Edds and Kitty Bennett contributed to this report, which also used information from the Associated Press.