PENSACOLA - Deborah Plessy was in the hallway when the dining room wall crashed down.
An ancient live oak, just steps from the window, fell into the wood-frame cottage. Wall studs snapped. Ceiling plaster fell in ragged, dusty chunks. Rain and wind whipped in, followed by leaves and small tree limbs.
The worst was yet to come.
Hurricane Ivan was at least two hours from landfall. Pensacola Bay was just two blocks away.
So Plessy, 58, and her 82-year-old mother, Juanita, crawled into a bedroom with their two dogs and their rosary beads.
They prayed for hours while the storm howled and the waves crashed.
"We're Catholic, you see," Plessy said Thursday. "We could do nothing but put it in God's hands."
Authorities, however, wish they had done it somewhere else.
People living or working south of Garden Street in Pensacola were ordered to evacuate. That included Tanyard, the Plessys' low-slung neighborhood just west of downtown Pensacola named for the tanning industry that thrived here more than a century ago.
She had no regrets about staying. "This is a good house," she said. "It's been our home for more than 20 years."
Plessy recalled her harrowing night as she stood on soggy dining room carpet. The ceiling hung inches from her head, but the china cabinet was intact, not a single dish shattered.
The ceiling fan, still attached to a beam, rested on the dining room table, nudging a crystal vase.
Main Street was under water, its asphalt disappearing into Pensacola Bay. Trees and power lines were down in every block, many winding up in homes and automobiles, others blocking streets.
Tanyard is a place of multigenerational families, lifelong legacies and working class roots. Many followed orders and evacuated. But for every resident who fled, at least as many stayed, including some former residents who returned to ride out the storm with family.
In a state where newcomers are as common as mosquitoes at a summer barbecue, Tanyard is a slice of old Florida, where a home came with a front porch because air conditioning had not been invented.
Neighbors helped neighbors Thursday. Children walked the streets and ogled the damage.
The neighborhood grocery store, Shoreline Foods, opened for cash-only sales. With the hum of a generator in the background, proprietor Stelios Vatsolakis said there was no reason to stay closed.
"I might as well help the people in the neighborhood," Vatsolakis said. "They're going to need things."
Richard Shine, 26, ran down the street when he heard the store was open. With three small daughters, the youngest 15 months, Shine and his wife, Tammy, returned to his childhood neighborhood Wednesday to be with his family, spread across three households.
It was an eventful night. The ceiling crashed down on his mother as she tried to sleep, but she was relatively unscathed, Shine said. The rubble just missed his 18-month-old brother.
