PENSACOLA - Hurricane Ivan ripped away chunks of bridges, roads, beaches and homes Thursday, killing at least 20 people in four states and forcing storm-weary Florida to mount yet another massive relief effort.
Ivan, the third major hurricane to hit Florida in five weeks, may have been the worst.
"This was a brutal storm," said a weary Gov. Jeb Bush. "This has been a tough month for Florida and this will add to the burden."
Bush deployed about 2,000 National Guard troops while search and rescue teams began looking for more dead or injured, a task complicated by downed power lines, trees and debris blocking roads.
Insurance experts said they would not be surprised if the storm's insured damage exceeds $2.5-billion. That would mean that in just more than a month, the United States was rocked with three of the five most costly hurricanes in history.
Ivan's eye came ashore about 3 a.m. near Gulf Shores, Ala., but the Florida Panhandle bore the brunt, sitting squarely in the northeast quadrant of the storm where its 130-mph winds were most violent.
Nine tornadoes caused deaths far inland, including four people in Blountstown, just west of Tallahassee, and two in the Panama City area.
In Bay County, a 77-year-old woman was found dead in a pile of debris 75 yards from her bayfront home. Drowning is suspected in the deaths of two people whose bodies were found near Pensacola Naval Air Station.
Across the region, electricity, water, sewer and phone lines were damaged or destroyed, leaving storm survivors in the dark and unable to flush, bathe or call family.
"It's catastrophic," said Gulf Power spokesman John Hutchinson, who said 90 percent of his company's customers were without service. "The electric system it has taken us 80 years to build was basically destroyed in eight hours last night."
Ivan's winds created a storm surge of 10 to 16 feet that swept away houses, cars and roads and anything else in its way. The surge was topped by battering waves that blasted a quarter-mile out of the Interstate 10 bridge between Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, cutting the major east-west highway through the Panhandle.
"This will have a significant impact on how quickly we can provide relief," Bush said.
A truck that had been crossing the bridge hung precariously halfway into the void hours later. The fate of its driver remains unknown.
The waves damaged the Bob Sikes Bridge between Gulf Breeze and Pensacola Beach and destroyed most of the two fishing piers that ran the 3-mile length of the Pensacola Bay Bridge.
"I've been through a lot of hurricanes, but this is the most ungodly thing I've ever seen," said Gulf Breeze deputy police chief Robert Randle.
Residents who rode out the hurricane in boarded-up homes awoke Thursday to discover a different world outside their plywood-covered windows.
Bayfront Parkway, which curves along a scenic stretch of the Pensacola waterfront, was washed away. What remained was covered with mud, big rocks, sections of piers and a rusty fuel tank.
In the historic downtown, huge piles of broken bricks littered the streets. Most of the walls on two sides of St. Paul's United Methodist Church lay in heaps beside the building. An Oldsmobile sat half-submerged in muddy floodwaters.
"I've lived here all my life and I've never seen the bay come up to Main Street like that," said Dolores Curry, a retired mortician and longtime resident of a neighborhood west of downtown. "You see my house? It's brick and it was shaking last night."
Pensacola resident Dino Githens, 38, edged his champagne-colored Ford Thunderbird slowly into his neighborhood on Bayou Chico and parked about 200 feet from the water lapping at the underside of what was once an enclave of expensive stilt homes.
He walked 60 feet before turning back, his head in his hands. About a dozen pilings were all that was left of his 3,500-square-foot house.
When Githens got back to his car, he threw up. "Well," he said, "I don't have to worry about looting this time."
Along beaches from Navarre to Cape San Blas, wooden boardwalks that once stretched across rolling dunes now end 4 feet in the air because the sand that was under them was washed away.
West of Fort Walton Beach, about a mile of U.S. 98 remained under water, while elsewhere along the coastal road chunks of asphalt were missing.
About 20 miles east of Pensacola, remnants of homes littered the road: a wicker kitchen chair wrapped around a fallen street light, a beer keg half-buried in mud. In the highway median, a soda vending machine lay on its back.
"It's a totally different landscape to this area now," said Pensacola resident Maurice Bouchard, who only lost a chimney. "When I woke up this morning, it was so bright, I thought it was the middle of winter because there are no leaves on the trees anymore.'
Tornadoes spin destruction
Mark Rush remembers Hurricane Opal, which struck the Panhandle in 1995. He remembers Opal's rain, wind and storm surge, but no tornadoes. Now when he thinks of hurricanes, the Panama City Beach resident will remember how one of Ivan's tornadoes hurled the roof of a nearby restaurant onto his wife's Ford Explorer.
"You can evacuate, but you can't evacuate from a tornado," said Rush, 51.
Thanks to the tornadoes, Ivan's damage inland rivaled that on the coast.
"We were prepared for the hurricane, but the tornadoes were bam, bam, bam," said Glenda Nichols, manager of the Microtel Inn in Marianna, where five tornadoes caused extensive damage to at least two mobile home parks. "There was nothing we could do about it. I put all my guests in their rooms and told them to get in the bathtubs."
Amid the soybean farms well north of Pensacola, Ivan tore the roof off Bratt Elementary School but left the portable classrooms undamaged.
"I heard they got it bad in Pensacola," said Bratt resident Cynthia Myrl Smith, whose ceilings fell in her kitchen, porch and bedroom. "But so did we. But you don't see any news trucks or helicopters around here."
In Atmore, Ala., the wind blew the steeple off the First Baptist Church and filled the main street with debris.
"We don't even have any road signs anymore," said Melody Archer, who runs a baby-sitting service. "You never think this sort of thing will happen here. On the coast, sure. But not here."
Ivan only grazed 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."
Low-lying New Orleans also dodged the apocalypse. Ivan did little more than whip up big waves over the concrete banks of Lake Pontchartrain's south shore, to the delight of nearby residents who frolicked in the overflow.
Damage along the Alabama coast was stunning to behold. In Gulf Shores, the ocean-side wall of the beachfront Crown Pointe condominiums was stripped off, leaving it with the cutaway look of a gigantic dollhouse. Visible from outside was a bedroom with a made bed, several fully-outfitted kitchens and a dining room with 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 crumpled like cardboard.
Police officers were the only people out in Gulf Shores early Thursday as water ran about three-quarters of a mile up the island from the beach.
"It was eerie when the eye of the storm went over," Sgt. Dennis King 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."
Relief on the way
In Milton, where the Blackwater River meets East Bay, streets and homes were flooded. Search-and-rescue teams scoured neighborhoods to bring trapped residents to safety.
David Taylor said the rising river destroyed his home and every house on his street.
"It's a total loss, water came in about 8 feet and it just pushed everything right out, off the foundation," Taylor said. "I'm gonna cry, and then I'm gonna rebuild."
About 1,700 people rode out the storm at the Pensacola Civic Center, but even they couldn't escape Ivan. Evacuees had to be shifted from floor to floor as water seeped through the walls, partially flooding the arena and third floor of the five-story building.
"Everybody was moved at least three times," said Sandie Aaron, regional general manager of SMG, the firm that operates the building. "This building was rocking and rolling all night long."
The water started streaming in after the storm ripped four air vents from the roof and tossed them to the ground.
Four Pensacola-area hospitals had roof damage and broken windows. At Baptist Hospital, the lost roof wasn't the biggest problem facing the staff, said spokeswoman Karen Smith.
"Our biggest challenge is that the water and sewage systems are not functioning," she said. "That kind of puts us into a Third World situation."
Some survivors chose to take advantage of the situation - there were reports of looting in some Pensacola neighborhoods, until police and National Guard troops imposed order.
Some relief could come early today when seven mobile kitchens from the Salvation Army and 12 from the Red Cross were due to arrive.
Lingering effects of the storm prevented Bush from seeing the damage for himself. He and his brother, President Bush, will tour the region. The president is scheduled to visit Sunday.
"It's important to go quickly," Gov. Bush said. "It is psychologically devastating for a lot of people. Seeing the governor is important. It's an important symbol of what is going to happen. They can't feel like they are left alone. Across the state there is a fear that in difficult times emerges. My job is to make sure those fears subside."
Late Thursday, Florida got what now passes as good news: Two tropical storms and a tropical depression were being tracked by the National Hurricane Center. But for once, no hurricanes.
- Times staff writers Lucy Morgan, Alisa Ulferts, Bill Adair and Brady Dennis contributed to this report, which includes information from the Pensacola News Journal, the New York Times, the Miami Herald and the Associated Press.
