PENSACOLA - A day after Hurricane Ivan smashed into the Florida Panhandle, residents and rescue workers began to grasp the dimensions of the devastation.
The death toll in Florida climbed to 16 Friday as teams continued to search the rubble. Divers recovered the body of the driver of a semitrailer truck stranded just ahead of a missing slab of the Interstate 10 bridge, washed away during the storm.
So many roads and bridges were damaged that relief efforts were hampered. Late Friday, traffic into Pensacola was backed up for miles.
All along the coast, expensive homes were reduced to piles of kindling and cars were buried in sand or washed into the water. Some streets and houses remained flooded.
Every single building at Pensacola's sprawling naval air base sustained damage, much of it severe, closing the base indefinitely.
Pensacola Bay is a boat graveyard. Boats are piled on top of each other, or resting on what is now dry ground. A high and dry storage building with more than 100 boats collapsed, stacking wrecked boats three deep.
Throughout the region, more than 400,000 customers were without electricity. Sewer, water and phone service were still out for thousands. State emergency management director Craig Fugate said numerous water line breaks are likely to keep much of Pensacola and surrounding Escambia County without water - even at hospitals - for a long time.
At the University of West Florida, the field house lost most of its roof.
"Our swimming pool used to be an indoor pool," said UWF vice president Pat Crawford. "Now it's an outdoor pool."
Coming on top of the destruction left by Hurricane Charley and Hurricane Frances over the past five weeks, it seemed almost too much to bear.
"Virtually the entire state of Florida is a disaster area," federal emergency management director Mike Brown said Friday on CBS's Early Show. "These people are just worn out from these storms."
Some Pensacolians who had endured 36 hours of pounding from Ivan on Wednesday night and Thursday morning began to lose control of their tempers Friday. Along with power and water, patience was in short supply. People were snapping at each other, at rescue workers, even at Gov. Jeb Bush.
When a radio station broadcast an erroneous report that there was ice and water available at a Winn-Dixie in Pensacola, the people who lined up became so upset when they learned it wasn't there that deputies were dispatched to keep the peace.
A Red Cross worker interviewed by a local radio station said the agency had 20 trucks full of supplies but they were having trouble finding an unobstructed route into Pensacola. She said the organization would start feeding people very soon.
"We've been hearing "very soon' a lot today," the frustrated radio host replied.
When Bush and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson visited a shelter in Pensacola, they were peppered with pointed questions from stranded evacuees about bridge repair, gasoline and power. Then, as Bush and Nelson stopped to talk to reporters, 93-year-old Robert Cross began yelling at them about the need to restore water service as fast as possible.
"Water is the main lifeline, what are you doing about that?" yelled Cross.
Two other men asked where the government was keeping its supply of emergency generators to get sewage and power systems running again.
Bush said he understood the anxiety but pointed out the difficulty of providing fast relief: "The day after a hurricane is the day after a hurricane."
Escambia emergency officials complained to Bush about poor communication with the state emergency operations center in Tallahassee, a lack of generators and shortages affecting their own emergency center.
"We need food. We need water," said Nan Weaver, an emergency operations center staffer. "Let me tell you, it's bad."
Bush promised repeatedly that help was on the way. Search and rescue teams already were on the ground helping to look for the dead and injured, while Red Cross comfort stations would arrive soon, he said. Meanwhile two C-130 cargo planes flew in with federally supplied water and meals. President Bush is scheduled to visit Sunday.
Republican Sen. Durrell Peaden of Pensacola said Ivan should prompt the Legislature to reconsider exceptions to the building code for much of the Panhandle north of Interstate 10. The exceptions were based on the premise that hurricanes would not inflict much damage there.
"Moving toward the interstate you can see no one was protected," Peaden said Friday after visiting the Escambia County Emergency Operations Center with Gov. Bush. "Basically we should knock out all the exceptions."
When asked about the effect on the region's economy, the governor said, "We met people who didn't have much before the storm and now have nothing. The economy will take care of itself."
But the Pensacola economy depends greatly on the venerable Naval Air Station Pensacola, which has trained aviators for every conflict since World War I. More than 12,700 military personnel and 5,400 civilians work there. Its flight demonstration team, the Blue Angels, stars at air shows nationwide.
Navy officials said initial estimates of the damage done to the base and its two outlying airfields were $100-million - far exceeding the $66-million damage estimates for Homestead Air Force Base after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
No base staff or employees were injured but every building on the base was damaged, "and 90 percent of them you can characterize the damage as significant," said Lt. John Schofield of the U.S. Navy Office of Information.
The base marina was destroyed, and the hospital lost most of its roof, he said. The control tower still stands, but the runway is covered with debris and the roads are either littered with downed trees or fallen power lines. Many of the airplanes were dispatched inland before Ivan's landfall, but some stayed and may be damaged as well.
A team of Navy Seabees from Mississippi set to work Friday clearing the wreckage and assessing the full extent of the damage, but fixing the base "is going to take some time," Schofield said.
State officials were scrambling to fix the most obvious roadblock to recovery in the Pensacola area: the Interstate 10 bridge over Escambia Bay that provides an east-west route through the Panhandle. State transportation officials hired a contractor to repair one span of the I-10 bridge within 24 days in order to have at least one lane of traffic traveling each way. The contract is for $3-million with a $250,000-a-day incentive to finish the work on time.
Transportation officials said they hope to finish repairs to Pensacola Bay Bridge by Tuesday morning and open four lanes of U.S. 90 by Tuesday or Wednesday. Cleared for use was the Perdido Key Bridge and the Lillian Bridge.
The truck driver who died on the I-10 bridge was far from the only missing person in the wake of Ivan. Search and rescue teams from as far away as Tampa, Miami and California were spending day and night looking for more bodies, marking the homes they have done in bright orange spray paint.
"I'm just looking into void spaces, anywhere that people might still be alive," said Larry Collins of the Los Angeles Fire Department. "I've worked all sorts of hurricanes, the Oklahoma bombing site, and the World Trade Center disaster. This area really got it. Storm surge and major tornado hits all in one."
By Friday night Ivan had moved far inland, drenching an area from Georgia to Ohio, washing out dozens of homes, sweeping cars down roadways and trapping more than 100 elementary school students.
The storm, which has killed 70 people in the Caribbean and at least 40 in the United States, retained its destructive power. More than 8 inches of rain in some areas triggered deadly floods. Hundreds of thousands of people were without power, and tornadoes were reported as far north as Maryland.
Times staff writers Brady Dennis and Lucy Morgan and researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report, which includes information from the Pensacola News Journal, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Associated Press.
