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PENSACOLA - Grande Lagoon was a slice of tranquility tucked between the quiet waters of the Intracoastal Waterway and the glistening white sand beaches of Gulf Islands National Seashore.
It's hard to imagine such tranquility now.
Hurricane Ivan claimed two victims here, a man whose body was pulled from a canal and a woman whose body was found covered in debris.
There might be more.
Two residents of the 1970s-era subdivision are unaccounted for as rescue crews from Miami and Los Angeles worked painstakingly in groups of four Friday, going house to house. They had to push away the debris from a neighboring house or a wayward boat before finding any semblance of order.
Sections of piers, palm trees, roof rafters, twisted timbers, lawn mowers, furniture and household goods - a jar of coffee beans, a single unscathed piece of Wedgewood Paladin china - line the main drag and spill into side streets.
Five homes with the best views are gone, only their foundations and driveways remaining. Most other homes are stripped of outer walls, their garage doors pushed aside, their front doors gaping open, revealing storm-tossed belongings.
But amid the devastation were remarkable stories of survival.
There was the woman who climbed into her attic with her 1-year-old and 10-year-old to escape the rush of floodwaters. A neighbor rescued them after the water receded.
Valerie Smith, 23, talked of a man she identified as Johnny Hawkins surviving the destruction of his house by clinging to a tree for more than two hours. He swam in a canal to a house owned by Smith's father.
"At 4 in the morning he showed up in the bushes and screamed for help," Smith said. A flashlight the family was using to watch debris stream up the street shined on him.
"He was just yelling hysterically, afraid the three women who had been with him had drowned," Smith said.
It was unclear what happened to the women, or if the woman whose body was recovered was one of them, said Eddie Barnard, homicide supervisor for the Escambia County Sheriff's Office.
Barnard said he had no idea how many people evacuated before Ivan tore through the neighborhood.
"But clearly not enough," Barnard said. "I think people had gotten so used to the barrier islands stopping storm surge they thought they could stay."
At nearby Perdido Key, the scene was much the same: mattresses tossed 150 yards through condominiums and hotels that are missing roofs and walls. Dumpsters sat on their sides, cars were buried in sand.
Perdido Key Drive, roughly 2 miles from the bridge to the mainland and 6 miles from the Alabama state line, disappeared into a rubble of sand. Side roads looked like crumpled pieces of ribbon.
"We can't let people out because we're still looking" for survivors, said Escambia County Sheriff Ron McNeasby. Searchers rescued a retired sheriff's deputy Friday morning on the mainland from the rubble of his destroyed home.
"That's why we've got to be careful of what we're doing," he said.
By nightfall, McNeasby said search crews found no deaths on Perdido Key. It might reopen to traffic today.