PENSACOLA, Fla. – Hurricane Ivan drilled the Gulf Coast on Thursday with 130-mph winds that inflicted far less damage than feared – except on Florida’s panhandle, where residents were left with surge-ravaged beachfronts, flooded streets and homes ripped apart by tornadoes.
The storm was blamed for at least 23 U.S. deaths, most of them in Florida.
“We were prepared for the hurricane, but the tornadoes were bam, bam, bam,” said Glenda Nichols, manager of the Microtel Inn in Marianna, Fla. “There was nothing we could do about it. I put all my guests in their rooms and told them to get in the bathtubs.”
Ivan quickly deteriorated to a tropical storm after coming ashore. But forecasters warned it was not done yet: It threatened up to 15 inches of rain and flooding across the South, already soggy after Hurricanes Charley and Frances over the past month.
In addition, more danger could be on the horizon: Tropical Storm Jeanne is tearing through the Caribbean on a path that could take it to Florida early next week as a hurricane.
More than 2 million residents along a 300-mile stretch of the Gulf Coast cleared out as Ivan, once a 165-mph monster that killed 70 people in the Caribbean, closed in on an unsteady path.
Ivan came ashore near Gulf Shores Beach, Ala., around 3 a.m., but it was the panhandle – squarely in the northeast quadrant of the storm, where the winds are most violent – that took the brunt.
Ivan spun off at least a dozen tornadoes in Florida, while creating a storm surge of 10 to 16 feet, topped by large, battering waves. A portion of a bridge on Interstate 10, the major east-west highway through the panhandle, was washed away.
Insurance experts put the storm’s damage at anywhere from $3 billion to $10 billion. Hurricanes Charley and Frances had combined estimated insured damages of between $11 billion and $13 billion after striking Florida in the last month.
Ivan’s death toll included 14 in Florida, two in Mississippi, two in Georgia and one in Alabama. In Louisiana, four evacuees in poor health died after being taken from their storm-threatened homes to safer parts of the state.
Many of the millions of Gulf Coast residents who spent a frightening night in shelters and boarded-up homes emerged to find Ivan was not the catastrophe they had feared.
New Orleans, especially vulnerable to storms because much of it lies below sea level, only got some blustery winds and a mere two-tenths of an inch of rain. By Thursday morning, French Quarter tourists had come out of their hotels to sip coffee under brilliant sunshine.
“Leaves in the pool – that’s it,” said Shane Eschete, assistant general manager of the Inn on Bourbon Street.
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