PENSACOLA BEACH, Fla. – Sandy Irvine protected her face from an angry blast of rain and powdery white sand as she stood by a mound of debris from last September’s Hurricane Ivan and wondered aloud whether she can emotionally withstand another hurricane season.
“It’s so terrifying,” Irvine said Saturday as Tropical Storm Arlene was swooping ashore. “We knew that when hurricane season came, we’d be concerned and paying attention. But we just hoped and prayed that it wouldn’t happen here again. We’ve only just gotten the house repaired and still haven’t settled in.”
While unable to scare off another big soaking of rain and high winds, residents all around the western Florida Panhandle embraced Saturday’s relatively timid landing of Arlene as an early-but-gentle reminder to Floridians that the 2005 hurricane season is under way.
Arlene on Saturday followed an eerily similar path to Ivan nine months ago. But Arlene didn’t pack the same punch or leave anything like the kind of widespread property damage and even deaths that came with Ivan, which battered this touristy barrier-island beach town and a 100-mile wide area stretching in both directions.
Authorities here predicted cleanup will be quick and sunny skies are expected by later today. They noted that Arlene failed, just barely, to reach hurricane status before making landfall near here.
Though Arlene brought out raincoats, delayed tourist travel plans and caused any number of messes, Ivan sprouted blue tarps on roofs, left thousands homeless or sheltered in government-owned travel trailers, and rendered even more people with financial and insurance woes .
along with emotional scars that were reawakened with this weekend’s rough weather.
“It’s almost like a cruel joke,” said Steve Elder as he swept rocks and sand launched by Arlene’s gusty winds from the open-aired first floor of his beachfront condominium. “It just isn’t fair that we have to go through this again and so soon. This is a tough price for living in paradise.”
From the beach towns of the western Panhandle to rural backroads near the Alabama-Florida border, clues of hurricane destruction don’t just reside in these residents’ memories of 2004. These Floridians still live amidst all sorts of vivid physical reminders.
Piles of broken concrete from damaged roads, glass shards and heavy chunks of metal and even storm-battered automobiles stand alongside sand dunes and broken beachside houses. Storm-ravaged roofs are covered by plastic tarps. And homes, hotels and small businesses are struggling to come back to life after last year’s hurricanes, stalled in part, by this spring’s far heavier than normal rainfall. In April, three heavy showers in three weeks dumped 14 inches of rain in 24 hours in Escambia County.
“It’s not fair; it’s like insult to injury for us to have to contend with this,” said Lane Gilchrist, mayor of Gulf Breeze, population 6,000, as he shopped for groceries just before Arlene arrived. “I don’t mind a few puddles. But we can’t deal with even more rain.”
In the Pensacola area home to more than 400,000 permanent residents and thousands more military service members there are surreal signs that people are caught in a confused situation of storm recovery and normalcy.
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At the Pensacola Civic Center, for instance, local celebrities attended a black-tie dinner and dance late Friday night, before Arlene’s arrival, even as the American Red Cross began converting a section of the center to an emergency shelter where a few dozen residents spent the night.
“We just don’t need this (Arlene) because these people are still in a bit of shell shock,” said Jo Dee Cattrell, a volunteer shelter manager. “They just want to be some place other than in homes without permanent roofs.”
Emergency officials said Saturday’s call for more evacuations in low-lying areas, sporadic power outages, bridge closings, and a big dump of rain coming after a spring that brought twice the normal rainfall for the area did nothing to heal the area’s wounds.
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“It’s a little depressing,” said Escambia County Sheriff Ron McNesby. “There’s just a lot of homes and people not ready for something like this. I saw a lot of blue roofs flapping and some pretty sad faces. But we know we’re fortunate because (Arlene) could have been worse. This is just a little setback to our recovery.”
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(c) 2005 South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
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AP-NY-06-11-05 1826EDT
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