PENSACOLA, Fla. – Less than 10 months after the central Gulf Coast was clobbered by one dangerous hurricane, most residents here quickly heeded the warnings that another was on the way.
They boarded up windows, sand-bagged doorways, and listened with mounting trepidation to news bulletins advising that Hurricane Dennis, expected to make a direct hit here Sunday, could be even more powerful than last September’s Category 3 Ivan.
“So many of us underestimated Ivan. I won’t make that mistake again,” said Nicky Harvell, 45, who Saturday afternoon was closing down his Chevron gas station in Gulf Breeze, a barrier island community.
As Dennis, which has already killed 20 in the Caribbean and left 100 more missing in Haiti, approached Saturday night, Escambia County Administrator George Touart urged residents to “just drive somewhere and get out of here.”
Dennis, has “large circulation, so no matter where it makes landfall, it’s going to have a tremendous impact,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami Dade County. “People need to do the wise thing and plan on a Category 4 hurricane” with winds of at least 131 mph.
Harvell, a Florida native, is doing just that.
“The mood is much more serious this time,” said Harvell, who rode out Ivan in his gas station, and after the roof flew off survived by crawling under a shelf in his walk-in cooler.
Ivan was blamed for 25 deaths in the U.S., including 14 in Florida.
Even if Dennis jogs west toward Mobile or New Orleans, Pensacola likely will suffer significant damage, officials said.
The storm threatens to produce 4 to 8 inches of rain and a storm surge of 10 to 14 feet.
Thousands of coastal residents began evacuating as early as Thursday, said Craig Fugate, the state emergency management director.
“They were not waiting until the last moment,” he said.
In Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, gas was hard to find, plywood prayers were spray-painted days ago, and tourists went home. So, with the sun shining Saturday, downtown Pensacola had the look of a ghost town, abandoned for no apparent reason.
Suspended traffic signals were taken down. Businesses were shut. In Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park, no one sat on the benches beneath the flowering crape myrtle trees.
As Dennis edged closer, local residents were warned that bridges damaged by Ivan have not been completely repaired, and could be shut down once sustained winds reached 45 mph.
Emergency officials also worried about last year’s storm debris, which still litters many of the region’s roads. And they acknowledged they could do little to protect all of the half-fixed homes dotting the shoreline.
On Pensacola Beach, a tiny spit of sand that would normally be clogged with weekend sun-bathers, hotels shooed guests inland, and sent the staff home.
“We had 137 of our 181 rooms occupied,” said Gina Dudley, assistant general manager of the Hilton Garden Inn, which was closed for four months after Ivan. “I thought maybe we’d have to do this again in another 20 years – not in 10 months.”
Down the road, Don and Mary Mason prepared to leave their home, just a few feet from the Gulf of Mexico. Ten months ago those waters rose 14 feet, blew out the break-away walls of the first story, and covered the road.
“We expect the same thing to happen this time,” said Mary Mason, 53, a pre-school teacher.
Gov. Jeb Bush said on Saturday he was worried about residents getting depressed.
“Ivan was a horrible storm and it takes more than a year to recover from a storm like that when you get a direct hit. And now they’re having to go through it again,” he said. “They’re hurting. The fact is that there is a legitimate feeling, “why me, why us, what did we do wrong?”‘
At Gulf Breeze Recreation Center, Brian Lynch gauged the mood of the people this way: “Last night the community was awash in panic,” he said. “These were the people who wanted to take care of their houses, get gas and get going.
“And they are gone. Now, people still here are calm. We are ready.”
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(South Florida Sun-Sentinel correspondents Linda Kleindienst, Ken Kaye and Orlando Sentinel correspondents Jason Garcia and Maya Bell contributed to this report.)
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(c) 2005 South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Visit the Sun-Sentinel on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): WEA-DENNIS
AP-NY-07-09-05 2125EDT
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