GULF SHORES, Ala., Sept. 16 -- Hurricane Ivan's brutish winds conspired with the Gulf of Mexico to drown mile-wide stretches of barrier-island resort towns, turning five-story condominiums into two-story rubble piles and spinning off deadly tornadoes before moving inland Thursday and leaving nearly one-fourth of Alabama's population without power.
The storm killed at least 23 people as it came ashore, ripped apart coastal homes in four states and promised to dump rain for three more days, as it showed resilience by maintaining tropical-storm-force winds on its northward slog toward southern Virginia. At least a dozen tornadoes whirled to life because of Ivan, demolishing hundreds of homes on the Florida Panhandle. Tens of thousands of people slept in public shelters, unable to return to their homes because of high water or snapping electrical lines.
Gene Mitchell of Pensacola wades through deep water in his yard in order to get a look at his home after Hurricane Ivan passed through several hours earlier.
(Candace Barbot -- Miami Herald)
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_____Tracking Ivan_____
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Interactive: Get weather reports from cities in the storm's path.
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Map: Gulf Coast storm track.
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Storm Surge: How a hurricane's most-damaging element is created.
_____Live Discussion_____
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Transcript: Hector Guerrero, meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, discusses the Hurricane Ivan.
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Still, many in this region, where hurricane season is as familiar as football season, felt lucky on Thursday. From the mushy Mississippi Delta towns of Louisiana to the jostled beach haunts of Alabama and Florida, the phrase "we dodged a bullet" was ubiquitous.
Mike Dow, mayor of Mobile, Ala., went even further, saying his city, so near the first landfall of the storm's 135-mph winds, had "caught a bullet with its teeth."
"It's not the first one," police Sgt. Dennis King in nearby Gulf Shores, Ala., said matter-of-factly. "We've overcome others."
King stood at the foot of one of the most vivid displays of Ivan's power. There, on the center line of Highway 59, where Ivan's eye first arrived onshore -- where the storm drove hard and rough through King's lovely little beach town -- was a major road transformed into a 10-foot-deep, three-fourths-of-a-mile-wide horizon-less lake. Off in the distance, too far away to be seen, were multimillion-dollar houses and row upon row of condominiums, where the "summer people" have come for decades to sun themselves on one of the South's best-loved beaches.
"It was nice until now," King said, shaking his head at the plight of this place that has been home for all his 46 years. "I've never seen waves going across the road like that."
Helicopters thundered overhead, their noses tipped down as if they were straining to see the wreckage below them. Somewhere beneath the circulating blades, King feared, were headstrong men and women who had refused to leave.
Ivan proved to be a great teacher of coastal geography. Barrier islands, such as the ones Gulf Shores rests on, were placed there eons ago to protect the mainland from storms just like Ivan. The islands did their job on Thursday. They suffered the most, offering up their pretty beaches to blunt the impact of Ivan on the mainland.
The only problem is that those barrier islands -- white-sand gems that they are -- draw people and houses just as insistently as they block storm winds. Much of the southern edges of these islands was underwater Thursday.
"People have lived on the coast from Day One," said Pete Blalock, a councilman and seafood retailer on the shard of island soil called Orange Beach. "We'll build back better. We're not going anywhere."
The beach in Blalock's town defied imagination. The road leading out to the coast is guarded by 40-foot wooden ships -- one on each side. They were lifted out of the water like toys.
Multi-story condominiums are built on stilts here in lower Alabama. Stilts can keep a home dry in high water, but they cannot stop a 135-mph wind gust. In spots, the stilts stood alone, everything above them washed to sea. Some beachside buildings collapsed upon themselves, pancaking one apartment onto another.
Mattresses, droopy and vile, dangled in the air, wedged between floors of the sagging, barely distinguishable hulks that were once someone's favorite place in the world. Twisted air-conditioning units and splintered dressers rested in ugly heaps.
