Outside the ruined Crystal Beach condominiums, the parking lot was dotted with the stuff of summer vacations: long, bendy tubes that children use to stay afloat in the ocean surf, a pillow decorated with a seashell-and-fish pattern. The sturdy stucco half of the building survived; the wooden part -- the part that looked out over the beach -- was a trash mountain.
A newspaper box sat next to the rubble. Inside, the Mobile Register's banner headline for its Tuesday edition, two days before Ivan arrived, read "Ivan Targets Central Alabama." On the street, a few feet away from destruction, lay a bottle of 2001 Indigo Hills chardonnay. Not a drop was spilled. The bottle wasn't even cracked.
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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If only the same could be said for 300 miles of the Gulf Coast. Nearly a million people were without power in Alabama, ranging from the expected coastal targets of the storm to interior cities, such as Montgomery and Birmingham, which suffered mass outages that could take days to undo. An additional 370,000 people on Florida's Panhandle were without power, and tens of thousands suffered through outages in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Preliminary estimates fix the cost of the storm between $3 billion and $10 billion. Those figures would place Ivan in the same league as Charley, which caused $7 billion damage last month on Florida's west coast, and Frances, which inflicted slightly less damage after making landfall on Florida's east coast earlier this month. President Bush plans to visit Florida and Alabama on Sunday.
The tornadoes spawned by Ivan demonstrated the most concentrated lethal power. Four people were killed in Florida when one twister ravaged a mobile home park in Blountstown, north of Panama City.
The Panhandle took some of the worst damage from Ivan because it was in the ferocious northeast corner of the hurricane, which is known for its punishing winds. But the aftermath of the hurricane, as always, was just as dangerous as the peak moments of its winds. People died in the hours after Ivan left while trying to remove antennas from downed power lines and while clearing fallen trees.
"My heart goes out to the people of Florida," Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said after getting reports on the Panhandle tornadoes. "These are people that have literally been beaten twice, in some cases three times, by these hurricanes."
Brown said he is confident that his agency can respond quickly to the disaster while still working on relief efforts for Charley and Frances. "We are going to have to spend literally billions of dollars to get these people and this infrastructure back up to par," he said. "If you think about the physical damage to public infrastructure, roads, bridges, highways, hospitals and schools -- it's enormous."
Yet Ivan might eventually be best remembered for what it spared. The approaching storm prompted a monumental exodus from the New Orleans area, where the revelation that emergency managers have stockpiled 10,000 body bags in case of a climactic direct strike was fodder for radio talk shows. Yet, for all the fear of a head-on blast at the city, New Orleans was barely touched, enduring little more than gusty winds and minor flooding.
"Oh, heavens, we're grateful for every storm that doesn't come up the river," said Sidney Coffee, the coastal chief for Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). "But it can't be escaped forever."
The relief felt by so many was tempered by the weather report. A tropical storm named Jeanne became a hurricane Thursday and lashed the Dominican Republic before weakening. Forecasters predict it will become a hurricane again and could even approach the U.S. coast this weekend in a place familiar with strong winds: Florida.
Staff writer Mary Fitzgerald in Washington and special correspondent Catharine Skipp in Mobile contributed to this report.
