Islanders Found in Razed Homes After Hurricane

Nearly a dozen people were found huddling in the wreckage of their homes on the narrow barrier island where Hurricane Opal charged ashore, rescuers said Saturday. At least two others are listed as missing.

Rescuers using dogs and sensitive listening devices searched for a 51-year-old man who had called 911 to say he was riding the storm out Wednesday, said Tom Carr of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Carr said the man’s Navarre Beach house had been washed away.

A 17-year-old girl who also called 911 was unaccounted for, but Carr said authorities did not know where she had been or where to look for her. Neither person’s name was released.

The death toll rose to 19 when a man died Friday after a tree fell on him as he cleared debris from his yard in DeFuniak Springs, authorities said.

Rescuers searching the eastern end of Santa Rosa Island, known as Okaloosa Beach, on Friday found 10 or 11 people who had weathered the storm in their houses and condominiums, said Raul Chavez, a rescuer with the Miami Metro-Dade Fire Department. They were taken to the mainland.

As the search wound down, residents of Navarre Beach and next-door Pensacola Beach, at the other end of Santa Rosa Island, returned for the first brief visit to their homes since Opal.

“It’s gone. It’s flattened. It’s a pancake. There’s nothing there,” Peggy Sparkman told her sister by cellular phone as she caught her first glimpse of her summer cottage on Pensacola Beach. The only thing left was the new roof she put on after Hurricane Erin two months ago.

Elsewhere along Florida’s Panhandle, life was returning to a semblance of normality. Power was back for all but 150,500 of the 572,000 Floridians who lost electricity after the storm, but thousands more as far north as North Carolina were still blacked out.

In Gulf Breeze, only a mile across Santa Rosa Sound from Pensacola Beach, it was a normal Saturday for most people as they washed cars, mowed lawns and played softball. Mail was delivered and trash picked up. The only signs of a storm were piles of tree limbs and leaves in yards.

In Laguna Beach, outside Panama City, a sign at the Carousel grocery store beckoned: “We Are Open. We Have Gas.”

Elsewhere in Panama City Beach, brooms, rakes and shovels were in use as residents cleaned up. Members of the National Guard patrolled past shuttered surf shops and damaged buildings. A few joggers and sightseers strolled the littered beaches.

Okaloosa County sheriff’s spokesman Rick Hord said there had been four arrests for curfew violations but no looting. “It’s a burglar’s paradise, but everybody seems to be looking out for everybody else’s property.”

The American Red Cross appealed for more money, saying the year’s previous hurricanes and the Oklahoma City bombing had depleted its disaster relief fund, now at $30 million. “We have had so many disasters this year,” spokesman Randy Ackley said.