Hurricane Is Deja Vu for Gulf Coast

Nearly 1.4 million people in low-lying areas of Florida and Alabama were ordered to evacuate Saturday as Hurricane Dennis, ominously retracing the steps of one of last year’s most punishing hurricanes, bore down on the Gulf Coast, carrying 135-mph winds that were expected to grow even stronger.

“The same exact storm path is almost too much to believe,” said George Touart, administrator of Escambia County, Fla. “It’s kind of a sense of deja vu.”

In the coastal city of Gulf Breeze, Fla., businessman Tom Dolaskie, 25, and three friends used a drill and plywood sheets to board up the windows of a building containing a massage therapy clinic, a gymnasium and a smoothie shop on U.S. Highway 98. Dolaskie said he had done the same to protect his properties before Hurricane Ivan hit Sept. 16.

Ivan, which caused more than $4 billion in property damage in the Florida Panhandle alone, peeled the roof off the one-story yellow-brick building.

“We’re still fixing up from the last one,” Dolaskie said. “We’re still living the nightmare, and this just adds another hour to the nightmare.”

On Pensacola Beach, Elise McKinney, 42, was packing up with her mother, husband and children, 8 and 4, to drive back to Birmingham, Ala., before Dennis, the first hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic storm season, arrived. The family had been visiting to check the progress of extensive repairs on their condominium on Perdido Key. It was supposed to be ready by next month.

“Ivan got it,” McKinney said. “And here we go again.”

Dennis, blamed for at least 10 deaths in Cuba and 10 in Haiti, knocked out electricity to thousands of customers in the Florida Keys and to neighborhoods in Miami and Fort Lauderdale as it marched north in the Gulf of Mexico. The storm spun off tornadoes that felled trees in the Tampa Bay area, though no injuries were reported.

Though the destructive core of the hurricane passed more than 70 miles west of Key West, where a complete power outage left the island resort city without traffic lights, sustained winds recorded at Key West International Airport reached 61 mph, with gusts of 74 mph. Residents and visitors in the Lower Keys had been ordered out Thursday.

As Dennis moved on a northwesterly course at 14 mph, state meteorologist Ben Nelson said rainbands spiraling off from its core would douse areas of southwest, central and north Florida with more than 10 inches of rain. The storm surge -- the amount the level of the sea is raised by water pushed ahead by the hurricane -- could reach a devastating 8 to 10 feet at the point of landfall and to the east of the storm, Nelson said.

More than 700,000 people were under evacuation orders in the Florida Keys and low-lying areas of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Gov. Jeb Bush warned Panhandle residents that “a very dangerous storm” was coming and urged people to seek refuge. Forecasters expected its core to reach land this afternoon or evening.

In Alabama, about half a million people were ordered Saturday to leave the Gulf beaches, and state officials turned Interstate 65 into a one-way route north from the coast to Montgomery. The Red Cross opened 70 shelters across the state, and Gov. Bob Riley asked President Bush to issue an “expedited major disaster declaration.”

Dennis had weakened from a Category 4 after crossing Cuba on Friday, but again developed into a major hurricane as it moved over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The hurricane’s eye had looked ragged, but by Saturday afternoon, said National Hurricane Center forecaster Chris Sisko, Dennis was “starting to get its act together, and get better organized.” By noon CDT today, the Pensacola area is expected to start being scoured by hurricane-force winds, the hurricane center said. The center predicted the storm’s eye would come ashore on the Florida-Alabama line, slightly east of Gulf Shores, Ala., near where Hurricane Ivan’s center reached land. But the forecasters cautioned that the storm’s course could change.

Dennis’ hurricane-force winds were extending as far as 40 miles from its center, and a hurricane warning was declared from the Steinhatchee River of Florida to the mouth of the Pearl River in Louisiana.

Touart, the Escambia County administrator, said back-to-back tropical storms this summer had raised the level of rivers in the western Panhandle, heightening the risk of flooding from Dennis. So much building debris left by Ivan was still on the ground that it would cost an estimated $2 million to $3 million to remove it, he said. In the winds of another hurricane, the broken planks and other junk could become lethal missiles or could clog storm sewers.

For the 5,000 to 10,000 Escambia County residents still homeless from the 2004 hurricane and living in trailers, Dennis would be an added ordeal. In the Florida Panhandle, Touart said, people are coping with “a tremendous amount of frustration” because of Ivan, which was blamed for 124 deaths in the U.S. and the Caribbean.

Gov. Bush told a news conference in Tallahassee that because the “psychology of the community” still bore the marks of Ivan, one of four hurricanes to strike Florida last year, it was vital that help arrive quickly after Dennis. More than 600 trucks were waiting to help carry ice and water to hurricane-affected areas, state officials said.

However, not all effects of Ivan were negative, Escambia County Sheriff Ron McNesby said. Since the havoc wrought by that hurricane was still on people’s minds, the evacuation order for Pensacola Beach, Perdido Key, other coastal areas and all people living in trailers or mobile homes was proceeding more smoothly, McNesby said.

But not everyone was heeding the pleas of officials. George Schwartz, 26, stood with his girlfriend Lindsay Stanley, 22, at the water’s edge on Pensacola Beach at noon Saturday, scanning the southern horizon for signs of Dennis. They had decided to “hunker down” at home, instead of “sitting in traffic for several hours,” said Schwartz, who said he had been serving in Iraq as an Army medic during Ivan.

Along the Alabama coast, where 80% of the state’s oyster reefs had been damaged by Ivan, oystermen were bracing for another hit.

“We’re trying to get as prepared as we can, everyone’s tying down their boats and equipment, but we will be what you call impacted. It could be devastating,” said Avery Bates, a Bayou La Batre, Ala., oysterman, and vice president of the Organized Seafood Assn. of Alabama. Bates said the Alabama oyster industry was at least three years away from recovering from the effects of Ivan, which he said drove the retail price of oysters to as much as $7.50 a pound, double the price two years ago.

In Louisiana, there were voluntary evacuations in low-lying coastal areas, including Jefferson Parish. The 484,000 residents of New Orleans were not ordered to leave, but were warned to be vigilant against strong winds later in the weekend.

“We want you to be somewhat comfortable, but not totally relaxed,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin said during a Saturday morning news conference.

New Orleans officials decided not to implement a new evacuation plan that would have reversed lanes on major highways to increase capacity on outbound roads. The plan was devised after the number of people fleeing Hurricane Ivan last year led to gridlock.

In Mississippi, officials on Saturday ordered the evacuation of 190,000 people. But even before then, traffic on two major highways, Interstates 55 and 59, had doubled, said state emergency spokesman Nash Nunnery.

“We get an influx of people evacuating from Louisiana and Alabama, and we’re in the middle,” Nunnery said. There were no longer any available hotel rooms south of Jackson, the state capital, he said.

Times staff writer Lianne Hart contributed to this report from Houston.