Terrifying Yes, but Nothing Like Ivan

Hiding in her bathtub, fully dressed, Margaret Bivens learned Sunday what a Category 3 hurricane sounded like: positively terrifying.

“Even though I was in a brick house, it was bad,” said Bivens, 62, who had decided with her husband of 35 years to ride out Hurricane Dennis at home. She lay in her tub, on top of a foam mattress and several pillows, as the storm made landfall on nearby Santa Rosa Island.

The wind shrieked and thick limbs popped off the oaks in the front yard. Bivens had heard from some of her friends that a hurricane sounded like a freight train, but all she recalled hearing was endless, intense whistling. The ordeal lasted about an hour.

“It wasn’t one of our brightest ideas to stay,” she said.

When it was over, Bivens emerged from her single-story home on Prado Street to survey the neighborhood. Dennis, she decided, had been no Ivan. That hurricane had come ashore along the Florida Panhandle nearly 10 months ago, causing so much damage that it qualified as the third-costliest hurricane in U.S. history.

Ivan had exploded two mobile homes on her street, Bivens said. Dennis, whose sustained winds at landfall were estimated at 120 mph by the National Hurricane Center in Miami, managed only to move one of her neighbors’ mobile homes 2 feet on its foundation.

“Ivan took nearly every roof on the street,” she said. A cursory look after Dennis seemed to show that nearby homes were intact, with the exception of a one-story house that a tree fell against.

Damage elsewhere in western Florida communities lashed by the quick-moving hurricane appeared considerable.

In the town of Milton, about half an hour inland from Navarre, pieces of the roof were sheered off the Santa Rosa County Courthouse. A Burger King sign lay in the middle of a highway. Traffic lights dangled from overhead cables. The wall of a feed and seed store caved in. Utility workers said tornadoes spun off by the hurricane had snapped power poles.

No deaths or serious injuries were reported in the county, home to 130,000 people. “We got slapped pretty good, but thankfully it went through and we got through and everybody’s OK,” said Don Chinery, Santa Rosa County’s public information officer.

Many people who live on the low-lying barrier island that runs parallel to the Gulf of Mexico shoreline in the Panhandle region didn’t know how their homes had fared.

Woody Barnes, 58, a real estate agent who lives with his wife, Sharon, 52, in the island community of Navarre Beach, said he was waiting for police to reopen the bridge across the sound so that he and his wife could return home. But he already had an inkling that things weren’t good.

“We tried to go to our house, but they wouldn’t let us,” said the retired American Airlines gate agent. “So I got binoculars and I looked, and our downstairs is completely washed away.”

That may sound more dramatic than it is, Barnes said; like many homes on the barrier island, theirs is on stilts, he said, and in the days before Dennis arrived, he and his wife moved their weed eater, generator, air compressor, lawn mower and other belongings they kept in the garage upstairs for safekeeping.

But Barnes was worried that he hadn’t been able to see all the damage. The back of the house, which faces the Gulf of Mexico, could have been washed away by seawater driven by Dennis, he said.

“We just got through rebuilding from Ivan. It cost us $150,000,” Barnes said. “The last storm, we were out of our house for 3 1/2 months. I think it’s going to be like that this time.”

In the yard of Charlie Devitt’s home in Navarre, so many pine needles were snapped by winds from Dennis that hours afterward it still smelled pleasantly fragrant.

Even when it came to the quantity of downed pine needles, though, Ivan topped Dennis, said the 48-year-old scuba instructor and technician.

The hurricane did do some damage to his yard and the one-story wooden house he shares with an Akita dog that a girlfriend rescued and gave to him.

“But Ivan took down a bigger tree, peeled off more shingles and turned off power for a week,” he said.

Devitt’s telephone and electricity had been knocked out by Dennis, but he said he hoped things would be back to normal in two to three days.

“This,” Devitt said of Dennis, “is a piece of cake.”