head fake kennyboy must be upset of hurricane ???Most Floridians Find Branches Down but Properties Blessedly Whole
By MICHAEL WILSON
MILTON, Fla., July 11 - The small towns are worn, like the inside of a catcher's mitt that is the Gulf of Mexico, where bad storms slap to a stop.
The day after Hurricane Dennis came and swiftly went, people hurried home just as quickly, from the couches of Alabama relatives and Georgia in-laws. They found, in most cases, their property strewn with branches and leaves, but blessedly whole.
Early analyses of the damage indicated that Hurricane Dennis was bad, but nothing like Hurricane Ivan last year, which directly or indirectly killed 57 people in the United States.
Hurricane Dennis's peak winds of 145 miles an hour in the gulf, putting it squarely in frightening Category 4 territory, had weakened to 120 miles an hour by the time it reached shore Sunday afternoon, and the storm sped through a relatively deserted Pensacola and nearby beach towns without any reports of serious injury or death.
Elsewhere, a 3-year-old boy was killed in DeFuniak Springs in the central Panhandle when he was run over by his father's car as the family prepared to evacuate; a man was electrocuted by a fallen power line in Fort Lauderdale and a man in Georgia was killed by a falling tree, the Associated Press reported.
The cleanup will take months, officials said Monday, and Hurricane Dennis should never be discounted as a small storm. "It didn't fizzle out," Gov. Jeb Bush said at a news conference.
Or, as Danny Hood, 55, a retiree enjoying his first afternoon of freedom after being trapped in his home by a fallen tree, said in a Milton restaurant, "One-hundred-twenty-miles-per-hour is a pretty good fizzle."
In some places, Hurricane Dennis inflicted more wind damage than Hurricane Ivan, like in Santa Rosa County, east of Pensacola. The towns of Milton, population 7,025 in the 2000 census, Bagdad and Pace were on the dangerous northeast edge of the eye wall, and the wind damage exceeded that seen at Pensacola. Monday brought the familiar sights of National Guard convoys chugging down two-lane roads, and insurance companies erecting catastrophe centers in strip mall parking lots.
Arnold and Peggy Skipper moved into their east Milton home in 1972 and watched two 8-foot-tall live oaks grow into towering trees that shaded their backyard and its pond stocked with koi.
"Used to be, you could walk in my backyard and you had to hunt a place to get in the sun," Mr. Skipper, 57, a supervisor at Air Products and Chemicals in Pace.
One tree fell on the house during Hurricane Ivan, denting the roof and collapsing part of the ceiling of the master bedroom. They fixed the roof, only to have the second tree crash through it on Sunday, into the living room and part of the kitchen. When Mr. Skipper stepped under the big trunk and through his back door Monday, he had to stoop, as if visiting a child's tree house. The living room roof bowed down over shelves of Reader's Digest Best Loved Books and their big-screen TV, and knocked the glass out of the grandfather clock. Their wedding pictures were soggy from the rain coming through, and the master bedroom is ruined again.
"Life and health are all that's important," Mrs. Skipper said, sitting on her porch as men with chainsaws dissected the tree. She apologized as she fought back tears, and said, "It's so hard, on top of just getting over the other one, getting torn up again."
In Reggie's restaurant, with food and air conditioning powered by a generator, William H. "Cotton" Byrom, 77, a former Milton mayor, said the winds of Hurricane Dennis were worse here than Hurricane Ivan's. "Last year it pushed the water in here and flooded everything," Mr. Byrom said. This time, the winds were able to shear off the left side of a Waffle House restaurant, a chain popular in many gulf towns for being the last to close - if it closes at all - during a hurricane.
A helicopter tour of Navarre Beach, Fla., close to where the storm landed, told a similar story, with a restaurant completely caved in, the dining tables visible from the sky. A seaside bar's tiki roof was nowhere to be seen. Two 20-story construction cranes had fallen away from a towering hotel complex like pieces of an old skin.
In Florida, 22 general shelters were still open Monday afternoon, with 3,969 people staying there, and 273,000 people in 28 counties still had no power.
Parts of Georgia had flooding after receiving six to eight inches of rain in 24 hours; about 400 homes in two south Georgia counties were evacuated as a precaution, The A.P. reported.
In Alabama, where there was minor damage, things returned to normal more quickly. In Gulf Shores, workers rehanged traffic lights - not because they had been knocked down, but because they had been taken down before the storm came in. A spokesman for Gov. Bob Riley, Jeff Emerson, defended the decision late Friday to order the mandatory evacuation of Mobile County, where some residents ended up not even losing power, and part of Baldwin County. "You can't wait until the very end - obviously, hurricanes are unpredictable, as we say," Mr. Emerson said.
Mobile, Escambia and Baldwin Counties had about 23,000 customers without power on Monday, and officials said most would have their power restored by Tuesday.
In Louisiana and Mississippi, no significant storm damage or injuries were reported.
For months, federal and independent storm forecasters have predicted that 2005, like last year, would very likely have a busy Atlantic hurricane season, in part because of warmer ocean waters resulting from a decades-long temperature cycle.
But no one predicted that the relatively quiescent months of June and July would have four named tropical storms so far, with another one possibly in the works.
The early-season burst of storms was probably caused by a very unusual early and extra warming of the tropical Atlantic, said James B. Elsner, a meteorologist at Florida State University.
"When you add that additional warmth over and above what's already there, you have a recipe for an early season start," Dr. Elsner said. Whatever the cause of the current conditions in the Atlantic, Dr. Elsner said, the situation portends a violent second half of the season.
In Milton, Mr. Hood, helping his son take down lumber from the windows of their shop, is already casting a wary eye at the latest storm, Tropical Depression Five, out in the Atlantic. "We just got done taking the boards off, but he left them laying there," he said. "He said, 'We might just have to put them right back up."
Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting for this article. |
