Hurricane Ivan

President Bush is visiting us again today to view the hurricane damage.
There are still 12 people in Santa Rosa County missing and at least that many in Escambia County. The Army Corps of Engineers is using sonar to search Escambia Bay. The looting is bad, with 72 cases so far. I don't know why Pensacola has attracted so many low-lifes. The Guard is there, but they're busy doing search and rescue and I don't think there are enough of them on the street to knock all the heads together that need it.

People are getting by as best they can:

Greg and Joanne DeLapp tried to salvage a few from things from their home Saturday near Santa Rosa Sound. The couple could not stay in the house because of the stench of sewage and amount of damage, and opted to stay at a nursing home where Greg DeLapp's mother-in-law lives.

"The old people are sitting in there with no generator. They've got water, (but) their food is rotting," Joanne DeLapp said.

"I've never seen anything like this. I did not expect it."

In Mississippi, the state Civil Defense director had to file a federal emergency protective request to get a beachfront nursing home evacuated. The owner was in Florida dealing with hurricane damage to his property down there, and refused to evacuate the people. The Feds got 40 ambulances and buses in there to move the people, but by that time branches were already flying through the air. What a wretched person to leave sick and feeble old folks in the lurch like that.

There are a lot of harrowing stories coming out of this storm. People punching holes in their ceilings to climb up in the attic so they don't drown in their own homes; a father choosing which of his daughters he had to let drown and which he would save.

Ivan gave out a lot of lessons in respect:

When they returned home from an aunt's house after the storm, the couple breathed a sigh of relief upon finding the front of their house intact. Even the plywood sign they had nailed to a window was still hanging, along with a taunting message: "Hit Me With Your Best Shot Ivan."

Then the couple walked around back, and saw the storm had answered their challenge.

The entire south side of the house is gone, as if someone took a chain saw from the roof to the foundation and cut it clean off.

"There's no saving this," said Michelle, 40, as she peered in at kitchen cupboards still stocked with Jif peanut butter and a can of Green Giant peas. A boat -- she has no idea whose -- is parked almost right beside the pantry, a blender sitting inside.

"It's ugly, isn't it?" 46-year-old Randy added. "You see things like hurricanes and tornadoes on TV, but it doesn't really make any sense until it's yours. You don't understand until you actually stand inside your house, and it's gone."

Despite most of the state being a disaster area, in the end, most people will pick up the pieces and go on:

“You’ve got to take the bad with the good,” said 42-year-old

Tracie Stitt, who stood in a pile of cinderblock and tile that once was the home she and her husband shared with her in-laws near Perdido Bay.

“If you live in California it’d be earthquakes, if you live in Kansas it’d be tornadoes, up north it’s snowstorms,” she said. “There’s not a perfect place on Earth. You’ve just got to take your losses and pray and go on.”

Posted by floridacracker at September 19, 2004 12:19 PM