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http://www.cfra.com/headlines/index.asp?cat=2&nid=19537
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Ivan Was Terrible for Gulf Coast
Josh Pringle
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Hurricane Ivan drilled the U-S Gulf Coast, killing 20 people and
causing up to 10 billion dollars in damage.
The Florida Panhandle was hit the hardest, where residents were left
with surge-ravaged beachfronts, flooded streets and homes ripped apart
by deadly tornadoes.
Ivan came ashore near Gulf Shores Beach, Ala., around 3 a.m. Thursday
morning, but it was the Panhandle, squarely in the northeast quadrant
of the storm, where the winds are most violent, that took the brunt.
Ivan spun off at least a dozen tornadoes in Florida, while creating a
storm surge of three to five metres, topped by large battering waves.
A portion of a bridge on Interstate 10, the major east-west highway
through the Panhandle, was washed away.
In the Panhandle, destruction was seemingly around every corner. Huge
magnolia trees had fallen across the streets, and the trunk of an
almost eight-metre-high palm had snapped about two metres from the
ground. Bricks from St. Paul's United Methodist Church lay in heaps
beside the building.
More than 1.5 million homes and businesses from Louisiana to Florida
lost power at the storm's peak.
Ivan has lost power and is now a tropical storm, but it continues to
pound parts of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama with heavy
rain.
Forecasters are warning Ivan could drop up to 38 centimetres of rain
and flooding across the South, already soggy after hurricanes Charley
and Frances over the past month.
More than two million residents along a 500-kilometre stretch of the
Gulf Coast cleared out as Ivan, a former 265 km/h monster that killed
70 people in the Caribbean, closed in on an unsteady path.
New Orleans, especially vulnerable to storms because much of it lies
below sea level, got only some blustery winds, a mere half-centimetre
of rain and only some downed tree limbs. By Thursday morning, French
Quarter tourists came out of their hotels to sip cafe au lait under
brilliant sunshine.
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