Pensacola, Fla. – Hurricane Dennis strengthened as it churned toward the Gulf Coast on Saturday, leaving at least 32 people dead in Haiti and Cuba and prompting mass evacuations and bitter frustration among residents of Florida Panhandle communities who were thrashed by Hurricane Ivan just 10 months ago.
Packing lashing rains and winds near 115 mph, Dennis rapidly regained Category 3 status Saturday evening, and forecasters said it easily could become a Category 4 storm before striking land today.
Dennis had been downgraded to a Category 2 hurricane after it lost steam over Cuba.
Emergency management officials warned that the growing storm could down power lines, chew up homes and businesses and trigger damaging floods as it comes ashore, most likely somewhere between Pensacola and Mobile, Ala.
More than 1 million people from Florida’s northwestern Panhandle to Louisiana were under evacuation orders.
Residential and business power outages were reported in the southern tip of Florida, and power was out to all of Key West. Several tornadoes touched down in the Tampa Bay area, causing minor damage.
“The state is going to get hit,” Florida Gov. Jeb Bush warned. “We’re going to have a significant amount of rain and lots of wind. This is serious. This is a very dangerous storm.”
Residents of the Pensacola area were especially on edge. At least 100,000 of the area’s 400,000 residents evacuated rather than stay to test the storm’s fury, local officials said.
Memories of Ivan are fresh, and loose debris and banged-up homes and businesses from that September storm can still be seen all over the area.
“I’d say the town is scared to death,” said Chuck Emling, 52, a health-club owner who loaded sandbags Saturday that he planned to place around his business and home. “It’s just my estimate, but I’d say two-thirds of the town is gone. I don’t know one person that stayed in their houses last time who is going to now. Ivan was bad.”
Ivan, which landed here Sept. 16, contributed to 52 deaths in the United States and 70 in the Caribbean and caused up to $10 billion of insured damage.
Ivan left 30,000 people homeless throughout the Pensacola area, and about a third of them still are unable to return to their homes – including 5,000 who continue to live in temporary trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said George Touart, the Escambia County administrator.
There simply have not been enough contractors and building materials to go around, Touart and other officials said.
Now, with Dennis approaching, “there’s a tremendous amount of frustration,” Touart said. “It’s very, very unbelievable. The same exact storm path, the same type of storm surge being anticipated. It’s like déjà vu. Here we go again with another storm.”
Viewed overhead from an airplane window, the face of Pensacola is pockmarked with blue blemishes – the tarps that still cover roofs of many structures damaged when Ivan swept through.
In Pensacola Beach, a resort community on a nearby barrier island, green tiles are missing from the roof of the Holiday Inn Express hotel, which is surrounded by a chain-link fence. Next door at the Dunes Hotel, wide swaths of the concrete facade appear to have been torn away like old wallpaper.
At St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in downtown Pensacola, clear plastic sheets cover the stained-glass windows cracked by Ivan, and an orange plastic mesh fence stands in for the metal one that used to be there. About 2 miles west, a plywood panel over the window of a single-story home reads, “Go home Ivan.”
“None of us would wish this on anybody, but, gosh, we’ve had our share,” said Susan Willis, 55, an elementary-school art teacher who lives in the barrier- island community of Gulf Breeze. “It is time for Mother Nature to pick another spot.”
Willis and her husband, Tom, 62, a retired real-estate broker, lost almost everything last year when Ivan demolished their waterfront home.
In Cuba, 10 people were killed Thursday night when Dennis struck the southeastern corner of the island and destroyed many homes in two coastal towns. Workers spent the day clearing debris, fallen trees, lampposts and electrical lines from streets in urban areas. Much of the country was still without power, including Havana, the capital, and Cienfuegos, the city on the south-central coast hardest hit by the storm.
In southern Haiti, 15 people died when a raging river tore away a bridge. The overall death toll in Haiti reached 22, according to officials.
