- Hurricane Ivan slammed into the United States in the
early hours of yesterday, killing at least 18 people and pummelling a broad
swath of coastline from Louisiana to Florida with severe winds, torrential
rain and waves as high as 25ft.
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- Coastal homes were destroyed and one-and-a-half million
people were still without electricity yesterday after 130mph winds swept
ashore. The worst of the storm hit the Alabama seaside resort of Gulf Shores,
where the eye of the hurricane reached land and alligators were seen swimming
in the streets after a zoo was flooded.
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- But the greatest number of casualties occurred in the
Florida Panhandle, where tornadoes spawned by the hurricane killed at least
13 people and washed away part of a road bridge. "It looks like a
war zone," said a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office in Bay County.
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- An eight-year-old girl was killed when a tree collapsed
on her mobile home in the Panhandle town of Milton, and a man died in his
car when, according to a witness, the tornado "picked the car up".
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- Four other people with medical conditions died after
being evacuated from the New Orleans area to safer parts of Louisiana.
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- In Gulf Shores, flooding of up to 9ft reached half a
mile inland and the local zoo. Most of the animals had been evacuated,
but nine alligators and 20 deer remained and were loose in the water yesterday,
the authorities said.
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- Elsewhere, though, relief was the the dominant emotion,
as those who had defied orders to evacuate emerged to inspect the damage.
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- "The good Lord was looking out for us," said
Robert Driver, after a night in his brother-in-law's home in Mobile, Alabama,
where Ivan turned streets into fast-flowing rivers.
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- "Ivan is here," Colette Boehm, the emergency
chief for Baldwin County, Alabama, had announced in the middle of the night.
"We are getting hurricane-force winds and they're still picking up.
We have reports of rising water ... and of trees down and roofs coming
off."
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- Thousands of tourists and conference-goers, including
many from Britain, remained stranded in New Orleans, where ferocious waves
crashed over defensive walls around Lake Pontchartrain.
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- But the city was spared the full force of the hurricane
- and there was no need for the 10,000 body bags that the authorities had
readied.
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- As Ivan moved inland, it lost much of its strength and
was downgraded from a category four to a category one storm.
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- But Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Centre in
Miami said it could still bring destruction as it moved into Tennessee
and Georgia.
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- The wider region was bracing for more trouble: a new
tropical storm, Jeanne, hit the Dominican Republic yesterday with winds
close to hurricane strength and a trajectory likely to take it through
the Bahamas and on towards the south-east US, the latest violent storm
in an unusually lively hurricane season.
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- The Red Cross, meanwhile, renewed its appeal on behalf
of those left homeless in the Caribbean, where Ivan caused at least 70
deaths. It said about £2.6m was urgently required for basic needs.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/naturaldisasters/story/0,7369,1306710,00.html
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