[AP photo] A bird's-eye view of a section of beach near Panama City Beach shows erosion that was escalated as Hurricane Dennis passed through the area on sunday.
Posted on 07/17/2005 4:06:09 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
For some people along U.S. 98, Dennis proved especially harsh. A road trip from Navarre to St. Marks is a drive through anger, heartache and endurance.
It wasn't as bad as Ivan. That was the easy thing to say about Hurricane Dennis.
And in many ways it's true. Fewer people died. Fewer houses crumbled. It brought relief to hearts once occupied by misery. But for some poor souls along the battered ribbon of U.S. 98, Dennis proved far worse.
We traveled the length of the highway in one long, slow, detour-filled day, from Navarre on the west to St. Marks on the east.
The drive took more than 12 hours and covered more than 200 miles.
U.S. 98 is a highway made unwhole by Dennis' wind and water, a road with washed-out homes and mountains of debris. A road heavy with the smell of mildew and loud with bulldozers and clanging hammers.
Along the way, we encountered defeat and determination, acceptance and anger, heartache and happiness. And an important lesson: Every storm, big or small, alters lives.
Navarre
This is not the Navarre of sun-kissed mansions and sugar-white beaches, where television crews flocked to survey damage after Hurricane Dennis made landfall here a week ago.
Joan Davis, 58, moved here six years ago. Just sold her house in New York, quit her job as a hairdresser and turned south toward paradise.
Her neighborhood, inland along the Intracoastal Waterway, is made of modest homes and modest people.
"I thought I could come down here and live comfortably," she said. "It's been nothing but a struggle."
The storms have hurt.
Hurricane Ivan ripped away the screened porch outside her home on Suncrest Street, a dirt road off U.S. 98. She replaced the porch, but Dennis took it again. This time, she also lost much of her roof. The rain soaked walls and ceilings and left an inch of standing water on her floor.
There, in the soaking, twisted mess of her dream, Joan Davis also has faced a different kind of misery. Doctors said her mother, Mary, who suffers from Alzheimer's, will die within a week.
Davis knew she must say goodbye, even as her house crumbled around her. Late one night, still without electricity, she sat by her mother's bedside and wondered how she could hold a funeral and start rebuilding at the same time.
She sat there in the darkness, surrounded by the heavy night air, and wept while her mother lay sleeping.
Seagrove Beach
Cheryl Jones stands on the edge of the cliff that has crept within feet of her home and stares nearly 50 feet down to the beach below. She just stands there, the wind in her hair and tears in her eyes, saying nothing.
She and her husband, Brad, bought this home between Destin and Panama City a quarter-century ago and grew to love it more with each passing year.
"Wherever we go. . .," Brad Jones says, and his wife finishes his sentence, ". . . we always want to come back here."
They spend more time here now than in their native Ohio. They've seen their family grow here - three children, 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren - and say this patch of land holds decades of priceless memories.
But the land keeps disappearing. They said storms in recent years have weakened the cliff below them and rendered the beach defenseless.
"We never had a chance," Brad Jones says.
Ivan took the stairs that led down to the beach. But nothing battered this place like Dennis. It swallowed the stairs again, plus part of their deck, 12 feet of their back yard and 10 feet of the beach below.
Their home now teeters on the edge of, well, they'd rather not think about that.
They are both 67, and they'd rather think about the good times here, the faces of their children and grandchildren. They'd like to think that future hurricanes will spare them, that the surf below will retreat and leave them something to pass along when they are gone.
Eastpoint
She didn't want to name the restaurant after herself. She wanted to name it Our Place.
But Sharon Shiver's daughter convinced her to name it Sharon's Place. For the past 14 years, that's what the regulars have called the little diner and seafood market that clings to a sliver of land between U.S. 98 and Apalachicola Bay.
Chances are, they've eaten their last meal there. Dennis' swelling waters wounded this tranquil stretch of the Panhandle more than any storm in recent memory. At Sharon's Place, it overturned chairs and tables, ripped out walls and left little of value, except maybe the Bible verses Sharon always hung on the wall urging people to love their enemies.
Down the road, the surge also flooded the house she has lived in with her husband, Coy, for more than four decades. They've been living in a camper in the front yard.
But somehow, while her business and her home and her life lies in disarray, Sharon Shiver seems at peace. When her friends or neighbors ask her why, she just smiles and tells them in her sugar-sweet drawl: "Honey, there is nobody dead. We've been blessed."
She said she will miss the regulars, the ones who came year after year. But she won't miss being tied to the place, hardly ever seeing her husband.
She is 57; he is 59. They celebrated their 41st anniversary this week.
If they can weather the financial struggle ahead, she said, maybe they finally can take a trip together. They've always wanted to see Alaska. "While we're still able," she said, smiling.
Alligator Point
He stands by himself on the road, or what used to be the road, the only man in sight for miles. He just stands there shaking his head and looking at his neighbors' houses, or what used to be their houses.
One house has crumbled completely. The rising waters brought by Dennis washed away others up and down this small barrier island that sticks like a thumb into the gulf more than 100 miles from where Dennis made landfall. Sand has nearly swallowed cars whole and covered the roads 2 feet deep in places.
But Norman Lassiter, 69, just keeps staring at his neighbors' houses.
"They are wonderful people," he says. "We didn't expect anything like this. I wouldn't have believed it till I seen it."
He and his wife are the first on their block to return. Their home survived, but he dreads the sadness he must see in his neighbors' faces when they return, too.
"Our neighbors have really suffered," he says, almost with a tinge of guilt. And just like that, he straightens up and turns to walk home.
"They are resilient; they'll build back," he says. "This was a little bit of heaven down here. It will be again."
St. Marks
The years and the wind have shaped William Young's face, the one he keeps hidden behind that red bush of a beard. He is a fisherman, plain and simple.
And this is his home, this little speck of a town south of Tallahassee, squeezed between two rivers that feed out into the Apalachee Bay.
Young, 49, lives with his wife and son above St. Marks Seafood, right on the river and just above the boat that carries him out to sea, month after month.
No storm he can remember has crippled this town as badly as Dennis.
The floods here, which swelled as high as 10 feet and almost reached his second-story apartment, wrecked the seafood house and melted all the ice. It kept the fishermen out of work all week.
But Young has bills to pay; he is not a rich man. So in the morning he will take to the sea again in search for grouper, in search for a living.
"You don't know if you're going to win or lose," he says. "That's fishing."
This time, for the first time, he will bring his 16-year-old son along for the trip. They will leave just after dawn.
But it is sunset now, calm and peaceful and quiet here by the river. He turns his blue-gray eyes toward the bay, thinking about tomorrow's trip and hoping that the sea will give something back after all it has taken.
Brady Dennis can be reached at 813 226-3386 or dennis@sptimes.com
[AP photo] A bird's-eye view of a section of beach near Panama City Beach shows erosion that was escalated as Hurricane Dennis passed through the area on sunday.
On the other, that picture shows the problem - People who live so close to the edge have no reason to blame anything except themselves when the ocean eats the land.
It's not like nobody knew a hurricane was going to hit the Gulf coast of Florida.
LOL...what is it with this guy's writing? I thought it was the winner in one of those "Worst of Hemmingway" contests.
My advice to those affected by hurricane damage...don't live on the coast, particularly not in mobile homes and manufactured housing. There should be a law that all buildings on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts be constructed of concrete with pilings sunk 40'into bedrock. That would solve much of the reconstruction problems after the inevitable storms. But what would FEMA do to justify its budget then?
In the picture it looks like the third house from the bottom built the deck to overhang the cliff.
LOL
Panama City Beach is a long way from where Dennis went ashore by Pensacola. This is natural storm erosion.
The coastline moves, particularly as the sea level rises. The taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab for these people's lack of good judgement. If you want to live by the shore, either get the insurance, or if it is not available, be prepared to rebuild with your own funds. You need to figure it into your cost of living.
Somehow an article about the hardships caused by Dennis was turned by you bozos into a rant about FEMA flood insurance. Lay off. A lot of people of simple means are really hurting here.
***.....A drive at sundown along Panama City Beach, about 100 miles east of Pensacola, showed minimal structural damage. But there was major beach erosion in areas that were in the midst of a multi-million-dollar effort to rebuild the fragile shoreline, much of which was eroded by Ivan last September.
Power lines were still standing along Seagrove Beach, and the boarded-up Red Bar in low-lying Grayton Beach appeared untouched. Seaside Village, the setting for the movie "The Truman Show," also appeared to have minimal damage.
The 30-foot-high sand dunes at Seagrove and Seaside, however, were badly eroded. The huge waves and storm surge ate away 15 feet of the dune line, already eroded by Ivan and Tropical Storm Arlene last month.
Every walkover, the long wooden stairways that connect Gulf-front homes and condos with the beaches below, had been cut off at the dune line. Several large stairways were tossed about in the violent surf.
Tourists who come to the area in the next few weeks can look out over the water, but there's no way to get down to the beaches from the high dunes.........
http://www.oxfordpress.com/biz/content/shared/news/nation/stories/07/11HURR_DENNIS.html
Thank you. So apparently the 15-30 feet high dunes are gone. Very sad.
That's the problem. If you can't afford to rebuild your house, you can't afford to live on the shore in a hurricane zone. That means from Cape Cod to Brownsville.
It's nature's way.
Too bad for the homeowners, however.
Here's the NOAA satellite photos of the gulf coast taken after Dennis hit.
http://alt.ngs.noaa.gov/dennis/DENNIS0000.HTM
One thing i've learned about "news" coverage of hurricanes is that they only do stories and show pictures of the worst damage. If 10% of an areas beaches and structures were damaged, that's what they show the pictures of.
The pictures only work with Internet explorer for some reason. Firefox will not open them.
I clicked on one barrier reef box and saw only water.
I didn't wait for it to totally load.
That is a neat site.
Thank you.
It takes a bit of scrolling around to find the beach in these pics. And once they fully load, you can enlarge them by clicking in the lower right corner of the photo.
Thank you.
Back in January the wife and I traveled to Naples to pick up an engine for an airplane I'm building. We passed by Port Charlotte where on one side of the interstate there was a heaping pile of destroyed trailer homes and on the other side neat rows of brand new FEMA trailers.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. It's hard to sympathize with folks who intentionally put themselves in harms way, repeatedly. It's really kind of amazing that the state of Florida still allows trailer homes after Charlie, Ivan, Andrew, et al.
The brand new FEMA trailers were intended as temporary emergency housing, not replacements for old trailers. FEMA uses trailers because they can be moved in and out of disaster zones.
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