Hurricane victims queue up for food and water

RELIEF workers fanned out across Florida and Alabama yesterday to hand out ice, water and meals to frustrated victims of Hurricane Ivan who faced another day digging through debris and waiting in lines as tempers began to flare.

Days after Florida’s third deadly storm in weeks, some residents demanded to return to neighbourhoods along coastal areas that had been evacuated and sealed off.

“They won’t even let me go in there and look for my underwear,” said Roy Butgereit, who gathered with other residents of the Grande Lagoon Lake subdivision southwest of Pensacola and pleaded for deputies to let them check their homes.

President George W Bush arrived in the Florida Panhandle early yesterday to tour the areas most devastated when Ivan howled ashore on Thursday with 130 mph winds, spawning deadly tornadoes and a huge storm surge that gutted homes and businesses and washed out roads and bridges.

More than a million people were without power across 13 states, leaving many in Florida’s Panhandle and Alabama’s Gulf Coast to sweat it out without air conditioning. At a Pensacola shopping centre, people waited in cars or on foot for hours on Saturday to receive necessities from Florida National Guard troops.

“It’s part of the life; 364 days of the year it’s paradise. One day it’s not,” said Kevin McKinly, 37, who was in Iowa on leave from the Air Force when he decided to drive 15 hours home to Pensacola to board up ahead of Ivan.

“We’re all in the same boat. It’s frustrating, but it’s not just you, it’s everybody,” added Lowell Weaner, who said a tree fell on his home during the storm.

Ivan’s path of destruction across the South and Northeast left 49 people dead, 19 of them in Florida. Earlier, it was blamed for 70 deaths in the Caribbean.

Hundreds of urban search and rescue workers scoured demolished neighbourhoods on Saturday, some using tracking dogs to look for victims in the rubble and along flooded river banks. In Escambia Bay, where a trucker was killed when a bridge collapsed, the army corps of engineers was asked to use sonar to search for possible victims.

As rescuers searched flattened homes in the Grande Lagoon Lake subdivision, Mr Butgereit and 20 other residents pleaded to be let check on their homes.

Mr Butgereit shouted that he had the right to protect his property from looters.

“Because of the government we’re losing personal property!” he shouted.

There have been 72 reports of looting in Escambia County since Ivan passed. Deputies have arrested 15 suspects.