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On Sept. 5, while Hurricane Frances was making landfall
in Florida, the storm system known as Ivan first achieved
hurricane status. By later that same day, Ivan was
a Category 3. It would later achieve Category 5 strength
three separate times, with winds as high as 165 mph.
It became a Category 5 storm for the first time on
Sept. 9, in the central Caribbean, and fluctuated
in intensity as it slammed into Jamaica and the Cayman
Islands. But now Ivan was farther to the west than
Charley had been, and passed nearly harmlessly, still
a fierce and dangerous Category 5, through the Yucatan
channel, missing Cuba.
Ivan drifted slowly into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening
much of the coast, before finally moving north and
striking east of Mobile, Alabama, on Sept. 16, as
a Category 3 hurricane. The bulk of the storm passed
to the west of the Florida Panhandle—but in the
northeastern quadrant, in a scenario only too familiar
to residents of of hurricane regions, it spawned tornadoes.
At least a dozen tornadoes struck the Panhandle, killing
13 people.
Ivan was still not through: after moving through
much of the southeastern U.S., spawning more tornadoes
as it went, the storm performed a bizarre clockwise
loop and came back to Florida. Five days after it
first made landfall in the U.S., Ivan made landfall
in south Florida, this time as an extratropical low
pressure system. Once it crossed into the Gulf of
Mexico, it reintensified to tropical storm status,
and made its final landfall in Louisiana on Sept.
24.
In all, Ivan was blamed for 25 deaths, and the damage
was estimated to run as high as $10 billion.
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