Rescuers Search For Hurricane Opal Survivors Some Managed To Ride Out The Storm, But Two Are Still Missing

Nearly a dozen people were found huddling in the wreckage of their homes on the narrow barrier island where Hurricane Opal charged ashore, rescuers said Saturday. At least two people were considered missing.

Rescuers using dogs and sensitive listening devices searched for a 51-year-old man who had called 911 to say he was riding the storm out Wednesday, said Tom Carr of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Carr said the man’s house had been washed away.

A 17-year-old girl who also called 911 was unaccounted for, too, but Carr said authorities did not know where she had been or where to look for her. Neither person’s name was released.

Rescuers searching the eastern end of Santa Rosa Island known as Okaloosa Beach on Friday found 10 or 11 people who had weathered the storm in their houses and condominiums, said Raul Chavez, a rescuer with the Miami Metro-Dade Fire Department. They were taken to the mainland.

As the search wound down, residents of Navarre Beach and next-door Pensacola Beach, at the other end of Santa Rosa Island, returned for the first brief visit to their homes since Opal.

“It’s gone. It’s flattened. It’s a pancake. There’s nothing there,” Peggy Sparkman told her sister by cell phone as she caught her first glimpse of her summer cottage on Pensacola Beach. The only thing left was the new roof she put on after Hurricane Erin two months ago.

Elsewhere along Florida’s Panhandle, life was getting back to a semblance of normality. Power was back for all but 132,000 of the 572,000 Floridians who lost it after the storm, but thousands more as far north as North Carolina were still blacked out.

In Gulf Breeze, only a mile across Santa Rosa Sound from Pensacola Beach, it was a normal Saturday for most people as they washed cars, mowed lawns, and played softball. Mail was delivered and trash picked up. The only signs of a storm were piles of tree limbs and leaves in yards.

In Laguna Beach, outside Panama City, a sign at the Carousel grocery store beckoned passersby: “WE ARE OPEN. WE HAVE GAS.”

“All of our advertised specials are in effect. Everything is normal,” said the store’s owner, Charlie Lahan.

Elsewhere in Panama City Beach, brooms, rakes and shovels were in use as residents cleaned up. Members of the National Guard patrolled past shuttered surf shops and damaged buildings. A few joggers and sightseers strolled the littered beaches.

“Our house is fine so we’re just doing some beachcombing,” said Bernard Hoffberg as he walked along Pensacola Beach picking up shells.

Okaloosa County sheriff’s spokesman Rick Hord said there had been four arrests for curfew violations but no looting.

“It’s a burglar’s paradise, but everybody seems to be looking out for everybody else’s property,” he said.

The American Red Cross appealed for more money, saying the year’s previous hurricanes and the Oklahoma City bombing had depleted its disaster relief fund, now at $30 million. “We have had so many disasters this year,” spokesman Randy Ackley said.

In Panama City Beach, Kirby and D.J. Vieira found their 4-year-old cat, Abigail, alive in their partially wrecked oceanfront house. The Vieiras couldn’t find her in the rush to evacuate and had assumed she was dead, but when a neighbor heard a weird sound in the house, they dug through a closet hanging out into the ocean and found the cat unharmed.

“It turned this from the worst day of my life into one of the best because it put all this in perspective,” Kirby said. “To have this little critter that we loved, I just held it and wouldn’t let go and sobbed.”