PANAMA CITY BEACH — Tornado survivors often compare the storm’s sound to that of a train, but Andrew Mask remembers it differently.
“It was just a big gust of wind,” said Mask, who was just 9 years old when a tornado tore through his grandparents’ Allanton home a decade ago. “You kind of feel the tornado hit. It was like the whole house was floating. ... I can’t really explain it.”
The tornado was one of 117 spawned from Hurricane Ivan, a Category 3 monster that first made landfall on Sept. 16, 2004, near Gulf Shores, Ala.
For Mask, and many others, Ivan left permanent scars.
Mask’s family left their home in Callaway Point to escape potential flooding, with plans to ride out the storm at his aunt’s house, which was not far from his grandparents’ residence. He still remembers his uncle yelling for him to go back inside while he was putting on his shoes at the doorstep of his grandparents’ home.
“I remember all the pictures and pots were banging on the walls, and then it all went black,” Mask said. “Even when I opened my eyes it was still black.”
Mask was pinned by a hot water heater, which broke his jaw in two places and severely burned his body.
His grandmother, 77-year-old Nancy King, was killed from the impact. Emergency officials found her body rolled up in carpet 75 yards from what was left of the home.
Mask’s grandfather, now 90, was found underneath a refrigerator.
Following the storm, Mask spent about a month at Shands Children’s Hospital in Gainesville, where he underwent about a dozen surgeries and painful skin grafts for the third-degree burns he sustained.
The worst pain came from the showers he took while in the hospital, as the nurses worked to scrub the dead skin from his body. The back of his triceps was burned so severely that the muscle was exposed.
Mask, a 2013 graduate of Rutherford High School, is now a student at Marion Military Institute in Alabama, where he plays on the baseball team, something doctors said he may never do.
“They said I’d never be able to throw again because of the scar tissue,” said Mask, who pitches for MMI. “I went to therapy for that and now I’m playing college baseball.”
‘Watershed event’
Bay County Chief of Emergency Services Mark Bowen remembers Ivan as a storm that changed the way forecasters predict tornadic activity during hurricanes. Before Ivan, forecasters typically warned only about weak tornadoes in the northeast storm quadrant, he said.
“Ivan was a watershed event in terms of tornadic activity,” Bowen said. “During Ivan we had [strong] tornadoes that killed people in Bay County and that killed people in Calhoun County.”
Although Ivan made landfall west of Bay County, emergency officials ordered evacuations for those living in high-risk storm surge areas.
“It’s a call that inconveniences people, but on the other end of the equation, it’s life and death,” Bowen said. “It’s a very important decision and we take it very seriously. I’m so glad we made that decision to call for those evacuations, but I still feel for those folks that lost family members.”
Bowen was thankful there were fewer people in Bay County than there would have been otherwise when the storm brushed the coast.
“There was definitely a lot of storm surge, a lot of erosion, a lot of damage,” Bowen said. “These things, when they come, it’s mayhem if you’re out in it. If we ask people to evacuate, we pray that they will.”
Better prepared
A decade after Ivan, Bowen said both the National Hurricane Center and local emergency officials are better prepared to handle storm threats.
For the Hurricane Center, 10 years has brought better predictions for a storm’s timing and track. Locally, the addition of a new Emergency Operations Center (EOC) has helped officials better coordinate with first responders, law enforcement and storm forecasters during a storm event. The new center opened in 2010, features state-of-the-art technology and has the capability to withstand Category 5 hurricane wind speeds.
“During Hurricane Ivan, we really didn’t have an EOC to speak of,” Bowen said. “I can’t even compare the tools we have now to what we have now. It’s night and day.”