‘You could hear it, you could feel it’:  A look back at Hurricane Ivan’s impact on Baldwin County

GULF SHORES, Ala. ( WKRG ) — Twenty years ago, Hurricane Ivan was headed straight for Gulf Shores.

“I mean you could hear it, you could feel it. It was all around you and it was loud,” said Jeremy Lee who owns the Down Under Dive Shop. “We knew it was going to be a destroyer wherever it hit. We did everything we could to prepare.”

But only so much could be done for the Category 3 storm. A photograph inside the dive shop shows a glimpse of what Lee returned to after the storm.

“Two walls had blown out of the dive shop and part of the roof had gone away. It was dark and muddy, there was debris inside, outside, and everywhere.”

“I remember that devastation and the recovery challenge of Ivan,” said Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft, who was a newly elected city councilman back then. “Sand was everywhere and roads gone and basically roads missing and rivers being formed between the state park and the gulf.”

There was a mandatory evacuation from Ivan and Craft says that saved lives.

“I learned the value of getting people off the island and what happens if you don’t,” Craft said.

Inside a closet at the dive shop there is a watermark from Ivan, “We have to remember where we came from so I think it’s a little bit of inspiration,” says Lee.

It is an inspiration and a reminder for all coastal communities that it could happen again.

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