Ivan's Wake

A Photo Documentary by the Pensacola News JournalThe Pensacola News Journal's coverage of Hurricane Ivan was chosen as a finalist in the public service category of the 89th annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism.Ivan was the worst hurricane in the history of Pensacola and the Florida Panhandle. The storm came ashore shortly after midnight ion Sept. 16, 2004, killing 12 people and creating a storm surge that nearly flattened Santa Rosa Island and Perdido Key. A wave of water crashed through the streets of downtown Pensacola and traveled 25 miles north through Pensacola Bay, Escambia Bay and East Bay and into the heart of Bagdad and Milton.The newspaper published and posted online more than 2,000 photographs of Ivan's destruction. Photographers for the Pensacola News Journal and Gannett Co. Inc. went into the air three and four times a day to take photographs of coastal devastation. People around the world flocked to the Pensacola News Journal's online coverage. The newspaper's Web site, which normally registered 100,000 page views a day spiked to 12 million a day. Two weeks after Ivan's landfall, the Web site had logged more than 90 million page views, with more than 80 percent of the traffic going to the Web site's photo galleries."Ivan's Wake" is a selection of these dramatic images.