From the Mobile (Alabama) Register newspaper:

Legendary Flora-Bama belted, buried, standing

The Flora-Bama lives.

In a manner of speaking.

That’s the tentative answer to one of the more earnest questions that people on Alabama’s coastline were asking Thursday: Did the Flora-Bama Lounge & Package store, that Perdido Key paragon, survive Hurricane Ivan?

“I heard the ‘Bama’s totally gone,” an officer said at the Orange Beach police station. A friend of his got that from folks in Florida, he said, raising his eyebrows, pursing his lips and nodding gravely.

Actually, it remains in its rightful place, straddling the state line on Beach Boulevard. But its familiar wood floor is now 3 feet of sand. The structure lost portions of walls and its roof and appeared to have heaved its contents onto Alabama 182.

Among the items left standing were the bar’s marquee and a front window covered by a plywood sheet on which someone had spray-painted, “till we float away.”

Parts of the bar itself and much of what had been inside were strewn across the high way — simple bar stools, aged ice chests, electric beer signs, steel kegs, a wood-handled blade for shucking oysters. An industrial-sized propane tank sat on its side in what would have been the roadway, hissing and smelling of sulfur. Something else reeked of rotting seafood.

And everywhere, there was booze. Stacked neatly on a shelf inside, bottles of champagne and merlot. Cast about in the tempest, flasks of Southern Comfort and Jose Cuervo Gold, 1.75-liter bottles of Jack Daniel’s and Finnish vodka and Puerto Rican rum and several longnecks of Flora-Bama Mullet Head Red, some near-buried in sand, a few broken but most still sealed.

It was as if a pirate ship had run aground.

The Flora-Bama has been a beloved rebel legend. Before Baldwin County eased its blue laws, Alabama drinkers would go there to pick up a six-pack on Sunday. And Alabamians would avoid the authorities’ evacuation orders by shuffling to the Florida side of the bar, and vice versa. Or so the story goes.

Developers built their high-rise condos, pastel and sand-hued, steadily closer to the bar in recent years, to the point that one began to steal some of the beachfront bar’s sunlight. The Flora-Bama and its gritty, graying wood stayed put. Until Ivan.

There’s probably enough of the structure left that the proprietors could bolster a couple of the walls, build around it and insist that the Flora-Bama never fell.

Still, the bar and the few other older buildings took the storm far harder than the more recent structures, especially in the stretch between Alabama Point and the state line. Ivan tore away the walls of several of the shorter condos. Practically every single-family home sustained more severe damage. A few were leveled, their utensils sitting atop the sand hundreds of feet from their kitchens. One house just across the Florida line came to rest more or less intact, squarely in the middle of the sand-covered road.

The hurricane mangled large sections of the highway, which was undriveable at any rate due to a massive crane that fell across it. And the storm flattened the Perdido Key dunes.

At least the Flora-Bama is still there, for now.

Mobile lawyer Braxton Counts was among the handful of souls who managed to make the pilgrimage Thursday. He had come back to assess the damage to a nearby residence he and his wife own, one they had visited just Monday.

But Mrs. Counts didn’t want to make it down to the ‘Bama that night, her husband recalled.

“I tried to get her to come,” he said, “but she wouldn’t do it. I said, We need to go one more time, just in case.'”