Hurricane Ivan was the September 2004 storm that destroyed Marsha and Glen Colbey’s home and intensified the family’s poverty and uncertainty. Its immediate damage was only part of its impact: while the Colbeys tried to keep their six children housed, fed, and in school, Marsha was pregnant, unable to afford prenatal care, and struggling with fears that echoed an earlier pregnancy. The storm thus becomes the point where disaster, economic insecurity, and the family’s coming medical and legal crisis converge.

The storm and its scale

Ivan struck coastal Alabama after a summer in which tropical storms and hurricanes had made life along the Gulf Coast increasingly uncertain. The storm spawned 119 tornadoes and caused more than $18 billion in damage. For Marsha, the figures translated into immediate practical questions: how the family would find work, when the children could return to school, and how they would obtain money and food. With six children to protect, there was little room to pause over the loss of their home.

The Colbeys’ displacement

Marsha and Glen were living with their children in a crowded trailer when the hurricane warnings came. They knew they were vulnerable, though the fact that many neighboring families shared their situation offered some consolation. When Ivan destroyed their home in September, the Colbeys joined thousands seeking assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They eventually received a camper trailer and placed it on their property so the children could remain at nearby schools.

The storm also interrupted the work on which the family depended. Marsha and Glen had found construction and roofing jobs at the start of the summer, but rebuilding work would not be available for weeks. By winter, jobs had returned and Glen had found steadier employment; most of the children were back in school. The family remained financially strained, but they appeared to have survived the worst of the destruction.

Pregnancy amid the aftermath

During the disruption, Marsha realized that she was pregnant again at forty-three. She had not planned another child, and the prospect of pregnancy limiting her ability to do construction work added to her anxiety. Five years earlier, when she was pregnant with her youngest son, Joshua, nurses found cocaine in her system and police threatened her with prosecution, imprisonment, and the loss of her children. This time, despite the stress and the old temptation to use drugs, she did not want to risk her family’s security.

Marsha and Glen remained very poor, but the account also describes the closeness Marsha built with her children: she read, talked, and played with them, showed them affection, and kept them close. She expected to love a seventh child as she had loved the others, even though the pregnancy was unexpected. With money scarce, she could not afford a doctor and relied on her experience from six previous deliveries. She tried not to worry about pains and bleeding, though the pregnancy involved problems she had not experienced before. In the old, largely uninhabitable trailer beside the FEMA camper, she went into sudden labor in a bathtub and delivered a stillborn son.

Consequences and significance

Ivan did not cause the medical emergency that followed, but it shaped the conditions in which Marsha faced pregnancy and birth: the family had lost its home, rebuilding work had paused, and medical care seemed unaffordable. The narrative then follows the stillbirth into an investigation and a capital-murder charge, despite disagreement among medical experts about whether the baby had been born alive. The storm’s aftermath therefore serves as more than a backdrop. It exposes how a disaster’s burdens fell on a family with little financial protection, just as Marsha’s pregnancy and loss brought her into contact with a criminal process that treated uncertainty as grounds for accusation.