Stuart, Fla. ? Floridians weathered their fourth hurricane in six weeks as Jeanne lashed the Sunshine State with 120 mph winds and torrential rains Sunday that turned neighborhood streets into muddy rivers, ripped roofs from trailers and knocked out power to 2 million homes and businesses.

The hurricane was responsible for at least six deaths statewide, authorities said.

Jeanne pulled a looping right-hand turn in the Atlantic Ocean just days before making landfall late Saturday at Hutchinson Island, 35 miles north of West Palm Beach — the same area hit by Hurricane Frances just three weeks ago. For several furious hours, the Category 3 hurricane brought 20-foot-high waves that pounded a wide swath of Florida’s East Coast.

By 2 p.m. Sunday, Jeanne had lessened to a tropical storm as it swirled westward over central Florida’s lowlands, bringing 5 to 10 inches of rain to areas already saturated by previous storms. It then passed south of Orlando before swerving northward toward the Florida panhandle — where 70,000 homes and businesses remained without power after the battering delivered by Hurricane Ivan 10 days ago.

Jeanne was expected to pass through Georgia and South Carolina today.

“This storm is a heavyweight,” said Joe Stawara, owner of the Fairlane Harbor Mobile Home Estates in nearby Vero Beach, where half the park’s 232 trailers were damaged. Many lost roofs or had holes punched through their frames by the heavy winds.

“We’ve already endured so many storms, we feel like a … boxer in the 15th round of a fight — it doesn’t take much to bring us down,” Stawara said. “And Jeanne definitely packed a punch.”

The hurricane, which killed at least 1,500 people in Haiti, also was blamed in the deaths of a Miami man electrocuted by a downed power line and a couple whose sport utility vehicle plunged 40 feet into a canal south of Boca Raton. The body of another man was found floating in a ditch in the town of Palm Bay, while a 60-year-old man was found dead — lying in water in his flooded home — after consuming a large amount of alcohol during a hurricane party, officials said. Not far from St. Augustine, a 15-year-old boy was crushed by a falling tree. More than 90 people in Florida have been killed by hurricanes since mid-August.

Shelters not immune

As residents huddled in homes and shelters, turning most central Florida communities into ghost towns, search and rescue teams in Martin and St. Lucie counties spent Sunday looking for homeowners who had decided to face the storm and had been left stranded by floodwaters.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had called for the evacuation of more than 2 million residents, but many — weary after fleeing from other storms — had threatened to ignore the order. By Sunday 60,000 people, some of whose homes had been damaged by Hurricane Frances, had checked into shelters statewide.

But for some evacuees, safe harbor was hard to come by: In Melbourne, 120 people, many in wheelchairs and needing oxygen, were moved repeatedly after the roofs twice were blown off shelters where they were being housed. “I’m sure they were scared,” said Yvonne Martinez, a Brevard County emergency-response office spokeswoman. “They bused them out at the height of the storm’s fury.”

Officials for Florida Power & Light, which serves 35 of the state’s 67 counties, predicted it would take days or even weeks to restore power to customers spread across 22 counties.

In Fort Pierce, a city of more than 35,000, residents were without water service. And so much beach sand was piled up by Jeanne’s storm surge on the major oceanfront road on South Hutchinson Island that it will have to be plowed and removed like snow, St. Lucie County Administrator Doug Anderson said.

Ricky Gould, 14, sits on the curb next to what used to be the Jensen Beach Community Center. The center was damaged weeks ago by Hurricane Frances, and destroyed Sunday by Hurricane Jeanne.

‘Mean season’ continues

Visiting the coast to see Jeanne’s damage firsthand, Bush said that 3.5 million Floridians might be without power by the time the hurricane makes its way through the state. The governor said trucks were on the way north from Homestead, an Air National Guard base south of Miami, to supply Jeanne’s victims with water and ice.

“We literally have had millions of people be impacted by these storms,” Bush said during a visit to the St. Lucie County emergency-operations center. “Some just with loss of power, others have lost everything. So this is unprecedented. There’s been nothing like it.”

But, Bush said, “Adversity makes us stronger, and this resilient state will rebound.”

President Bush, the governor’s brother, on Sunday declared 19 Florida counties natural disaster areas as a result of Jeanne, making available special federal loans and other funding.

Jeanne is the fourth hurricane to hit Florida since Aug. 13, arriving in the wake of Charley, Frances and Ivan — the first such storm sequence nationwide since Texas was hit by four hurricanes in 1986. And National Hurricane Center officials warned Sunday that the “mean season,” as they call it, lasts until Nov. 30.