Well, kenny, what happens to people when tragedy strikes. Home and family and God comes to mind.
Urban idiots vote for kerry scum. Home, family and God vote Republican. You must be able to recall a poll or several hundred that show that simple human nature.
Dazed and Heartsick, Residents Return to Assess Storm's Damage
By ROBERT PEAR and SHAILA K. DEWAN
PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla., Aug. 14 — The mobile home parks looked like they had been destroyed by wrecking crews.
"I lost everything I had," said Eleanor C. Jones, 78, walking as if in a daze through what remained of Harborview Park here Saturday, a day after Hurricane Charley swept through southwest Florida. "You cannot patch up these places. They are too flimsy."
Ms. Jones and her husband, George B. Jones, moved to this community from Maryland 16 years ago. "It is enough to make us sit down and cry," said Mr. Jones, 77. "How would you feel if everything you own was just destroyed?"
From Harborview Park in Port Charlotte to nearby Punta Gorda, two of the hardest hit places, and all along Route 17, which traces the hurricane's course northeast, mobile homes were flattened, particularly affecting retirees and the less affluent.
What remained were lightweight scraps of tin and plywood piled like jackstraws a few feet deep along the roadside, crowned by tufts of faded orange insulation. Here and there, a piece of someone's life peeked out: a pink afghan, a rusty bicycle.
Life was on view in other ways as well: trailers with sheared-off walls faced the road, each room displayed dollhouse-style. In some places, trailers lay one atop the other like collapsed towers of blocks. Residents picked their way through the debris, looking for anything recognizable.
Harborview Park had once been lines of neat houses. On Saturday some homes stood. Others were leveled. Most had sustained serious damage. Homeowners saw a jumble of chairs, tables, curtains, windows, wires, walls, pocketbooks, clothing, drain spouts, plumbing fixtures, books, stoves and shards of glass, piled high and helter-skelter.
David and Ruth Birge inspected the damage to their own home Saturday afternoon. The roof was blown off. The front porch, the carport and a shed in their backyard had been destroyed, and the house had numerous leaks. Mrs. Birge, 65, said: "Nobody here got hurt. I am thankful for that. Things can be repaired, but lives cannot be fixed."
"We are alive," said Doris Setzler, 71, who lives in a nearby community but was walking though, inspecting the remains of a mobile home park reduced to smithereens. "We are fortunate, very fortunate. God put his blessing on us."
In nearby Punta Gorda in the Crystal Lake mobile home community, death was more of a presence. Hurricane Charley left almost every other trailer home standing. But it did not spare the double-wide where a sickly elderly couple and their grown son decided to wait out the storm in defiance of an evacuation order.
The couple's bodies were found underneath an upturned dump truck several lots away. Their son was hurled even farther, passing through another home and embedding face first in the back wall of a closet, neighbors said. He was taken to the hospital alive, they said.
Police stood guard over the bodies of the couple until they were moved and said they did not yet know the son's condition. Neighbors and authorities declined to give the victims' names. But they did say the couple was cared for by home nurses.
The gruesome deaths devastated Crystal Lake residents who returned Saturday to inspect the damage. "We don't know why they didn't leave," said Cindy Comstock, 54, the owner of the trailer where the son's body was found. "It doesn't make sense. They had the money."
Pam Alvin, 53, whose mother lives in the community, said, "It just picked up their trailer and spun it across the road and into our work truck." Nothing was left of the double-wide but a concrete slab where the front porch had been.
"I have no idea," Ms. Alvin said, when asked why she thought the family had not left. "Who knows if they had some place to go."
Many of those left homeless by the devastation of these communities along the Gulf of Mexico were retirees, officials said, who had settled in less expensive pre-fabricated structures. Trailer parks are as emblematic of Florida life as Palm Springs mansions. They are affordable for snowbirds and year-round residents, migrant workers and single parents. Many are cozy little communities with porches, their own shuffleboard courts, swimming pools, even private lakes.
Yet on Saturday, even Floridians were questioning the state's fondness for mobile homes. One radio talk show host asked caller after homeless caller why they chose to live in them. "I don't get this mobile home thing," he said. "Is it some kind of subculture?" One caller said he had lived in one his whole life.
At Crystal Lake where Karen Hull, 50, lives with her husband, Ed, 59, she said, "It's an affordable way of life."
"It's private here," Ms. Hull added. "We have a private lake." Her 1968 mobile home was still standing, but its additions were demolished, leaving it uninhabitable.
"You have to realize," she said, "that there hasn't been a storm like that in years here."
Some thought the entire area looked like a war zone.
Jennifer L. Koohns, 32, who works for a local home builder, said: "It looks as if a bomb went off here. So many houses have been demolished."
Some telephone poles were snapped in two. Many poles were askew, leaning at 45 degree angles. Streets were littered with palm branches, as if a giant lawn mower had sheared off the treetops.
Billboards were flattened. Cars were abandoned on the roadside. Street lamps were twisted.
Robert D. Thompson was nailing Styrofoam onto his mobile home to keep it from leaking. A neighbor's roof fell on his car and destroyed his carport.
"I feel sorry for other folks who lost more than I did," said Mr. Thompson, 73. "As soon as I get my bearings, I am out of here, to someplace else in southwest Florida."
Joy D. Bilbrey, 65, said she and a friend rode out the hurricane in a motor home.
"We sat in the bathroom, held on to each other and prayed very hard," Ms. Bilbrey said. "That home rocked and rolled."
About 40 miles south of here, in Fort Myers Beach, people waited impatiently on Saturday for the authorities to allow access to the island so they could see the damage.
"I just want to see if my house and my business are still there," said Carolyn Epperson Brotka, 38, who manages a beachside restaurant called Wahoo Willies.
The island lies near a body of water known as Hurricane Bay.
Niri Cohen, 40, said the roof of his clothing store on Fort Myers Beach had been peeled off by fierce winds.
"I have property and liability insurance," Mr. Cohen said, "but it does not cover wind and hurricane damage."
nytimes.com |
