Hardship, Stress Still Buffet Storm-Tossed Community : Recovery: South Florida neighborhood is a mix of despair, hope. Some are leaving; others seek silver lining.

Ron Bishop, uninsured, his house blown apart, fighting the temptation to start drinking again, is planning to leave. “I’m sick of everything here,” he said. “I’ll go to central Florida and get me some property and a mobile home.”

Marsha and Ken Pitts are still staying with friends while their home, gutted by Hurricane Andrew’s winds, is rebuilt from the drywall out. Both have gained weight, and Ken is chewing more tobacco and enjoying it less. But they are hopeful: They could be back in their shattered dream home by Christmas.

Finally, more than three months after they came to spend the night of the storm, Domingoes Gonsalves’ parents, Antonio and Arminda, are about to move out. “We found them a new house,” said Gonsalves, owner of a paving company and patriarch of a large Portuguese-American family. The move can’t come too soon, especially for Gonsalves’ wife, Otilia.

The hurricane’s 145-m.p.h. winds are gone, but the people on one block of Southwest 274th Street in this storm-blasted neighborhood in the Redlands section of South Dade are still being buffeted by uncertainty and dislocation. The electricity is on. The avocado grove across the street has been cleared of fractured trees, and green sleeves of leafy new growth cover the hatracked remains. But the stumpy, shadeless look of the neighborhood has an unnatural after-the-bomb feel, and that colors the moods of people who live here.

“It’s been rough,” said Gonsalves, 54, whose household still includes two grown sons and their wives. “It’s hard to function in your mind. This has changed everybody’s life. People don’t know what to say, what to do. There were some arguments.”

Only Doug Cumbie seems to be smiling much these days, and even he’s not sure why. Weeks ago, long after he had patched the roof, ripped out the water-soaked carpet and dried out the floors in his $160,000 house, mold began to grow from cracks in the walls, and Cumbie learned that his place will have to be gutted. The insulation is wet, and the new roof he needs, once estimated at $9,000, will now cost double that--when he can find a roofer.

Still, Cumbie is coping this way: “The hat I’m wearing for the next year is recovery. I’ll do some piddly little technical writing jobs, and concentrate on fixing our lives. I actually enjoy this. I figure that by next year I’ll have learned enough to be a contractor myself.”

“I’m still overwhelmed by the destruction all around,” said Amy Cumbie, Doug’s wife and mother of their four school-age children. “We went to Hollywood (Fla.) to the beach one weekend and it was great, but then we had to come back. Seeing all this disaster--it’s like a fantasy. I wish it wasn’t like this.”

But it is. The federal troops have pulled out, and on Nov. 16 the 10 p.m. curfew in the epicenter of the single most expensive and widespread natural disaster in U.S. history was lifted.

But piles of rubble still dot the landscape of this residential area abutting farm lands, and traffic remains congested with debris-hauling dump trucks. Ken and Marsha Pitts have had 15 flat tires in the past three months, most caused by punctures from roofing nails blown into the streets.

Along Dixie Highway, four miles from this block, scores of out-of-town laborers are living in tents. At day’s end, many of the workers encircle a couple of nearby lounges and a topless bar with their pickups and spend the evening drinking beer in the parking lot. The whole scene reminds Doug Cumbie of the Wild West. “I got used to seeing a neighbor hanging her laundry while wearing a pistol in a shoulder holster,” he said.

Crime hasn’t been a particular problem here. In fact, the rate of auto theft, burglary, robbery and sexual battery fell by as much as 50% or more in September and October, compared to the same months last year, according to police statistics. Says Maj. Frank Boni, district commander for the Metro-Dade Police Department: “An awful lot of the bad guys have the same problems you and I do. In that way, the storm has been a little bit of a blessing.”

Blessings are often relative, however.

Thanks to Andrew, for example, Ron Bishop thinks he’ll be able to file for bankruptcy and get out from under $10,000 of old credit card debt. “I tried before,” he said, “but it was too much aggravation because you had to itemize every fork and spoon.” Now, Bishop, 40, doesn’t have any forks, spoons or anything else. His $180,000, two-story house, perched on stilts and uninsured, collapsed around him in a heap that Aug. 24 morning as he ran for his life.

Bishop and his 14-year-old daughter are staying with a cousin. He works as a roofer, and he says: “Every cent I get goes into the bank. This has made me very conservative. Before I didn’t care; I’d see something and I’d buy it.

“Now I try to go to the movies more, and every Wednesday I go fishing, because there’s so much stress in me I’ve got to get away.”

Around the corner from the wooded lot where the rubble of Bishop’s home lies, Amy Cumbie was pleased to find that a few baths of WD-40 lubricant got her two sewing machines working, and she is finishing up some dressmaking jobs begun before the storm. But she also has lost work; people who had ordered slipcovers are now using insurance checks to buy new furniture.

When a tree fell on Amy’s beloved Volkswagen van, the Cumbies also were reduced to one car. With four children in three schools--and the closest restaurants, clothing and fabric stores miles north toward Miami--the couple spends a lot of time fighting the traffic they moved here three years ago to avoid.

For Domingoes Gonsalves, the Cumbie’s next-door neighbor, the hurricane has also meant lost business, maybe $150,000 worth. Twenty of his 30 trucks were damaged. Now, says Gonsalves, there is plenty of concrete work: replacing patios, repairing driveways, doing roadways for Dade County.

But no amount of work or money will erase the memory of the hurricane or assure Gonsalves and his wife that life will ever be the same. “Next time,” he said, “we will be better prepared.”

If there is a next time, Gonsalves says he will ride out the storm at home. He has confidence in the sturdiness of his house. But Ken and Marsha Pitts aren’t so sure.

They were terrified by the hurricane, huddling in a bedroom closet while the roof lifted and the wind swirled through the rooms, smashing windows and drenching furniture with rain. “I will never forget the sounds, the eeriness of sitting in the closet that night,” said Marsha Pitts, a library/media specialist at Avocado Elementary School. “I don’t hear that sound anymore, but I will never forget it.”

With insurance money, the couple is overseeing a $121,000 rehabilitation of a house once valued at $153,000. As a windfall bonus, they are adding a fireplace and storm shutters for every window. They considered building a concrete-block storm shelter in a closet, but it proved to be unfeasible.

Ken Pitts, a football coach at South Dade High School, says he and his wife won’t stay home for another major storm. “If it’s Category 3 (sustained winds of 111 m.p.h. or greater), and we have two days notice, then we’d leave.”

Even though it will be weeks before they move back home, they have begun work on their lawn and flower beds, once this neighborhood’s most exquisite. With humidity and temperatures now slipping down into the comfort zone, it’s time for impatiens and geraniums.

“We went to visit family in Oklahoma a few weeks go, and I was reminded of what normal was,” Pitts said recently when he stopped by his house at lunchtime to check on reconstruction, “And I’m still confident that six months from now, we’ll have a brand new neighborhood.

“I’ve learned a lot from this experience. You know, we had only about 25 boys out for football this fall, but we won our first game against a ranked opponent, 3 to 0 on a 49-yard field goal. The other team just wasn’t prepared for the emotion we showed.

“Then we lost some games,” he said. “Before, the kids hated to lose. They were impatient with losing. But this year, losing a game is not the biggest loss they’ve faced.

“I guess that’s not a bad thing to learn.”

Struggling to Come Back

Hurricane Andrew turned lives upside down in a neighborhood known as the Redlands. Here’s a progress report on residents’ efforts to rebuild: Where They Stand:

Bishop: Lost his home; now plans to file for bankruptcy and move. Ron Bishop and 14-year-old daughter are staying with a cousin. He works as a roofer.

Cumbie: Undertook extensive home repairs, then learned home will have to be gutted. Amy Cumbie has resumed dress-making but has lost many jobs. Lost a van in storm, leaving one auto, which is difficult for family with four children.

Gonsalves: Parents who took shelter during storm are about to move out. Domingoes Gonsalves’ paving company has lost about $150,000 worth of business. But there is work to be done for his undamaged trucks.

Pitts: Still staying with friends while their gutted home is rebuilt from the dry wall out. Using insurance money to re-do the home, adding a fireplace and storm shutters for every window. They’ve resumed work on their garden, once the neighborhood’s most exquisite.