Quake Insurance: Mobile Homes’ Silver Lining : Disaster: Many trailers were knocked off their blocks or burned. Most owners are covered but some can’t pay the deductible.

If there’s a silver lining for owners of earthquake-damaged mobile homes, it’s that most were insured for quakes, compared with just one-third of all other houses in Southern California.

Although about 5,600 mobile homes--or one out of 10 in Los Angeles County--were deemed unlivable after the Jan. 17 temblor, most are expected to be rebuilt because quakes are usually included as part of a mobile home owner’s comprehensive insurance policy.

“About 85% of the people here didn’t think they had earthquake insurance but they found out they had it,” said Curt Atwell, owner of Crest Mobile Home Village in Simi Valley. Atwell said all but two or three of the 40 homeowners at his seniors-only park had earthquake coverage.

“Earthquake insurance is one of the greatest benefits of a mobile home policy,” said Ruth Walker, a spokeswoman for Foremost Insurance of Grand Rapids, Mich., the nation’s biggest insurer of mobile homes, which has about 150,000 policyholders in California. Walker says Foremost has received 2,707 claims related to the Northridge earthquake and expects a net loss of $13 million--larger than its losses from Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Even with insurance, however, many residents of mobile home parks who are retired or earn small incomes say they can’t afford to cover their $2,000 to $3,000 earthquake deductible payments. Mobile home policies often come with a 5% deductible of the property value, compared with 10% deductibles for conventional homeowner earthquake policies, which must be paid out-of-pocket before insurance kicks in.

Insurance will be crucial to rebuild places such as Tahitian Mobile Home Park in Sylmar, where more than 60 of the 240 mobile homes went up in flames from the earthquake. Last week charred remains of ovens, car shells and twisted metal and ashes littered a large section of the grounds. Many homes were emptied of furniture, with only a sign on the windows identifying the insurance company and policy number.

“Do you think some people would like to move out here?” asked Jean Priestman, who owns a single-wide trailer at space No. 28, just a couple of houses away from the hollow remains of a burned trailer. Priestman, 56, bought her trailer nine years ago for $30,000. She has a $19,000 mortgage on her property and has insurance through Foremost. But the quake has made Priestman fearful of living in mobile homes.

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“I don’t think mobile homes are that safe,” she said, sitting inside her dark and cold trailer, still without utilities. “It’s going to be scary,” Priestman said before she launched into a description of the pandemonium that reigned the morning of Jan. 17 when it appeared the whole park would go up in flames. “I’m not anxious to be here alone.”

Priestman said she would rebuild. But some owners at Tahitian and other mobile home parks have walked away from their damaged homes, contractors and residents say, and others have sold their damaged trailers on the spot for as little as $3,000. There are renewed safety concerns at many mobile home communities, and many residents worry about further depreciation of their homes, which have trouble keeping their values even in good economic times.

Mobile home owners also face higher insurance premiums as a result of the earthquake. Foremost last week applied to the state for a 13.6% rate increase. That is on top of a 29% increase granted earlier this year for Foremost and 19% for American Federation, a Foremost subsidiary.

Foremost, among other insurers of mobile homes, currently charges between $200 and $300 in annual premium for a comprehensive mobile home policy in California. That’s relatively expensive given that an average trailer sells for about $30,000--or about one-seventh the price of a single-family house in the region. Conventional home insurance premiums typically run $500 to $600 a year without earthquake coverage, which costs an additional $2 per $1,000 coverage.

State Farm, the state’s biggest insurer of homes, says it charges about $150 in annual premium for a typical mobile home policy, and it costs an extra 15% for special earthquake coverage. State Farm has about 15,000 policyholders in the Los Angeles area, but the insurer did not have a breakdown for mobile home claims from the quake.

The state’s Housing and Community Development Department reports that of the 5,600 mobile homes that were severely damaged by the quake, about 4,500 trailers slid off their tripod supports. Most of these were in the San Fernando Valley, but the quake also affected several mobile home parks in Simi Valley. In all, state figures show that 184 mobile homes burned to the ground in fires ignited mainly by ruptured gas lines from the earthquake.

The extent of the damage and the pace of repairs since the quake vary widely from one park to the next.

At Sunburst Park Mobile Homes in Chatsworth, all but a few of the 118 homes lurched off their tripod piers. Two trailers burned down, one killing a 92-year-old woman when her home burst into flames.

J K Construction, an Orange County-based contractor that has set up its own trailer for an anticipated yearlong repair at Sunburst, said it has already raised 80 trailers back on their tripods at a cost of $1,500 to $3,500 each. The overall repair bills for a trailer at Sunburst will be much higher, work crews said, because floors, aluminum sidings and awnings, wood paneling and utility lines all have to be fixed.

Bev Miller, a 17-year resident of Sunburst, says she is fortunate to have survived. The earthquake caused her double-wide home to move three feet and land on the ground, crushing water and utility lines underneath her trailer and causing a main gas leak that wasn’t shut off until 24 hours later.

“They said we were real lucky we didn’t have a fire,” said Miller, who with her husband, Jim, have since lived in a rented motor home parked next to their trailer.

Inside her spacious 1,500-square-foot home, the chandelier and ceiling fan were both down, walls were cracked and the ceiling was bent. Bev Miller estimated total repair bills at around $30,000--the price the Millers paid for the home 17 years ago. The Millers have an $80,000 policy through Michigan Millers Insurance, another specialty carrier based in Lansing, Mich., for which they pay $400 a year in premium. And their deductible is $4,000.

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The Millers, who are in their 60s, have applied for a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Bev Miller says she would like to move her trailer to Arizona, to get away from earthquakes, increasing crime in the Valley and the $400 a month they now pay for space rent. But she said a move was unlikely. “A few years ago they said it would cost us $8,000 to move it 100 miles,” she said.

Indeed, the high cost of hauling mobile homes is the main reason most manufactured houses never leave their first site. A mobile home, long viewed as a stepchild of the housing industry, also does not hold its value as well as a conventional house.

“In the last couple of years mobile home values have dropped 25% to 45%,” says Anne Hetherington, a Remax real estate agent in Granada Hills who has specialized in mobile homes for the last 15 years. While Hetherington doesn’t expect the earthquake to hurt the mobile home market much, she says it won’t help it, either.

In Sylmar, at the Tahitian Mobile Home Park, resident Sharon Frick still remembers the morning of the earthquake. “Oooh, it was such a boom,” she said. “The fire started, we had to get out, but the door was stuck. All the gas mains were exploding. . . . If there’s another earthquake, it’s all going to happen again.”

Frick, too, had insurance, but she wasn’t sure she could pay the $2,000 deductible because she has been laid off from her job. Her employer, a Robinson-May Co. store in the Topanga Mall in Canoga Park, was damaged by the quake and it may not reopen for several months. “I don’t know, it’s so discouraging,” she said. “It looks like a bomb hit this place. All our neighbors are gone.”

In Simi Valley, at a big, family-oriented trailer park called Simi Country, few of the 250 mobile homes that were toppled had been raised back up and most were without utility. At space No. 159 one day last week, Connie Lial stood nearby her pink trailer. When she saw a visitor pass by, she said eagerly, “Are you from FEMA?”

Lial, unemployed, said she does not have earthquake insurance. “Everything is down inside. The roof leaks. The carpet’s all wet. I don’t have no light, no gas, no water. Nothing.”