Rampages of Frances, Jeanne Sow Doubts Among Floridians

The mobile home at 411 Plover Drive -- the one that today looks decidedly more like a squashed dollhouse -- was, for most of 10 years, Patsy Gibson’s little piece of tropical heaven.

Mornings, her habit was to sit on the screened porch with a cup of tea and her macaw, Ali Baba, and watch the sun lift out of the Atlantic in a bonfire of mauve, rose and orange. Evenings, she’d return to her Florida room, feeling the soft hand of the trades on her face and listening to the fronds of the tall coconut palms crackling in the night.

“I’m from Harrisville, R.I., but I’ve always felt that I was home in Barefoot Bay,” she told a visitor recently. “Here, by the sea, I always felt safe, tranquil, at peace with nature.”

Until Hurricane Frances came calling on Sept. 4.

That tempest reduced dozens of mobile homes across this 175-acre, 4,988-unit community to piles of crunched walls and furniture. Gibson, who had evacuated, returned to find her carport gone, roof missing, and the front wall of the home split and sagging.

There was still enough of a house to fix, though, and she, like many of her neighbors, set out to start over. Within a few days, power was restored. A few days after that, contractors came out. Not long after that, she filed the paperwork to get a new roof.

And then, Jeanne arrived on Sept. 25.

This hurricane ripped away big things, like her Florida room, and little things, like an antique frame that held a photograph of her Polish grandmother, her daughter’s Easter bonnet and Gibson’s very first doll, a 20-inch, hand-painted toy that was crafted in 1940.

All four exterior walls lay spread out in the mud. “The coup de grace,” Gibson said.

The Treasure Coast, as this storm-gouged coastline between Daytona and Vero Beach is called, is now full of such stories -- of houses ravaged and then ravaged again, of retirements shortened, of dreams shattered and lives uprooted.

Like so many other places in Florida, the first state to get pounded by four hurricanes in one season since Texas in 1886, it is short on hope, long on fatigue, and increasingly concerned that the current hurricane surge will be the norm, not the exception, for years to come.

Scientists, in fact, have confirmed those fears: They say marine and atmospheric conditions have shifted into a “stormy phase,” as will happen every generation or so, which means that Americans can expect multiple hurricanes on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts every year for the next 10, 20, even 30 years.

That’s too much for Gibson, 63, a bartender at the Disney Resort in Vero Beach. Like so many transplants, she moved to Florida’s east coast for the tropical lifestyle, and now makes a living by catering to others who come for the weather.

The day she first surveyed the wreckage that was once her home, her cellphone rang. It was her daughter, calling from New England. “She said, ‘Mom, isn’t it time you came home?’ ” Gibson recalled.

She sighed, tears gathering in her eyes.

“I’m a survivor,” she continued. “But then I started thinking, do you want to subject yourself to these types of emotions again and again? You know, the anguish, the fear?”

The answer was no. Gibson says she’s going to sell her property and move back north.

*

There are no carts putt-putting around Barefoot Bay’s 18-hole golf course. The heated swimming pools are empty, as are the cocktail lounge, the horseshoe pits, the shuffleboard courts, the softball field.

Frances plucked the roof off the community’s shopping center, leveled the palm trees in the park. Jeanne yanked the chain link fences around the tennis courts out of the ground, then tore away the fishing pier that used to jut 776 feet into Indian River on the far side of U.S. 1.

The storms even bent back the iron cross atop Concordia Lutheran Church, near the entrance to the community.

“It’s the totality of the devastation -- that’s what gets to you,” said George Hunt, the community manager.

Hunt doesn’t live in Barefoot Bay, and never has. He’s from Venice, on the southwest coast of Florida, where he used to be city manager. Two days before Frances struck, Barefoot Bay’s manager quit. Pulled out.

It wasn’t as if Hunt needed the income or the hassle, but he took the job anyway, without knowing a soul. “These folks were going to need somebody,” he said, “so I figured it might as well be me.”

As it turned out, more than 700 homes were obliterated, and 85% of the ones left standing incurred heavy damage. “Three-quarters of the homes still standing are habitable, I suppose, as long as people don’t mind breathing in heavy mold and mildew, and doing without water or power,” Hunt said.

Of course, no electricity means no air conditioning, and that, in a metal-framed mobile home in the month of September -- when humidity in the Sunshine State is quite severe -- translates into trouble.

“Depending on where the sun is during the day, the temperatures inside those mobile homes can easily reach 115 degrees, probably higher,” Hunt said.

At first, people combated the heat by opening their doors and windows to get a cross breeze. “But wouldn’t you know it, we’ve had a large infestation of Asian Tiger mosquitoes,” Hunt said.

“Now, they’re four times the size of normal mosquitoes, and I’d swear they’re four times as hungry too. Their bites leave welts the size of silver dollars.”

The hardships, he concedes, have some residents talking about packing up, migrating north. A majority of Barefoot Bay’s 11,000 residents -- upwards of 60% -- came from the northeast and Midwest.

“In my mind, the people who are leaving or considering leaving are, well, how can I put it diplomatically? They’ve been caught unawares by these storms because we’ve had such a quiet, storm-free 10 years.”

And yet, for now, Hunt discounts a mass exodus from Florida, that is, a mass exodus from Brevard County, as unlikely.

On what does he base his opinion? “This county has more than just traditional service jobs that cater to T-shirt buying tourists,” he said. “There is an industrial component to this area. You’ve got Harris Technologies, the defense contractor, and several industrial parks that pay their workers pretty decently. So I’d bet against snowbird flight right now.”

But what if a fifth hurricane, or a sixth, were to hit Florida this year? Hunt removes his glasses, rubs his weary eyes, and politely declines to speculate.

*

Marie Schmitt, 74, native of Buffalo, N.Y., born-again Christian, owner of a 24-by-48-foot mobile home in Barefoot Bay for seven years, knows a thing or two about mobile home parks. She ought to.

Up north, she and her husband, Richard, 78, once owned a mobile home park in an out-of-the-way town called Little Genesee, N.Y. “We built the place from scratch, 30 mobile homes in total,” she said.

She was a natural, then, to serve as Barefoot Bay’s chief volunteer roof advisor, which is no slouch job. She must listen to a litany of tragedies, answer questions that cannot be answered (“Why us? Why our house?”), reassure the suddenly destitute that somebody still cares, and fill out every line on the work-order applications, even though, in many cases, the victims’ home telephones are no longer in service.

On this, her first day on the job, two weeks “A.J.” (“After Jeanne”), Schmitt has filled out 21 applications from roofless residents. One of the applications was her own.

“After Frances, my husband and I stood in our yard and, I must say, the house looked real nice, perfect, like it was untouched. Then I noticed it looked funny on top, bald somehow, and then I said, ‘You know what, Rich? Our whole roof is laying in our neighbor’s yard.’ ”

Bonnie Layher appears, and Sharon Amenta, followed by Guy Laursen, and then Nancy Eisele.

Layher, 59, a retired teacher from Greenbelt, Md., is here on behalf of her mother, Bernice Staples, 89. Staples suffered a heart attack two days after Jeanne peeled open the roof of her mobile home; she then broke her hip at a rehab center where she was receiving therapy.

Mold and mildew are growing on the walls and furniture, rain is finding cracks in nearly every room in Staples’ house, and Layher is beside herself.

“I don’t know what to do,” she told Schmitt. “My mother has been living here for 34 years -- her friends are here, her church is here -- and she doesn’t want to come north. It’s too cold for her. But I’d like to bring her back to Maryland. What should I do?”

“Fill this form out, dear,” Schmitt said, gently.

Amenta, 53, is here on behalf of her parents, Erich and Mildred McWaid, of 1178 Barefoot Circle. They are stuck in limbo at a motel in Titusville, 75 miles north, waiting for someone to fix their roof, a third of which was folded back, and replace their sunroom, which took flight during Jeanne.

“The adjuster come out yet?” Schmitt asked her.

“Not yet.”

“You get a temporary tarp put on the roof?”

Laursen, 90, originally from Massillon, Ohio, and, until recently, from 713 Perrywinkle Drive, was diagnosed with prostate cancer a week before Frances took his carport, four weeks before Jeanne took his two screened porches. A widower for the last eight years, he decided to ride out Jeanne inside his home.

“I took the cushions off my couch, laid them down in the hallway, lay down on them and tried to sleep through it,” he said.

“I’d decided that if it was my time to go, I’d go. When the good Lord is ready, He takes you.”

Schmitt lowers her eyes and nods. Then: “Did the storm take your roof off?”

“Yes.”

“Sir, why don’t we start by filling this form out?”

Next is Eisele, who, until a two weeks ago, owned a fine mobile home at 846 Hawthorne Circle, which she was renting to a single, elderly gentleman. Then Jeanne arrived. Now it has no roof, no porch, no carport, no windows or doors. She’s not here to fill out paperwork. She’s come to let Schmitt know that a new roof will not, after all, be necessary.

“My house has been condemned,” Eisele said.

Schmitt looks away. “Have I thought about moving back to New York? The answer is yes. Will I do it now? No, not now. I’m committed here. I’m committed to helping these people. They’ve been through so much.”

She pauses. “But, I’ll tell you, though, if this kind of stuff keeps up, I just might.”