Residents and managers find major damage in several parks while some owners are out of town. The wind and rain churn the contents where roofs are pried up.
By RICHARD DANIELSON
Published September 8, 2004
Frances destroyed one mobile home in Palm Harbor and seriously damaged several others across North Pinellas, officials said Tuesday.
At the Grand Bay mobile home park on Alt. U.S. 19 in Palm Harbor, high winds damaged four mobile homes.
At Angelo Prinzivalli's home in the back of the park, the storm took the roof off in one piece, then dumped it beside the residence. It then soaked and churned up the contents of the home.
Prinzivalli, 69, was visiting family in New York during the storm and learned of the damage from his niece, Jeannie Prinzivalli-Morse of Dunedin.
"He took it fairly well," she said Tuesday. "He just wanted to see if there was anything I could salvage."
Unfortunately, most of the retired painter's belongings were waterlogged, broken or ruined, she said. She filled the back of a sport utility vehicle with a few possessions and items from his pantry, but there wasn't much.
"This is what I could salvage from his life: a couple of pictures and a couple of cans of tomatoes," she said. "That's it."
Gusting wind dislodged parts of roofs from two other mobile homes in Grand Bay, but those were "second roofs" installed over the original roofs, maintenance manager Keith Brandemihl said. A fourth mobile home lost a carport.
Not all of the damage occurred when the storm first blew through on Sunday.
At the Linger Longer Mobile Home & R.V. Park on Anclote Road in Tarpon Springs, manager John Powers was touring the park Monday morning and thinking that residents had been fortunate when a man ran up and said trees had just fallen on two mobile homes.
The homes were side by side on Linger Lane, and neither was occupied, Powers said. One resident was in New York and her neighbor was in Pennsylvania.
"We had tree trimmers come over right away and clean them off," Powers said. "Then we covered them as best we could with blue tarps."
Tarpon Springs fire Chief Kevin Bowman said the homes are "probably not safe to be occupied."
Mobile homes in several other parks, including Hillside, Stonehedge on the Hill and Sun Valley Estates on U.S. 19 also sustained damage, police and fire officials said.
At Sun Valley Estates, high winds pried up a roof from a carport and about a third of a mobile home, but the owner told officials she wouldn't leave.
"I recommended very strongly to that individual that she needed to find a shelter," Bowman said. But she was adamant about staying in her home and signed a waiver acknowledging that she had been warned that the home could be unsafe, he said. She could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
