Hurricane season has certainly taken its toll on the Caribbean and Florida, and the Palm Beach Gardens mobile home park was not excepted from the Category 5 storm, Irma. While natural disasters don’t discriminate, it’s often poor and minority communities that suffer the most in the aftermath. Mobile home communities are especially prone to destruction.
Fortunately, The Meadows mobile home park only saw the destruction of patio screen, storm gutters, and house siding.
Many stationary houses are incapable of standing in the winds of a Category 5 hurricane. For this reason, a mandatory evacuation had been put in place for those living in mobile home parks. The small structures and mobility of the homes would have rendered them easily moveable in the strength of Irma’s wind gusts.
In spite of the evacuation order, Meadows homeowner Rick Rodgers decided to stay put for the hurricane. According to the Palm Beach Post, Rodgers lost power around 11:30 PM, but regained power an hour later.
Rodgers had planned to leave on a New York vacation on Saturday, the day Irma landed on the coast of Florida. He decided to stay, he said, because his wife would have been worried about the house.
To those who are unfamiliar with the force of a hurricane, Rodgers may seem chaotic in his choice to stay. However, Rodgers is just one of many Floridians who chooses to wait out these forces of nature year round in spite of evacuations.
According to Rodgers, he’d stayed in his trailer for Hurricane Matthew, Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma on Singer Island. Singer Island, the Palm Beach Post reports, is one of the first areas in Florida to be faced with an evacuation order.
“We watch the track closely,” said Rodgers. “Logistically, it was just better to stay.”
While many Southerners who have faced these storms before may agree, the professionals don’t, both for Irma and for hurricanes past. Rodgers’ survival and the grounding of the other mobile homes were extremely fortunate. Flying debris and numerous uprooted trees of enormous size were reported in the area, many of which landed in Rodgers’ yard.
Clogged gutters on a house can weigh thousands of pounds. Should one of these gutters be removed by the force of the wind and sent through a window or a home’s siding, the resulting damage could be life-threatening. In the words of comedian Ron White, “It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.”
Photo: Julius Whigham II/The Palm Beach Post
