ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Homes knocked off their foundations, piles of wet carpet, wood and pipes rotting in the sun, and abandoned cars and trucks littering roads glazed with mud and blocked by debris.
With one of the most powerful hurricanes in a century barreling toward Florida on Tuesday, the Twin City mobile home park was already a scene of devastation because of Hurricane Helene.
Now, as Hurricane Milton stays on track to hit the state Wednesday, residents of Twin City say they’re unprepared for the double whammy of nearly back-to-back hurricanes.
While millions of Floridians living in the path of the storm were heeding urgent evacuation orders, a few holdouts were still hanging around the wreckage of the low-lying mobile home park.
Mark Prompakdee, a 71-year-old retiree who has lived in the park for five years with his older brother, said they survived Helene by packing everything they could into their minivan and camping out for two days in a nearby high school parking lot on higher ground.
He said they plan to do the same before Milton arrives because they have nowhere else to go and no family or friends to stay with.
“They’re saying, ‘Get out of here,’” Prompakdee said. “Where?”
Several of the homes in the park were deemed uninhabitable by local officials after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26. They were marked with signs that read “Unsafe” and “Do not enter or occupy” in bright red lettering.
The home of Jesse Hancock, 39, and Ria Blaight, 34, was flooded by Helene’s surge, but unlike their neighbors, they have someplace to go — Blaight’s father’s house in nearby Pinellas Park.
But Pinellas Park, just north of St. Petersburg, is also in a mandatory evacuation area. As Hancock and Blaight loaded a borrowed car with whatever belongings they could salvage from their wrecked home, they were still weighing the pros and cons of evacuating.
“You’re picking and pulling straws here,” Hancock said.
“Stay with your ship and stick with it or abandon ship and go somewhere else that might be worse,” Blaight said. “It’s a two-headed coin. Scary either way.”
Walter Smutz, a disabled 47-year-old military veteran, said he and his wife have been sleeping in their cars since Helene flooded their mobile home. All the furniture inside was either destroyed or infested with maggots.
“Right now, I’m homeless and scared to death,” said Smutz, who returned to Twin City to salvage what he could before Milton hit. “I’m worried about getting on my feet. I just want a home. I don’t care what kind of home.”
Smutz said Lakeshore Management, the company that manages the mobile home park, deceived them about the potential for flooding when they rented the plot where they parked their home.
“When I bought this place a year ago, the guy scammed me,” Smutz said. “He lied to me about the floods and everything.”
Smutz and other tenants also said Lakeshore Management is making them pay the $750 monthly plot rental fee, even though their homes are now uninhabitable.
An unidentified woman who answered the phone at the Twin City office said, “That’s not what’s happening,” when NBC News asked to speak to a representative for Lakeshore Management about the tenants’ complaints.
Officials at Lakeshore Management’s headquarters in Skokie, Illinois, did not respond to a request for comment.
Tenant Ninda Menegias, who has lived at the Twin City mobile home park for 11 years, said she reluctantly returned to the nearby hotel where she stayed when Helene came through.
“We had to get a boat to get out,” Menegias, 70, said by phone. “The water was about 4 feet. The water was in my home.”
After the floodwaters receded, Menegias said she went back to her home and camped out in the only semi-habitable room of her “castle,” a bedroom that stunk of mold.
That lasted for only a few days, as residents were ordered to evacuate again.
“It’s a mobile home, but I paid a lot of money,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “I lost everything. I don’t know what to do.”
Matt Lavietes reported from St. Petersburg and Corky Siemaszko from New York City.
