'We prayed a lot': North Port retiree community ripped apart by Ian
George and Sharon Fink weathered Hurricane Ian from their manufactured home in North Port, only to realize Thursday morning that their house was one of few spared by the Category 4 storm that devastated the community.
The Finks live in Holiday Park, a retiree community in North Port with 836 manufactured homes that was devastated on Wednesday by winds topping 100 mph. Hundreds of homes were destroyed, but theirs stood tall on Thursday morning.
“The noise was horrendous,” Sharon, 74, said. “The noise reminded me of being at a stock car race, and the engines are revving. That is what the wind sounded like. The roar from the stock cars, that’s what it sounded like. It was nonstop, wind just blowing and blowing. It was like that for like eight hours.”
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Many of the homes were built in the 1970s, but the couple purchased a new model built by Jacobson about six years ago meant to withstand hurricane-force winds. The couple said law enforcement asked residents of the park to evacuate, but they decided to stay because of the confidence in the integrity of their home.
“That aluminum sound is the biggest noise, because it's light, it takes off like a plane, then when it hits, it hits,” George, 82, said. “I really think it was exciting, because I would look out the windows and see a part of a roof just blowing past.”
Much of that debris from the community littered Chancellor Boulevard, where homeowners cleaned rooftops, metal slabs, glass and rubble from their front yards.
“A piece of metal struck right through my roof like a spear. I was getting water in my living room, in one of the bedrooms the ceiling fell down onto the bed; the roof is peeled back, the fence is down,” said Richard Sylva, who took shelter inside his home with his wife Donna, his dogs Lexi and Venzie, and a cat whose name he could no longer remember.
He had not slept since the remains of one of the mobile homes, destroyed but intact, blocked traffic in the middle of the road just a dozen feet from his yard.
“I was looking out through the garage. I knew the mobile homes were going to go because when we had (Hurricane) Charley a lot of them were popping like popcorn because of the pressure; it was lifting the roofs right off their houses,” Sylva said.
But Charley in 2004 was a tiny storm whose impacts were more limited than Ian's stopping south of the Charlotte-Sarasota County line.
“We were lucky. We didn't get damage at that time. This storm here was so much more intense. It hung around for so long. Charley was like a 45 minute deal, this was hours of wind. The wind had to be, I'm guessing, over 100 miles an hour. Easy.”
“There's a whole trailer in the middle of the road; it was scary," Sylva said. "We prayed a lot."
His neighbor, Ron Smart, 82, watched much of the hurricane from his back yard. He has lived in the community for 42 years, and 11 years in his current home on Chancellor Boulevard.
He had nowhere else to go.
“I sat there and watched my shed blow apart, the roof fly off the other one, and all this stuff fly around,” Smart said. “The worst of the wind was coming out of the east when it first started, then it shifted around and that’s when all this damage happened. I stayed in the back because I was out of the wind.”
“I consider myself lucky, there’s a lot of people around that have a lot worse damage than I have,” he said. “I have a lot of damage but it’s still livable.”
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Hurricane Ian wrecked this North Port retirement community
