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Open House

Deadly Florida Storms: Surveying the Damage; Prepare and Protect

Aired February 03, 2007 - 09:31   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

GERRI WILLIS, HOST: Good morning, T.J. Good to hear from you. I am live in Lake County, Florida, with a special edition of OPEN HOUSE.
We are here at the site of where a powerful tornado came right through this area. As you can see right behind me, the devastation is extreme. This house completely bowled over. And I've been looking at this all morning long, walking through the neighborhoods where this tornado went through, roused people out of their beds.

They had been sound asleep, scared them to death, the people that we talked to. And now they are, as these people are right here, picking through the rubble.

Now, as you may know, there are now 20 people dead from this devastation, and thousands of homes have been ruined. Many of these homes were mobile homes, manufactured homes, which are built differently than stick-built homes. And now we're finding that some of the dangers of those homes are extreme.

Listen to this story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WILLIS (voice over): Friday's tornadoes hit especially hard at two mobile home parks. It brings up an old issue. Traditionally, mobile homes have been more dangerous in storms than regular homes built on site. In fact, almost half of the people killed in tornadoes in the last 10 years were in mobile homes, according to government statistics.

From 1997 until last week, there have been a total of 625 deaths caused by tornadoes in the U.S. Three hundred and three of those killed lived in mobile homes. Yet, just under 8 percent of all homes are manufactured, or mobile homes.

In Florida, damage from Hurricane Andrew led to new and stricter national building standards for mobile homes. Since 1994, manufactured homes built for wind zone 3, which includes the Florida coast, must withstand 130-mile-per-hour winds.

BILL YORK, ENGINEER CONTRACTOR, FLASH.ORG: It was quite a change in the code required for construction of those homes. Often they were made with 2 x 2s in the walls versus 2 x 4s that are used today. So the entire design really was quite different, and they're made stronger now, with better tie-down straps through the roofing system, down to the ground, and they didn't have those previously. WILLIS: Department of Housing and Urban Development investigated its new standards after Hurricane Charley 10 years later and learned the mobile homes built to the new 1994 regulations stood up just as well as traditional homes built on site in 100-mile-per-hour winds.

JIM AYOTTE, FLORIDA MANUFACTURED HOUSING ASSOC.: Looking back over to the hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, we were really pleased with the way that new manufactured housing performed. What we need to do is go back to those homes that were built prior to that and see if we can enhance them, make them more durable and safer.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WILLIS: It always seems like those that can least afford it are those that are hardest hit.

Next we're going to talk to the owner of this house behind me. His name is Gene Suggs, and he was awakened by the storm itself.

Isn't that right, Gene?

GENE SUGGS, STORM SURVIVOR: That's correct.

WILLIS: And what happened? You felt that storm in your face, right?

SUGGS: Right. Hail and cold rain, and it threw me from the bed on my mattress. I hit a wall. And then fell to the ground.

WILLIS: Well, let's go back and look at your house here.

SUGGS: OK.

WILLIS: Because it suffered extreme damage here. All your household goods are really out in the front yard now. A bed here. I understand that the bed you were sleeping in you had just bought.

SUGGS: This one over here was where I was at, in this bedroom. And that's the bed I was sleeping on.

WILLIS: Wow.

SUGGS: This has all been rearranged because we're looking for valuables. But my wife was in this bed and I was in the bedroom over there.

WILLIS: Over here.

SUGGS: She was in this bedroom. And of course, when I -- I heard her crying out, and I later found out it was fear, not that she was hurt.

WILLIS: But it must have scared you to death.

SUGGS: Boy, never heard nothing like it.

So I go to her, I get to her, I get to her, and this wall -- it was over here pushed off -- was on top of one of her legs. She couldn't free herself. And I lifted up, and she got out. And then we came down right here amongst all those pointed nails sticking up.

WILLIS: And you walked through...

SUGGS: Never got injured.

WILLIS: ... essentially a bed of nails to get out.

SUGGS: Barefooted.

WILLIS: Now, how long have you been in this house?

SUGGS: Since '74. The house was constructed in '74, and we moved in it in November of '74.

WILLIS: Did you design this house? Did you help build it?

SUGGS: Well, no, we picked it out. It wasn't near as much growth here then, but there was a brother -- a family construction company been here a long time, and we chose those to build us a special built home.

WILLIS: Let's walk up here a little bit because I want people to see really what's going on here, because you can see the insulation that's fallen out of the walls here onto the floor of your house. It's obviously opened up to the sky. The rain's been threatening all morning...

SUGGS: Right.

WILLIS: ... and if we get rain, your -- the inside of your house is going to be as wet as can be.

Are you getting help from your friends and neighbors?

SUGGS: Unbelievable.

WILLIS: Yes. They're all over here. I understand they helped you with a trailer?

SUGGS: A lot of this is family. But yesterday our entire -- we had a prayer meeting over here at 8:00 a.m. yesterday morning with our church people, and it's just been -- the response has been unbelievable.

I mean, we've got -- we've got damage everywhere, and lives are lost. My wife and I crawled out of this. And -- but I have such compassion for the ones that couldn't.

WILLIS: Right. Exactly. You two were really very lucky even though you've had a lot of damage here.

SUGGS: Very blessed. That's another name for it. We were blessed by God.

WILLIS: Now, the damage, of course, isn't just to your home. It's also to neighbors in your community who have also been hurt as well. SUGGS: Right. Our granddaughter lived up at this house. And we -- of course, when it was dark, we was afraid she had sustained the same damage we had and could have been injured bad. So one objective was to get up there and see if they were OK.

WILLIS: And they were?

SUGGS: And they were.

WILLIS: And they're all right. It looks like they have some damage to their roof, but that's about it.

SUGGS: They've got roof damage, but they can live in it. People have responded even to there, not even being asked, and covered it up where it won't leak anymore.

WILLIS: Now, obviously, you didn't have any time to prepare for this, right?

SUGGS: No. We woke up form sleep with being thrown around with ice in our face. But this tornado, it was hail. That was the cold thing. And we both was in our skimpy bed clothes. So we were both cold.

And there's a closet standing. You can see the boy over there. Well, there's a closet this side, and I was able to get in there and get some quilts that we could cover up with. And that's what...

WILLIS: But you had nothing on your feet obviously.

SUGGS: No. We was barefooted, all -- well, for two hours, until we finally got down to where we got flip-flops so we could at least have something under the soles of our feet.

WILLIS: Well, Gene, I appreciate your help today, and I wish you great luck getting your house together.

SUGGS: Oh yes.

WILLIS: I know it's a hard thing to go through. A lot of people in this community trying to put it back together.

SUGGS: Yes.

WILLIS: I just want to say we're going to be talking more to other victims, to other people all day long. Clearly, we're going to talk to an expert who can tell you what you need to do if you're worried about a tornado. The kind of steps you can take. We'll have somebody to talk to about that.

We'll be coming right back to you.

This is OPEN HOUSE in the field, Lake County, Florida. We'll have more in just a minute.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WILLIS: Hello and welcome back to our special edition of OPEN HOUSE.

I'm here with Kevin Lenhart. He is with the emergency operations center for the county, and he has some advice for people who are in this situation.

Let's talk, Kevin, about prevention first. I think that's the biggest problem.

As you can see, we just talked to the owner of this home. He didn't have any warning at all. He woke up, and the storm was right in his face.

What can people do ahead of time, if anything?

KEVIN LENHART, LAKE COUNTY SPOKESPERSON: Well, that's one of the problems with tornadoes, is they sneak up on you, especially here in Florida, where we just have weather systems like right now, sort of come up on us without any warning. But we encourage everybody to get weather radios. They alert you when there's a warning from the National weather Service that there's inclement weather, that there's going to be...

WILLIS: We're having a little inclement weather right now, as a matter of fact.

LENHART: Exactly. And severe weather comes. And there needs to be that warning, because this happened at the worst possible time, when people were sleeping. And there was no warning, there was no way to get that alert unless you had the weather radios that alerted you to the weather.

WILLIS: So the radios, obviously, are key. You want to be listening to television, listening to any news you can if you think there's the possibility of a storm, right?

LENHART: Exactly. Exactly.

If there's severe weather that you know is coming, stay tuned and look out for that. But when things happen in the middle of the night, there's a lot that, you know, sneaks up on you, and you really can't prepare for that sometimes.

WILLIS: Now, I know that your organization is out in the field right now trying to help people. What are you doing for people in the county here?

LENHART: Well, we've got teams out looking at the damage, surveying the damage, making sure people's needs are being met, where we need to get ice, water, food for people. We've got shelters set up. And we're just trying to meet the needs, get people out of the weather like this right now.

This is compounding the problems. So we're trying to get people healthy and safe.

WILLIS: Healthy and safe. That sounds like a great goal. LENHART: Exactly. It is.

WILLIS: Kevin, I'm going to thank you for your help. Thanks so much for being with us. I think that's great advice.

We've got some more good information for people who are worried about these kinds of tragedies, these kinds of storms, what you can do. I want to show you the tour I took this morning before the rain of an area very close by and the problems with some of the houses there.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WILLIS: We're seeing some real devastation here that -- some of which might have been preventable, right?

YORK: It's possible. Unfortunately, tie-down straps are broken on a number of these.

WILLIS: What's a tie-down strap?

YORK: A tie-down strap is the metal strap that goes down into the ground, into an anchor, that goes up either to the bottom of the mobile home or over the top of the unit.

WILLIS: And they're metal. They are what they sound like?

YORK: They're a lightweight metal strap typically used in construction of all types, not just manufactured housing.

WILLIS: Trees are down. People's kitchens, utensils, food scattered everywhere, obviously. This is real devastation.

I want to -- I want to bring you down here so we can take a look at what was this house.

YORK: OK.

WILLIS: So, this is the trailer that was lifted and spun over upside down, now lying here upside down.

YORK: That's the one that was sitting right here.

WILLIS: And it's completely destroyed. I mean, take a look in this window here.

You know, it's just -- it's a mess. The furniture is on the ceiling essentially. The carpeting has been pulled down. It's open to the wind, to the water, to all the elements, and we see the contents of their kitchen sitting outside in the front yard.

It's just a mess.

YORK: And, you know, not to dwell on it all the time, but here's the tie-down strap from this corner. It goes up to what was the bottom of the unit right there. WILLIS: So, I mean, obviously, everything these people owned is outside in the yard now instead of inside the home. And you can even see the insulation here.

YORK: Right.

WILLIS: And it's getting wet. That becomes a mold problem, doesn't it?

YORK: Well, it does if the home were going to be savable, but this home's going to the trash dumpster.

WILLIS: It's done.

YORK: It's done.

WILLIS: There's no hope for this house.

YORK: There's no way. And interestingly enough, back to the tie-down straps, you see the strap inside the wall underneath the aluminum? It goes up over the top. This one held, but the unit still blew apart.

WILLIS: And you can see these...

YORK: Those are...

WILLIS: ... like a foot interval, a foot and a half interval.

YORK: That's where the roof is tied to the walls. The ones that go over the top go up through the walls, and they should be on about five-foot centers.

WILLIS: OK.

YORK: So, you know, here's one right next to one that blew apart.

WILLIS: Right.

YORK: And on the other side, they blew apart. So this one stayed, but it still was destroyed, and this is 2 x 4 construction.

WILLIS: Which is what it's supposed to be.

YORK: What it's supposed to be.

WILLIS: All right. But, you know, what's amazing to me is you see the siding that's been ripped away by the winds here.

YORK: Right.

WILLIS: All of the siding. It looks like wallpaper maybe down here, chairs, cushions from some kind of seating.

It's just heartbreaking really to see. I mean, look, you know, all these small things...

YORK: All the little keepsakes.

WILLIS: ... that people think of as being their home.

So here we see a big hole where something was.

YORK: Here we see a big hole where we can see the concrete blocks that the home was mounted -- sitting on top of. We saw on the side, that tie-down strap again that went over the top of the unit. It broke. The anchor appears to even be gone from over here.

WILLIS: Do you think this was a house, or was this a garage?

YORK: Oh, this was a House, because I think the garage was right over here. The car's off the driveway into where the house was.

WILLIS: So it was lifted up and moved as well, just as the house was.

YORK: It was lifted up. Yes.

WILLIS: This would have been the entrance right here.

YORK: This would have been the entrance.

WILLIS: Right here. Here's where you would have come through the front door right into the house. And you can get a sense here of the size and the shape of it.

YORK: Yes.

WILLIS: Now, this one did have straps.

YORK: It had some anyway that we see. We don't see an awful lot of them. That's a little surprising.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WILLIS: So sad to see what's going on there with people's houses destroyed. I have to report to you that Bill York said these tie- downs that he showed you just a second ago, while they exist in that community, they aren't necessarily up to code. They're too far apart. So he had some concerns about the construction there.

But right now I want to toss it back to Atlanta. T.J. has some breaking news you'll definitely want to hear.

T.J. HOLMES, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Gerri. Thank you so much.

This takes us to Iraq, where we have gotten word of a bombing, a suicide bombing that has killed 38 people in Baghdad. Again, this was a suicide bomber, a truck driver who launched this attack.

This happened in a crowded market in central Baghdad. And again, we have confirmed at least 38 dead and some 85 others were wounded in this bombing.

So often we see this, and it's sectarian violence. It happens in one neighborhood that's full of Sunnis, one neighborhood full of Shiites, one or the other. This time, this happened in a market and in an area that is actually mixed with Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Again, a suicide truck bomber has launched an attack in Baghdad in a busy market that has killed 38 people on this Saturday, and another 85 wounded.

We have our reporters working this story for us in Baghdad, and we are following it closely. We will have much more for you coming up here on CNN as we get the new information.

Meanwhile, we're going to take a quick break, get you back to Gerri Willis and OPEN HOUSE right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WILLIS: Well, as you can hear, the rebuilding is already starting where I am. But this has been a very difficult situation for so many families.

Rusty Dornin has the story of one man's devastation.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GENE BARTHAUER, TORNADO SURVIVOR: I see one of my jackets.

RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There was no place to hide, no safe place to go in Gene Barthauer's mobile home. So, when the tornado struck, he stayed right where he was.

(on camera): So, where were you when this happened?

BARTHAUER: That's my bed right there.

DORNIN: Oh, my God.

(voice-over): And, there, 86-year-old Barthauer stayed, huddled for 20 minutes, until neighbors came with flashlights.

His friends Rich (ph) and Maryanne Horner lived around the corner. When they discovered their house was OK, they came running.

MARYANNE HORNER, NEIGHBOR: We didn't know what happened to Gene. When we came around the corner, it was devastating. And we kept saying, has anybody seen Gene?

DORNIN: When they got to the remains of his mobile home, Gene wasn't there. He had walked down to the clubhouse of the Lady Lake mobile home park.

From the air, it appears flattened. From the ground, it's not much better, sheet metal wrapped around trees like paper decorations.

Barthauer's clock marks the hour when his life here blew apart. Across the street, the only thing left from his neighbor's place is sand and a concrete pad, along with her couch and some other belongings.

BARTHAUER: The whole place just blew right over the top of mine, and along with her, and took it right across over...

DORNIN (on camera): And they found her somewhere over here.

BARTHAUER: Found her out in the field over there.

DORNIN (voice-over): One of two residents here believed to have died in the storm.

Barthauer has no insurance. It was canceled by the company last year. He says he never filed a claim for anything, and they didn't give him a reason. Now, out of this mess, he only wants to find one thing.

BARTHAUER: I'm looking for a Michigan jacket that my daughter bought me last Christmas.

DORNIN: So, with hammer and crowbar, they set to work. Soon, search- and-rescue crews come through, looking for survivors.

BARTHAUER: Oh, these -- these are all accounted for, all the way to the end. Does that look blue over there?

DORNIN: Then, they struck pay dirt, the closet.

BARTHAUER: There it is.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We can see it?

BARTHAUER: Right underneath this.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We can see it.

DORNIN: Just another closet rack, and...

(CHEERING)

(LAUGHTER)

DORNIN: And then was the Handy Andy doll his granddaughter gave him, but not much else.

BARTHAUER: My life here -- I think my life here is gone. I don't -- I wouldn't -- I don't think I would rebuild here. I have got a place in Michigan on a lake.

DORNIN: A man with a place to go, but not much to take with him.

Rusty Dornin, CNN, Lady Lake, Florida.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WILLIS: So many people in that situation today, obviously, and so sad.

We actually have someone with some great advice for people.

Susan Holmes is here from the American Red Cross, who has some tips for consumers.

But as we talk, I want to you take a look at this House, and let's just start walking.

SUSAN HOLMES, AMERICAN RED CROSS: Sure.

WILLIS: You know, we met the fellow who owns this house. He was awakened in the middle of the night. And I know that you have talked to a lot of people who were in the same situation.

What are you telling people in terms of their safety?

HOLMES: We want them first to be prepared in advance. They need to discuss with their family where their safe place is going to be.

WILLIS: And what -- what does that mean? How can you have a safe place when you see a house like this?

HOLMES: Well, in this area, there are very few basements. So we ask people to consider a sturdy room with no outside walls.

WILLIS: So it might be an interior bathroom with no windows?

HOLMES: Or a closet is a good choice as well.

WILLIS: OK. So that's what you should seek out if you do hear the sirens, if you do hear on the radio or TV that a storm is approaching.

HOLMES: That's correct.

WILLIS: If you have a little bit more time, is there anything else you could do?

HOLMES: If you don't feel safe riding out a storm where you are, seek more permanent structure. We have so many people in mobile homes. We ask them, if there is time, to please go to a brick and mortar structure. We don't advise them to get in their vehicles.

WILLIS: You can't race a tornado. I mean, Hollywood aside, movies aside, where we've seen people racing tornadoes, that's not a good idea, right?

HOLMES: That's right. That's right.

The biggest thing is they need to plan in advance. We also suggest they take their important family papers, group them all in one location as part of their preparedness kit.

WILLIS: And Susan, let's -- you know, let's take a look. Here's what happens if you don't have the things together that you need.

They are just, obviously, strewn all through the house. And they get wet if it rains. It may rain here later today. You'd be in a situation where your important papers, maybe your Social Security number, maybe birth certificates, all of that material would be wet and perhaps ruined, right?

HOLMES: That's correct. And there are kits available to purchase, and we've got some great tips on the Red Cross Web site.

WILLIS: Give us that URL.

HOLMES: www.redcross.org.

WILLIS: Well, Susan, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

HOLMES: And thank you.

WILLIS: For more information, more breaking news on this very important story, stay with us at CNN.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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