John Thiele sat on his sofa, clutching the TV remote and spouting hurricane trivia like a weatherman gone wild. His eyes rarely strayed from the all-weather, all-the-time news on the screen Saturday morning.
"Honey, could you mute the television, please?" said his wife, Andrea, taking a break from feeding her granddaughter.
Lifting his shoulders and spreading his hands toward the TV, he said, "I've got to get the update at noon."
"You'll get it at 1," she said.
The TV went quiet and Thiele visibly relaxed. A little.
For Hurricane Charley, he and his wife evacuated their mobile home in Causeway Village in South Pasadena. He rode out Frances alone, which he said "probably wasn't a good move, but if I hadn't, I probably would've lost my roof." His wife went to their daughter's St. Petersburg home, and he stayed behind, tightening the tie-downs that anchored his home.
As Hurricane Ivan churned off the coast of Cuba, Thiele waited anxiously for the words most Floridians have come to dread in the past month: mandatory evacuation.
Mobile home residents and those in low-lying areas are typically the first ones told to go when the weather turns rough.
With cotton-ball clouds dotting the sky and the sun's glare cooled by a slight breeze Saturday, it looked like the perfect day for fishing or enjoying the beach. Instead, the day found many local residents gearing up emotionally and physically for the latest round of wicked weather.
Some awaited word from emergency officials, while others planned to flee, no matter what. All trudged toward their fates in the same way: dejected, shell-shocked and bone-tired of back-to-back storms.
"I was right here for a tropical storm/category 1" hurricane, said Thiele, a 61-year-old security guard. "I saw roofs flying around, transformers blowing up. I thought I was in a war zone. That's how bad it was."
"Mobile homes are just not safe," he said. "Obviously, if it gets close, we're out of here."
"There's no way I can even deal with this," Andrea Thiele said. "I'm just numb."
Fellow Causeway Village resident Donald Chaput, 43, has taken the opposite approach to weather updates: He avoids them. For the Massachusetts native, the weekly storms of late have made for a weary welcome to the Sunshine State.
A survivor of two threats, he's taking no chances with Ivan. He plans to evacuate to a St. Petersburg home he's renovating, no matter what emergency officials say.
"When I don't think about it, it doesn't really affect me," said Chaput, who's lived at the mobile home park abutting Boca Ciega Bay for about a year. "I get scared when I turn the TV on because I don't know what I might see. . . . It's very unsettling."
At another park near another large body of water across town, a mother struggled to find the energy to pack up her husband and three kids for the third time in a month. Amy Clarke, 33, has lived at St. Petersburg's Bay Mobile Home Park across the street from Lake Maggiore for 11/2 years.
"I'm just emotionally stressed out," she said Saturday, holding her 1-year-old son and watching her 3- and 6-year-old daughters play outside. "I'm drained. I'm so tired. It's very hard to just pick up your whole family."
"Being in a mobile home, you've got to take (everything) because you don't know what's going to be there when you come back," she said.
Charley drove them to a motel. For Frances, they evacuated to her mother's house in Clearwater and ended up losing power. Now, they plan to ride out Ivan in a shelter.
Evacuations aside, Clarke said Florida's still the place for her and her family.
"A month of rain and storms is a small sacrifice to make for the other things the state has to offer," she said.
Yet, a change of scenery's not out of the question.
"When we do have a chance, we're going to be moving somewhere more safe so we don't have the same issues during next hurricane season," she said.
