Lakewood Park residents recall terror of tornadoes

James Sebree still remembers screams from his front porch.
“I could hear them,” he said on Sept. 24. His eyes welled with tears as he went to his aging Saturn sedan for another commute on an otherwise uneventful afternoon. Sebree, 71, has lived along the northern boundary of the Eastwood Canal, a 2.2-mile stormwater conduit in Lakewood Park near the Indian River County line, for 30 years.
An uprooted tree has stood over the canal in his front yard since last Oct. 9. Its roots poked out of pitch-black soil like intestinal villi; its branches grasped for vacant lots of evergreen grass yards away.
The tree, due to be removed by next month, fell toward lots where double-wide mobile homes once housed six residents of the Spanish Lakes community.
It made an indelible landmark to remind Sebree how the shrieking belonged to more than the tell-tale “freight train” din that he and many others recalled in Hurricane Milton’s aftermath. “These people died,” he said as his voice barely rose above a whisper. “They were right there, too.”
These six residents perished from the strongest of six tornadoes Milton spawned in St. Lucie County, according to the National Weather Service. They included Alejandro Alonso, 66; Debbie Kennedy, 66; Mary Viramontez, 70; William Cutlip, 82; Sandra MacDonald, 84; and Roger Ammon, 85.
Sebree and many of his neighbors along Eastwood Drive came out of the ordeal alive. Nonetheless, the tornado destroyed several homes along that street, a grim reminder of twisters he encountered in his former home of Lincoln, Neb.
The revealing shriek of high winds that accompanied the tornado followed the breakage of one of Sebree’s impact windows. “I told my wife, ‘Get in the bathroom,’” he remembered along with how they scrambled to wrangle both of their dogs and close their metal shutters.
He said that he didn’t apply for aid funding through the Federal Emergency Management Administration, likely from a combination of what he observed as less costly damage to his home and survivor’s guilt. “We didn’t have much damage. The roof was old; 14 years old, anyways. Didn’t file insurance on it or anything. It was all just maintaining part of the property.
“There were people out there who needed it. Look at the houses that were destroyed,” he added. His words then caved into a grim silence as he recalled the screams once again.
Today, much of Lakewood Park and unincorporated St. Lucie County still lies in ruins. Displaced sheet metal clogs drainage ditches and decorates bent trees. Freight warehouses, agricultural research facilities, industrial garages and numerous farms struggle to recover from damages.
Some facilities rebuilt; some were torn down; others remain damaged, even as freestanding structures appear on the verge of collapse. All of them lay in the path of one of three tornadoes that reached peak wind speeds of 155 miles per hour among a record 46 statewide, NWS surveys show.
The tornado tore a 21.2-mile gash through farmland starting at Midway Road west of Interstate 95 at 4:59 p.m. It weakened before pummeling Lakewood Park around 5:15 p.m., where it destroyed homes in Spanish Lakes, Portofino Shores, Holiday Pines and surrounding non-HOA communities. It dissipated over Vero Beach at 5:30 p.m.
Sebree and three other Lakewood Park residents shared anecdotes of surviving the historic twister – the first fatal tornado in St. Lucie County since 1954, according to NWS – in the days before its first anniversary.
The 315-acre Spanish Lakes community – one of three mobile home communities owned by the Wynne Building Corporation in St. Lucie – has been home to many retirees from the north including Ray Balsamo, a former school bus driver from New Jersey. In a Sept. 26 interview, he remembered photographing streets rendered unrecognizable by Milton on a morning walk last Oct. 10.
Lakewood Park endured heavy rain and a tornado spinning at around 80 to 90 miles per hour by 4 p.m. the day before, Balsamo said. “It was still light out. There were tornado warnings all over the TV and radio, which we lost after that.”
Then, the fatal twister crept north of Indrio Road complete with its telling wails an hour later. “I was thrilled. I was happy, like, ‘I got to hear the sound that people only talk about!’ I had no idea that half a mile away, it was tearing up homes.”
By 5:15 p.m., the twister swallowed mobile dwellings along La Villa Way and La Villa Court lining the community’s western perimeter near its on-site water treatment plant. The enthusiasm behind Balsamo’s discovery muted to a sobering calm upon seeing the wreckage the morning after. “Then, I felt bad about being happy.
“I remember asking somebody once, ‘what street is this?’ And he told me that his two next-door neighbors were confirmed dead.” He also recalled one woman “who lost both her dogs” and tunnels within mountains of debris clogging the streets. “These tunnels had to be 8 feet high separated into construction debris and yard waste. It took months to truck all that out.”
Crews razed uninhabitable double-wide homes along La Villa Way and La Villa Circle in the following weeks before “nothing but dirt” and freshly planted grass remained. “We didn’t have it nearly as bad,” he added, on how the house he shared with wife Linda sustained cosmetic damage.
Like their neighbors, the Balsamos had to subsist without basic plumbing, power or telecom access as line crews restored services for several weeks afterward. The water treatment plant, designed exclusively for the community, required rounds of pipe replacement before residents could flush their toilets as before.
“I had to go to the Winn-Dixie parking lot to make a phone call,” he said of a shopping center near the Indrio Road/Turnpike Feeder Road intersection. “I would tell people, ‘Look, if I’m not responding to your calls or texts, it’s because I have to go elsewhere to do that.’”
Some residents left Spanish Lakes in the year since as prices for mobile homes there steadily decreased, he claimed. “There’s always that concern with modular homes because they could blow away, which a lot of them did. That’s the nature of a tornado: You can’t predict that and you don’t get a lot of warning. The resale on the modular homes, in my opinion, they’re standing still. They’re not selling.”
The damage did not solely affect the HOA communities of Lakewood Park, as Pat Johnson attested to. She has lived homeless for 15 years in St. Lucie, as many as seven of them in the area where Milton struck.
The 65-year-old spent the afternoon of Sept. 24 bicycling between houses, her arms rigged with spackle buckets, mops and gardening tools. She earns a modest weekly keep of $140 providing menial labor for neighbors pushing 90 and 100. “I only work four hours a day, being an old lady,” she said.
She recounted graduating in 1989 with a biology degree from Indian River Community College – now Indian River State College – and prospects of attending the University of Florida before an assault derailed her plans. “The A/B student here became a D/F student because the mugging gave me brain damage,” she said, weaving her words with a mirthless chuckle. “I didn’t know that because I didn’t have insurance; so, they didn’t do any tests like that.” She also lost several teeth in the altercation.
Years of living paycheck-to-paycheck alongside earning money from rigged street fights organized by her late husband would precede the disarray last Oct. 9.
Before the storm, Johnson and companion John “Skip” Vascoscellos III, 55, lived on woodland property watched over by a local realtor on their behalf. Sheriff’s deputies arrived to evacuate them, which stirred feelings of suspicion among the two.
“They just came up and tried to get us to leave,” she claimed as tornado warnings started trickling in. “You could see the blue tarps above the trees, so they were just trying to get rid of homeless people. Where were we supposed to go? We had permission to be on that property; they couldn’t even call the people we have permission (from) because that would be soliciting a trespass, which is against the law.”
They sheltered at the Lakewood Park Church, 5405 Turnpike Feeder Road, courtesy of staff members Jeff and Shari Bentley. Johnson and Vascoscellos shared a couch bed in a rectory office-cum-bedroom before the church sustained extensive damage.
“When we heard the ‘freight train,’ we got out of there because just the difference in pressure can shatter the windows even though they’re covered,” she said, referring to barometric shifts from the major tornado that broke the windows and splintered doors. “It took me five hours to sweep all that up, underneath the chairs and everything. Nobody helped me.”
They later “went home because the water was above the pallets where our bed was on top of,” she said. In time, they gathered new pallets to maintain their home amid widespread recovery efforts.
Ernest C. Wyatt, 69, rode his scooter the afternoon of Oct. 1 on a shopping trip to the Dollar General along Turnpike Feeder Road. He once served a tour in Vietnam and stayed abroad in Germany with the U.S. Army before transitioning back to civilian life near his native Fort Pierce.
He waited out the Oct. 9 tornado with his wife, son and grandson at his house along Bayard Road some yards west of Eastwood Drive, his home since 2013. “Nobody on our street” received the same damage that some Eastwood residents contended with, he said. “The only damage we got in the house was on the eave of my porch. I got three pieces of panels that were torn up.”
Wyatt’s half-hour round trip along Eastwood Drive crossed in front of several houses condemned by the county Sheriff’s Office. At least one, reduced to the frame of a garage-cum-workshop, bore campaign signage in the name of Keith Pearson, who served as sheriff for nearly a year before becoming a senior member of the St. Lucie Department of Homeland Security chapter.
Being “prepared ahead of time” aided with outages that lingered for residents outside of the more intense path of destruction, Wyatt said. “When we were expecting a hurricane, we went to a grocery store to get what we were going to get. We got bottles of water for the month to fill our buckets up; we put it in our toilet; we filled our bathtub up with water.
“The electricity went out during the hurricane, and that’s expected,” he added. Line crews from Georgia restored power to his block “about three days later.”
He did not apply for FEMA aid as there “wasn’t much damage” to his home, which he paid for out-of-pocket, he said. 