She left with the clothes on her back

RIVERVIEW - Lena Skidmore was at home Monday night when her grandson knocked on her door. You need to leave as quickly as possible, he told her. Noxious ammonia was leaking from a pipeline just 1,500 feet from her home and the area was under a mandatory evacuation order.

"I didn't know anything about it because I was talking on the telephone,'' Skidmore, 75, recalled this morning after a breakfast of toast and milk gravy at Ruth's Steakhouse on U.S. 301.

She left with only the clothes on her back and a house coat. "I feel naked,'' Skidmore said.

Skidmore spent the night at her son Pat's house three and a half miles from her home. A sheriff's deputy allowed her back home briefly this morning to retrieve some medicine, she said.

She was among the hundreds of people forced to evacuate their homes Monday night after authorities say teenagers drilled a hole into a pipeline carrying ammonia to fertilizer plants.

Skidmore said she has lived in her house at 10523 Moody Rd., about a block in from the Alafia River, for 20 years but never knew an ammonia pipeline was so close.

Most of the evacuees seem to have spent the night with friends and family, officials said. An emergency evacuation shelter at Riverview Elementary had seven people this morning, but all left and another shelter has opened at Simmons Loop Baptist Church, 6610 Simmons Loop Rd., Riverview.

Melissa Scofield, who works at Ruth's Steakhouse, 7409 S. U.S. 301, said four or five people were sitting on a bench outside the restaurant when she arrived at 4 a.m., smoking cigarettes, reading and waiting for the place to open. The neighborhood breakfast spot usually doesn't open until 6 a.m., but she unlocked the doors early and started serving coffee to the evacuees.

Just across the river, deputies knocked on Thomas Milton's door in the Alafia Village Trailer Park at 8601 U.S. 301 at about 1:45 a.m. Milton, 50, doesn't drive so he called his neighbor Paul Cormican, 65.

"They told us to get out," Cormican said. "We had to leave."

The two got in Cormican's red pick-up truck and drove to a Steak N Shake in Brandon to kill some time.

Still under a mandatory evacuation order, the two men spent the rest of the early morning hours shopping in two different Wal-Mart stores. Later in the morning, they sat at the counter at Thompson's Auto Parts on U.S. 301 just south of the trailer park, trying to figure out how to get back home to get their insulin.

"I figured the stuff would be cleaned up by morning time," said Milton.

Milton said he didn't know why they didn't receive word of the evacuation until the early morning hours. He had heard the sirens earlier but didn't think anything of it. "I thought it was just a wreck," he said.

- Jan Wesner, Times Staff Writer

Comments

[Steven Tamayo]

amazing, amazing stories. wow.