Transcripts

SPEAKER: When there is severe weather in our region, especially a tornado warning, you'll hear us say, get to a basement, or an interior room, far from windows. For those who live in mobile homes, that's not an option. However, in Minnesota, state law does require most mobile home parks to have storm shelters. But as Matt Sepic reports, it's often up to residents to make sure their landlords follow that law.

MATT SEPIC: Drive through the Sunrise estates mobile home park next to I-35 in the town of Stacy, and you'll see a mix of older corrugated metal trailer homes, alongside brand new factory built modular houses with vinyl siding and ample porches. On opposite ends of the park are two identical, low slung, windowless buildings. Inside one, maintenance man, Rudy Hernandez, flips a switch to open a large motorized roof vent, drawing fresh air for the several hundred residents who may need to wait out a storm here someday. Bolted to the top of the building's thick cement block walls is a ceiling made of precast concrete tubes strengthened with steel.

RUDY HERNANDEZ: You can have a tornado come through here, tear everything around it, and this will all still be intact. So it's not just a little piece of plywood like most homes would have on top, it's, almost a foot of concrete reinforcement up there.

MATT SEPIC: For almost three decades, Minnesota has mandated buildings like this, and appears to be alone among the states in doing so. Manufactured home parks with at least 10 homes built after 1988, must have shelters. Older developments need at least an evacuation plan to an offsite shelter. A half hour up the road at another park near Pine City, resident Jim Maggi drives a golf cart from his house to the nearly complete storm shelter, dug into a small hill about 100 yards away.

JIM MAGGI: And here we are. It's about 20 by 35, windows for ventilation, and a gravel floor. So it could be worse.

MATT SEPIC: McGee, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran, retired from the construction industry, says getting his landlord to build this shelter was a difficult, protracted process. It involved forming a homeowner's association, and spending three years writing letters to public officials.

JIM MAGGI: It shouldn't be this way. We shouldn't have this adversarial relationship. This shelter was supposed to have been built 17 years ago. And for us to have to fight it for that long, or even for three years, that's crazy. The state should have intervened and said, you've got to have a shelter.

MATT SEPIC: The Minnesota Department of Health licenses around half the state's 900 plus mobile home parks. Cities and counties oversee the others, and for all parks, local governments have to sign off on shelter and evacuation plans. For his part, Pine City park owner Bill Woischke says he has always complied with the law. Before building the new shelter, Woischke says Pokegama Township allowed him to use a nearby supper club, the floppy crappie, as a place of refuge for residents like Maggi.

BILL WOISCHKE: They don't know quite what they're talking about when they say, I never did anything. That was a perfectly acceptable and the township's the one that really makes the call, and they had no problem with it all these years.

MATT SEPIC: Woischke says other unrelated disputes with Township supervisors led them to withdraw approval of the restaurant as shelter arrangement, but resident Jim Maggi says that plan was never up to snuff, not least because the floppy crappie has floor to ceiling windows overlooking Lake Pokegama. Wendy Spanier with the State Health Department says in this case, there were other factors that slowed the process-- that included a possible sale of the park at one point and the Department of Labor and Industries rejection of an earlier shelter design.

WENDY SPANIER: We wanted to make sure that everything was built according to the regulations so that it was truly a safe shelter.

MATT SEPIC: David Anderson with the tenant advocacy group All Parks Alliance for Change, says getting adequate shelters in manufactured home communities often takes a concerted effort by residents, something he says many don't have the time or resources to undertake.

DAVID ANDERSON: You have people who are among the lowest income households in the state, who are made responsible for enforcing the laws that are designed to protect them.

MATT SEPIC: Spanier says the health department inspects mobile home parks regularly. She says in the last five years, MDH has issued fines of several thousand dollars against seven parks for not having storm shelters. Matt Sepic, Minnesota Public Radio News, Pine City.