Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 10

52a TIMES SUNDAY, OCTOBER A DEADLY STORM HUT iEVHacriage proposal sunives storm A tornado rips most of the roof off itheir new home, but a couple recovers one important item. Hi Vu Ml? rtybsfa lY1 Regina Kowalska and Curtis Crowder were shopping for paint when a tornado struck their new house. The storm uprooted an oak tree and sent it into a neighbor's yard. CURTIS KRUEGER Tlmee Staff Writer lost, there was one thing he could not afford to do without. Crowder and Kowalska had discussed marriage but had not made it official.

He had hidden a ring in the garage, inside a box next to a Walt Disney World hat and a race car helmet. He checked the wreckage of the garage; the ring wasn't there. "I looked all around and couldn't find anything," Crowder said. The diamond ring had belonged to his great-grandmother and was about 100 years old. "If we didn't find it, I didn't know what I'd do." Then, suddenly, he saw the velvet case soggy, sandy, but there.

He, wearing his LA Gear T-shirt and black pants, asked if Kowalska would marry him. In her International Surf Club T-shirt, she said yes. The date is Jan. 2. Kowalska is happy to be engaged, but that's not the only thing she's grateful for.

"I'm just glad he's okay," she said. moved in their things. They refinished the parquet floors, put in carpet and painted the walls. Saturday morning, they drove to Home Depot and bought latex paint and brushes for the door jambs. While they were out, police blocked off the Autumn Run neighborhood.

That was when they started thinking about the tornado reports they had heard earlier. They saw damaged homes as they came to their new house. "She just started screaming and crying," Crowder said. He had one thought: "Glad I wasn't in it." The tornado ripped the roof off most of their house and laid rafters over the swimming pool. The oak was uprooted and now sits in a neighbor's yard, three houses down.

Inside, shards of glass and hunks of drywall covered the floor. Bits of insulation were everywhere. The walls at least the walls that were standing still had their fresh coat of paint. Crowder got scared. Among the $10,000 worth of household goods he estimates that he PINELLAS PARK Curtis Crowder proposed to Regina Kowalska on Saturday, but not lift some fancy restaurant.

Instead, he proposed while standing in a ransacked garage that had lost its roof earlier in the day. This isn't just any engagement story. It's the story of a man, a woman and a tornado. I Eight days before, Crowder and Kowalska Jbought their first house, at 10730 Oakhaven. At $70,500, it seemed like a great deal: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, with a beautiful pool beneath a tall oak tree.

They did not dream a iornado would hit a week later. All week, Crowder, 26, and Kowalska, 21, Timet photo ADRIAN DENNIS JIi. Storm victims seek shelter at schools, hotels 'm "Some came to us with nothing but Ithe shirts on their backs," Anne Stuckey, principal of Bauder Elementary School, said of those left homeless. 1 By JEFF TESTERMAN Timet Staff Writer 1 It 1 -r- Time photo JIM DAMASKE Traffic lights and utility poles were down at West Bay Drive and Indian Rocks Road in Largo. Elsewhere in Largo, a tornado destroyed or damaged scores of mobile homes in the Glenwood and Indian Rocks parks.

Residents rescue neighbors from storm debris More than 200 residents were left homeless by Saturday's storms, the Red Cross estimated, and several dozen of those residents trickled into emergency shelters throughout the day. I "Some came to us with nothing but the shirts on Itheir backs," said Anne Stuckey, principal of Bauder Elementary School, which was being used as a shelter in Seminole. "Some had no vehicles or couldn't get to them after the tornadoes and were Ipicked up by one of our school buses. Others drove Ihere in cars that had all the windows knocked out." Many without a roof; over their heads found shelter with friends, relatives or neighbors, while others including those who made their way to emergency shelters ended up in hotels Saturday night. i Within hours of the disaster, insurance companies began booking blocks of rooms in nearby hotels for customers whose homes were rendered uninhabitable.

By 3 p.m., displaced residents, many still in 'shock and crying, began streaming into the La iQuinta Inn at 7500 U.S. 19 a 117-room hotel just from the devastation. I "A lot of them 'are really upset," said Patrick IKelley, the hotel's service desk operator, on Saturday. "I've had several people crying. One lady was the wife of a police office in Pinellas Park.

Her husband had to go to work and their house was as well. She was really upset." I Just hours before, Debbie Prichard had been in her home, awaiting her husband and son's return from the library. They returned just mo-jments before the storm tore through her Time Staff Writer NOTE! p.m. i Children home alone as twister strikes Amy Brosnan, 13, and Jessica Soto-mayor, 12, were home alone in Amy's home on ijtoble Avenue in Spring Hill, appropriately enough watching the video Home Alone, when the winds whipped up. Amy's parents, Paul and Cathy Bros-nan, had left briefly to shop for groceries when a twister touched down in Spring Hill around noon.

"The birds were screeching and the "We raced to the back of the house and huddled a doorway," Prichard said. The storm tore Jerry Gould, 69, climbed out from underneath a kitchen table at a mobile home in Park Royale and went outside to survey the damage. Then he saw his friend, Chick McRath, buried in debris from his collapsed mobile home. At least one, and perhaps both, of his legs were broken. "He was pinned from the waist down," Gould said.

"We dug him out. Then put him on a mat. He was mainly concerned about his wife, Mary. He kept calling her." His wife was sitting on steps on the other side of the elderly couple's mobile home, wrapped in a blanket. When she went to her husband, he calmed down, Gould said.

He and several other people dug out two other neighbors who were pinned by debris from their mobile homes. They had to carry out a woman from a mobile home who was unable to get out of bed. "I was bouncing around all over the place," Gould said. "It's amazing in the park how the people got together. Young kids they were pitching in." Pinellas Park High suffers heavy damage The football field and roof of Pinellas Park High School, 6305 118th Ave.

were hard hit by a twister. The school's exterior was littered with pieces of the roof, glass shears and pieces of metal crushed like aluminum foil. About 40 students and eight teachers were there for Saturday morning programs when the tornado touched down, but no one was injured. Large chunks of the roof blew away or caved in, said custodian Alphonso Huntley. Work- ers from several area school districts and volunteers worked "from the inside out," cleaning up collapsed ceiling tile and flood water, Huntley said.

The school's football scoreboard, the driver's education tower and several trees were blown down, and a storage shed was nearly flattened, exposing shelves of office supplies. Principal Alec Liem said didn't know whether the school's nearly 2,000 students would be returning to classes Monday. "I just can't determine that for sure until tomorrow," Liem said Saturday. Deputies help injured greyhound Deputies found a small brown-and-white greyhound wandering through the rubble at the Indian Rocks Mobile Home Park, where many homes were destroyed. Two of its legs were cut; the front left leg gashed almost to the bone.

Lt. Larry Smith of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office comforted the dog and then carried it across a water-filled ditch to a patrol car where other deputies brought bandages to bind its wound and keep it until Pinellas County Animal Control could retrieve the animal. Her house started shaking, then silence For thirty seconds Saturday morning, 19-year-old Sylvia Sawyers, like many victims of the tornadoes, wondered whether she would live or die. "I was in the bathroom putting on my make-up when our entire house started shaking, then there was this dead silence," Sawyers said of a tornado that ripped the roof from her home in the Autumn Run subdivision in Pinellas Park. "When I looked up all I could see was gray sky.

Everything else was gone," she said, standing in her garage that has a caved-in roof. Times should be on time, despite damage It might have taken some extra effort, but the St. Petersburg Times should have arrived complete this morning to mid-Pinellas readers. Wally Hendry, a Times circulation administration manager, said the District 15 distribution center at Walsingham and Ulmerton roads was so badly damaged that he had to move some circulation operations. That meant some 10,000 inserts, including advertising, comics and some sections of the Sunday Times, had to be moved to drier areas.

Hendry said circulation workers would have to work out of another distribution center for a time because the building had too much structural damage and wasn't safe to work in. Freight-train sound, then the roofs gone Ron Brody works as an electrician for Pinellas County, so he wasn't surprised to get a call at his Pinellas Park home Saturday morning. Someone from work was saying they needed generators near MacKay Creek because a tornado had touched down. Then he heard the proverbial freight-train sound. "I rushed everyone into the bathroom," he said.

The tornado slammed his house. "There was a pipe that came through one of the walls in the bathroom. I could see the sky, so I knew the roof was gone." Destruction gets networks' attention The destructive storm, coming as it did only six weeks after Hurricane Andrew devasted Dade County, got big play on at least one major news broadcast. CBS News led with a lengthy report on the damage, likening it to Andrew, followed by a report of President Bush's visit to Clearwater earlier in the day. NBC News gave a report on the damage later in its newscast and ABC did not have a newscast because of its college football coverage.

However, local channel WTSP-Ch. 10, the ABC affiliate, aired a special report on the damage at 7 blinds were flying all over the place," Jessica added. Then the electricity went out. The winds intensified. "And we closed all the doors and windows and stayed calm," Jessica said.

"It was scary." When Amy's parents returned, they saw the surrounding wreckage. "Coming back, we thought, 'Oh my Paul Brosnan said. "We're blessed we got no damage." Insurance was put off; now it's too late Lloyd Hughes didn't have a dime of insurance on his Pinellas Park trailer. Hughes, 77, had meant to get it renewed. "I kept putting it off." He wasn't thinking much about insurance on Saturday morning as he worked on the decorative reindeer baskets he makes for his church, Oakhurst United Methodislj.

"I was in the shop, it was pouring down rain. All of a sudden I heard this noise." He whirled around and saw a black sky. "Stuff was twirling around through the air," he said. His wife, Daisy, said: "Oh my God, it's a tornado," he said. "It just scared us so bad.

We went into the bathroom, both of us crying." Saturday afternoon, he and his family covered the roof with a blue plastic tarp. Beachf est events to go on as planned Events planned for today at the Beachfest celebration in St. Petersburg Beach will be held ai scheduled, a police spokesman said. Police said the tornado that damaged several blocks of Ireasure Island on Saturday had no effed; on festivities. The only change in schedile was a postpon-ment of a fireworks display because of gusty winds.

Times staff writers Brian Chichester, Anne Glover, Wendy Lenus, Sabrina Miller, Sharon Kirby Lamm, Cutis Krueger and Mark Joumey contributed to this report Ithrough the home, leaving a gaping hole in the roof. Prichard ended up in the La Quinta Inn, her room paid for by her insurance company. She considered herself relatively lucky. "Some of my neighbors lost everything the houses just completely flattened. It's bad, real bad." A total of 26 people sought shelter at Bauder Elementary, Stuckey said.

But shelter workers ar-ranged for accommodations for all of them by the Itime darkness fell Saturday, thanks in part to the Igenerosity of the Holiday Inn Central on U.S. 19 and the Thunderbird Beach Resort on Treasure Island. The Thunderbird cut room rates from $52 to $30 a night for displaced persons, while the Holiday Central offered storm victims rooms for two nights for free. In all, the hotels handed out keys to about 30 rooms for persons shuttled over from the emergency shelters. "At a time like this, you can't look at someone who's lost their home and charge them for a room," said Fred Bishop, an official with the holding compa-my that owns the Holiday Inn.

About 22 people sought shelter at the Nina Harris Elementary School in Pinellas Park, many of them elderly residents of the hard-hit Park Royale iMobile Home Park, said area school superintendent iBetty Ivey. She said shelter workers were spared the chore of cooking when a local Pizza Hut delivered free pizzas to the school. I Bauder was closed by the Red Cross after all those without a home were placed elsewhere. Officials at Nina Harris, after placing most of their homeless at the Holiday Inn, also thought that Ishelter could be closed by late Saturday night. 1 Seven people initially sought shelter at the Cha-jpel on the Hill, 12601 Park said Joanne Cherry, including "a couple who had been married 51 years and had lost everything." Saturday night, workers at the United Church of IChrist chapel had found temporary homes for all but 85-year-old Russell Skinner and his poodle, Kelley.

Cherry was trying to place them in a retirement home run by a friend. Skinner is handicapped and has no family in the area, and his mobile home was destroyed by a Itwister. "I guess I don't know where I would have ended if emergency workers hadn't come to get me and brought me here," Skinner said. Staffer writers Chris Lavin and Sabrina Miller contributed to this story. Time photo ANDRIAN DENNIS Mobile home residents patch their windows at Travel World Trailer Park at 124th Avenue and U.S.

19 in unincorporated Pinellas County..