BRADENTON, Florida — Dozens of mobile homes were torn to shreds and roofs peeled off entirely when Hurricane Milton ravaged Florida — with the destruction so devastating, some snowbird retirees left picking through the rubble are reconsidering their annual migration.
Some heartbroken residents even struggled to match what pieces of debris came from which home when they returned to inspect what remained of their dwellings in the riverside city, just south of Tampa, on Thursday.
“It’s just devastation everywhere,” Cheryl Long, 66, told The Post as she surveyed the damage to her home at the Royal Garden Estates mobile home park in Bradenton.
“I lost my roof, my front awning and the carport,” she added. “When I got home, I found my roof at my neighbor’s.”
The harrowing scenes came as residents across the Sunshine State began trying to repair the damage inflicted by Milton after the ferocious hurricane smashed through coastal communities — leaving at least eight people dead.
In the hours after Milton churned through Bradenton, the residents of two mobile home parks slowly started returning through Thursday to find their roofs missing, steel carports contorted and debris strewn everywhere.
Some homes were so badly damaged that the living rooms were left totally exposed.
“My shed went through my neighbor’s house,” Dave Kania, 78, said of the damage at the Seabreeze Mobile Estates.
“It just broke apart. I had the shed strapped down, you can still see the straps, but you couldn’t stop the wind.”
Kania, a snowbird retiree from Akron, NY, said he found his neighbor’s roof in his driveway.
Despite spending every winter in Florida for the past decade, Kania said the damage inflicted by Milton had him — and others — questioning whether to keep returning altogether.
“I’m having second thoughts about staying in Florida,” Kania said. “We always have to worry about hurricane season. Once you’re retired, you don’t want all that stress.”
“It’s devastating,” he continued. “Look at it. It costs tons of money to get fixed back up. I don’t have insurance because hurricane insurance is so expensive down here.”
Fellow resident Ruthie Reynar, who uprooted to Florida from Cape Cod, Mass., roughly six years ago, said Milton was worse than any New England nor’easter she had ever experienced.
“I’m from New England and I’ve been through a lot of nor’easters but I’ve never experienced a storm as ferocious as this one, truly,” the retiree said, noting that parts of her roof had been torn off.
“It was so frightening. Even the guys were scared. The fellas were tight-lipped but you knew they were frightened,” she continued.
“You start questioning whether to leave Florida. Truthfully, I think a lot of older people will leave. I will rebuild.”
Meanwhile, over at the Royal Garden Estates, Cheryl Long — who hails from Ohio — said she was feeling faint from the anxiety and physical exhaustion of picking through the debris under the blazing Florida sun.
Like most of her neighbors, Long rode out the hurricane in a nearby brick condo building where the air pressure fluctuation was so extreme, it made her ears pop.
“The hurricane was awful,” she said. “The windows were sucking in and out so hard it was making my ears pop.”
“It was real calm and like daylight outside when we were in the eye, but the winds on the backside were the worst,” she added.
“I keep wanting to pass out. I’m just very … lots of anxiety.”
As residents continued to assess the damage to their property, more than 2.5 million customers across the state remained without power as of early Friday, according to the poweroutage.us site.