The potential impacts on Virginia from Hurricane Florence diminished in the days and hours leading up to the storm. That was good news for residents that decided to stick out the storm inside the comfort of their Suffolk mobile homes.

On Wednesday, dozens upon dozens of residences inside the Bullock Mobile Home Park on Pughsville Road still had cars parked in driveways with little sign of evacuation. Residents like Madilyn Moore had decided that she and her children would simply get all the groceries they would need, fill up the car’s gas tank and wait for Florence to pass by.

“I think it will be fine,” Moore said, saying she thinks Florence would be no worse than Hurricane Matthew was for them in 2016. “I heard (Florence) is apparently going west and it’s not going to be as bad as people thought.”

Children in Magnolia Meadows Mobile Home Park on Nansemond Parkway were playing in the hot, humid and sunny Wednesday afternoon. Parents were mowing their lawns or playing with the children. Like Bullock, there was little concern for Florence on the streets.

“All we did was make sure everything put up inside,” said David Yancey, who was watching his children play on the front lawn of a mobile home that’s stood at the Magnolia Meadows street corner for more than 30 years of bad weather, he said. “We’re just going to ride it out.”

Others that chose to stay at home still expressed their concerns. Roberta Mills-Ashby at Bullock Mobile Home Park said she wanted assurances that emergency services would make it out to her neighborhood if flooding occurred, along with the other mobile home parks in Suffolk.

“People in trailer parks get a bad rap, and people tend to forget about us like we’re second-class citizens,” Mills-Ashby said. “That’s just not right. There’s a lot of hard-working people that live out here.”

She and her son Kendall Ashby, 29, had already stocked up on food on Wednesday and had plans to move anything valuable and heavy indoors. Everything else was going to be in the Lord’s hands, Mills-Ashby said.

“First and foremost, how I’m preparing is putting it in God’s hands. That’s my first preparation right there,” she said.