The Professional Amateur Pinball Association briefly boasted a collection of 232 pinball machines, including a Blackwater 100, a motocross game of "mud, sweat and tears."

Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Tony Landi, left, and Jose Oyervide remove one of 232 pinball machines from the Professional Amateur Pinball Association's flooded building in Carnegie yesterday. Click photo for larger image.

That theme now describes PAPA's newly opened headquarters in Scott, just across Chartiers Creek from Carnegie.

Five feet of flood water rose over the flippers of the "Fish Tales" and other machines, destroying every one. It happened one week after renovations were rushed so the building could host more than 300 people for the PAPA 7 World Pinball Championships, Sept. 9-12.

"We cleaned it up just in time for the flood," Kevin Martin said Monday as he peered in at 40,000 square feet of mud. He had bought the century-old former food-packaging factory in May and transformed it into a pinball playhouse, painted purple and other bright colors and sleekly furnished and carpeted. It was home not only to PAPA, which he recently took over, but also his personal collection of pinball machines and video games.

He estimated they were worth at least $500,000, not counting the thousands of man-hours his friends spent fixing them up. His insurance company told him he wasn't covered for flooding, so he's left pondering whether to have the restoration company scavenge the remains for parts.

"Or we have to decide if we just want to walk away from it, which no one would blame us for," said Martin, who is founder and CEO of pair Networks, a Web hosting company based on the South Side, and who helped organize Pinburgh tournaments. He had to walk to his new building Friday night because his Ferrari stalled on the flooded Mansfield Bridge and he still hasn't recovered it. He has one pinball machine left at home in Point Breeze.

He's heard from hundreds of upset pinball lovers, and may seek their in-kind help later, but on his Web site -- www.papa.org -- he's telling them to donate to the Red Cross or Humane Society. Still, if he and his friends don't rebuild, the region loses a venue it hardly knew it had.

One skateboarder braved the clanging cleanup in the industrial park to come up and ask, "Is this the pinball place?"

Martin said, "It was."