Florida's Hurricane History
by Jay Barnes
Second Edition

424 pp., 139 photos, 87 maps, 3 tables
$24.95 paperback, $39.95 hardcover
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"Damn you, Andrew" was crudely spray-painted across the lone cement block wall of a crumbled residence in Homestead, Florida, in late August 1992. The graffitilike message wasn't the mischief of a local gang but was instead painted by a suburban mother of two left homeless after the storm trashed her house and overturned her world. It was a trying time. South Dade County had been overrun by the mother of all hurricanes, a tempest that would be remembered by an entire generation as Florida's Great Storm. Surviving the violence of wind and water on the morning of August 24, 1992, was just the beginning. For thousands of storm victims, the real test came in the weeks that followed as they tried to piece together their lives from their new quarters in the temporary shade of a National Guard tent.

Andrew was certainly a powerhouse when it hit Florida, a strong category 4 with all the trimmings. With winds that gusted to over 175 mph, it was less a meteorological freak than a chance encounter since storms of Andrew's magnitude don't often strike the United States. Records were broken when its winds and tides pummeled South Florida, a region quite familiar with the ways of vicious hurricanes. But most Dade residents weren't around for the big storm in 1926 and only knew a few unpleasant storiesabout the lake victims in 1928 or the Keys in 1935. To those hammered by Andrew, the other storms didn't matter because they saw with their own eyes a seemingly endless display of hurricane destruction that surpassed the limits of imagination. Only two other hurricanes, both category 5--the Labor Day storm of 1935 and Camille in 1969--had been more powerful than Andrew in the United States during the twentieth century. Andrew's power was painfully evidenced in the broken, stripped, and tattered landscape of South Dade County after the storm.


Left: Andrew over the Florida coast, as seen by satellite. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, EROS Data Center)
Right: Andrew's emotional toll on Dade County victims lasted far beyond the first few days of cleanup. (Photo courtesy of the Florida State Archives)


In many ways, the story of Hurricane Andrew is not merely about wind speeds, barometric pressures, and eyewalls. Incidents of miraculous survival and sorrowful loss were scattered through the blasted neighborhoods. Once the scope of the destruction wasrealized, the massive recovery that ensued was of epic proportions. And in the weeks and months that followed landfall, Andrew's story continued to unfold. Grim scenes of the destruction in Homestead hit the airwaves and helped pique national curiosity about hurricanes. Federal disaster response, construction fraud, insurance exposure, environmental damage, and code enforcement all became front-burner issues in the wake of this thoroughly modern hurricane.

Forecasters at the Hurricane Center, not accustomed to having majorhurricanes bear down on them, were nevertheless ready in their Coral Gables stronghold. They stockpiled food and water and tested the two emergency generators that had been installed for use when the power failed. The center had been in the area since 1943 but in 1979 had moved to its Coral Gables offices, which had never been tested by a hurricane prior to Andrew. The director, Bob Sheets, and his predecessor, Neil Frank, had worked successfully to have steel shutters installed on the sixth-story windows of the center's offices, overcoming a local ordinance that prohibited them. As Andrew drew closer, the forecasters' work continued around the clock, just as in any hurricane. But as the hours rolled by, they realized that Andrew was not "just any hurricane" and that they were situated at ground zero.

Across South Florida, and especially in Greater Miami, word was out that Andrew was coming--and with frightening strength. Many people packed their families in their cars along with bags, boxes, and pets and left for safer quarters. The total evacuation was estimated at around 700,000 in South Florida, although many of the evacuees moved to areas hit by the storm. On the afternoon of August 23, local highways were jammed with cars leaving the area. With each weather bulletin, the news worsened. The Miami Herald ran its now-famous banner headline that aptly described the storm's approach: "Bigger, Stronger, Closer." Across much of the target zone, some residents still wrestled with the question: "Should we stay or should we go?" Of those residents who did remain in their homes through the night, few got any sleep.

Around midnight, while Andrew was still more than 100 miles east of Miami, aircraft reconnaissance reports and satellite images confirmed that the storm's eye was experiencing cycles of eyewall replacement, a phenomenon sometimes seen in intense hurricanes. As the storm strengthened, its eye would contract, followed by the formation of a new outer eyewall that would eventually choke out the inner eye. As this replacement occurred, the storm weakened slightly, then strengthened again when the new eyewall began contracting. In Jack Williams's Weatherwise article, "Tracking Andrew from Ground Zero," Hurricane Center director Sheets commented on these fluctuations in the hours before landfall: "The question is, will it be on an upswing when it hits us?"

As the hours passed after midnight, Andrew moved in on South Florida, and the radar images told the story. It was not a large hurricane; sustained winds of hurricane force extended only about thirty miles in all directions around the eye. This was thought to be good news since this was only about half the size of Hurricane Hugo's area of sustained hurricane-force winds when it struck South Carolina in 1989. Also, forecasters observed that Andrew's rainbands generally lacked the heavy precipitation usually found in hurricanes. This meant that it was a relatively dry storm. But it was also known that Andrew was a very intense hurricane and that winds would be extreme in the vicinity of landfall. Although most Dade County residents had no concept ofhow destructive sustained 140 mph winds can be, the ardent pleas of television newscasters and the stern forecast from the Hurricane Center gave them much to fear.

Louisiana was left reeling in the aftermath of the hurricane, but Andrew's toll was far greater in Florida. Because of the relatively small diameter of the area with the most destructive winds, the heaviest damages in Dade County were concentrated along a thirty-mile-wide path that just missed Miami and zeroed in on the region around Cutler Ridge, Homestead, and Florida City. Although places as far north as Fort Lauderdale suffered wind damages, the area of extreme devastation began just south of Kendall Drive (Southwest Eighty-eighth Street) in Miami. Homestead, a blue-collar farming community of 26,000, was almost razed beyond recognition. Nearby Homestead Air Force Base, an integral part of the Homestead community, was "virtually destroyed," according to Governor Lawton Chiles, who arrived on the scene after the storm. In every direction as far as the eye could see, houses were ripped to pieces; many were roofless shells with barely a wall standing. Wind-shredded debris of every imaginable kind was scattered across streets and lawns. Few trees were still standing, and those that were had lost all traces of foliage. Power lines and stoplights were nonexistent, ripped away from their supports by wind gusts that topped 175 mph. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed in tornadolike fashion, but the culprit was not a twister--it was a hurricane the likes of which most Floridians had never seen.


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