Aug 20, 2007 6:40 pm US/Eastern
A Life Changing Terror: Hurricane Andrew
A Look Back By CBS4 Storm Specialist Bryan Norcross
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MIAMI (CBS4) ―
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Damage done by Hurricane Andrew changed South Florida, and its people, forever
CBS
It was Friday, August 21, 1992. Andrew is a tropical storm, 950 miles east of Miami, moving due west.
On Saturday, the 22nd, hurricane hunters find a hurricane that's strengthening ...and still on the due west track.
I was on TV for my former employer, WTVJ, telling people what to expect.
"We expect that the storm is going to be in our neighborhood here by early in the day Monday," I said then.
At 5pm that Saturday, a hurricane watch went up for South Florida. Some people start to get ready. As the sun comes up on Sunday the 23rd, it dawns on South Floridians that this storm is not going to turn.
And then, there was a hurricane warning.
That Sunday, people started to move as Andrew closes in, and intensifies rapidly, with top winds that we now know were about 165 miles an hour that Sunday night. South Florida waited, and feared what would happen next.
"Without question, this is going to be the most expensive natural disaster ever to hit the United States," I told the TV audience that night.
In the early morning hours of Monday, August 24th, the eye of hurricane Andrew comes ashore in south Miami Dade County, and for those who lived there, the next four hours seemed like an eternity.
And a terror never to be forgotten.
As the morning continued, people emerged from their homes to a landscape they barely recognized and the reality that their lives would be different for months, for years, and in some cases, forever.
CBS4's Al Sunshine, reporting on the virtual destruction of his own South Miami-Dade home, summed up what many were thinking that awful morning.
"There's no way of knowing how long it's going to take to try to put our lives back together," he said.
We found out. It took a long, long time.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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