Aug 24, 2007 12:33 am US/Eastern
Hurricane Andrew: Family's Recordings Survive
by Al Sunshine
HOMESTEAD (CBS4) ―
Bill and Sandy Zinn of Homestead will always have their memories of Hurricane Andrew, but they have a lot more recordings of the event that changed their lives.
On Sunday, August 23rd, 1992, Bill videotaped what he did to protect their home from the storm in the afternoon.
"[We got] the living room and bedroom, boarded up, just in case," said Bill Zinn.
Their son Ian decided to make his own audio recording, talking about his thoughts on the night to come.
You hear Ian say, "Nine-40, all is quiet. The stars are out."
At midnight on the 24th, as they all went inside, Ian tracked the Hurricane.
"110 miles east of Cape Florida, winds 140, moving west at 16 miles per hour."
When Andrew made landfall at 3:45 a.m. Ian calmly narrated what happening outside his door.
"It's just really loud outside—unbelievable," he said.
Finally, the Zinns took cove under a mattress, with their lifeline to the world--their transistor radio.
"We listened to Bryan Norcross the whole time we were under there," said Bill.
Then Ian's tape recorder captured the moment when everything came apart.
"Holy (expletive), the roof just came off. Okay, okay! It's all right. We're under the mattress, we're fine."
But it wasn't fine. The Zinn house was smack in the path of Andrew's eye, and the concrete block home collapsed around them in the dark.
"Bryan said, 'You've got one more real strong band coming through', so we said, 'we're going to stay until that'.
"We said, we'll wait until that passes, and we'll try to get out," said Bill.
And so they did, with home video confirming they rode out the storm under a mattress.
Only a couple of the garage walls were still standing. The concrete tie beam from the front of the house had blown over top of us and come down in the back yard.
They stayed and built a much stronger house on the same spot. It took them two years, and in the new house they rediscovered Ian's tape, with their memories of the night that changed their lives.
It serves as a memory of a son who survived the worst of Hurricane Andrew, only to die in an accident nine years later.
"He was a great kid," said Sandy.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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