Aug 24, 2009 1:25 pm US/Eastern
Andrew: 17 Years Ago, The Storm Of Our Nightmares
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
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A satellite composite image of Hurricane Andrew hitting South Florida's coast August 24, 1992
NOAA
It struck in the dark of night, and by sunrise it was gone, leaving a path of destruction in its wake that stunned those who lived through it. Hurricane Andrew visited South Florida for only a few hours that August morning 17 years ago today, but it changes lives, landscapes, the insurance industry and the way South Florida thinks about hurricanes. It was "The Big One", and it's made us fearful of "The Next One."
It was August 24th, 1992. Andrew was the first named storm of the year. It was also the first hurricane many residents of South Florida would ever face, and as we would learn just 24 hours later, most of us were woefully unprepared.
The storm began as barely a blip on the radar. The Friday before Andrew arrived, NOAA Hurricane hunters canceled their trip into the storm, because it appeared to be disintegrating.
A second trip was scheduled for Saturday the 23rd. That trip, too, was almost canceled. They went anyway, and what they found caught South Florida unprepared.
What forecasters had learned was that Andrew had strengthened dramatically, into a category three hurricane, and was headed straight for South Miami-Dade.
Forecasters could not say exactly where it would hit, but they warned it would hit somewhere, and could be even stronger by landfall. With the storm bearing down on them, South Florida was starting, at last, to prepare.
"Without question, this is going to be the most expensive natural disaster ever to hit the United States," Meteorologist Bryan Norcross told the TV audience that night.
In the early morning hours of Monday, August 24th, the eye of hurricane Andrew came ashore in south Miami-Dade, 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 consumer investigator 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. Years later, we found out: It took a long, long time.
"Horribly, I still remember it like yesterday. Huddled in a closet with all my loved ones, hearing the house exploding, not knowing if it was going to be there or not," Al remembers.
Al rode out Hurricane Andrew in his home west of Florida's Turnpike. The plan was for him to be in place to join a photographer who would meet up with him to cover the cleanup. Al had no idea that the cleanup would start with his own home.
He recalls the terrifying fury of Andrew, whose eye rolled right over his home. "It's like what's next, worst over, boom, boom. Is this it? Is there going to be more? Boom, boom."
Executive Producer Dave Game was a reporter when Andrew hit, assigned to Richmond Heights Middle School on SW 152nd street to report on people riding out the storm in a shelter. Game was there because that shelter was supposed to be the closest 'safe' shelter away from the brunt of the storm. Instead, Andrew barreled right over the school, just a mile and a half from Dave's own home, where his wife was facing her first hurricane alone with 7 cats and two dogs.
The storm hit, and Dave lost communications with his wife. Outside, his team could hear chaos explode, and could only wonder what was happening outside.
While waiting in the lobby of the school at the height of the storm, Game and his photographer heard a pounding at the door. Police unchained it, and a family of five stumbled in from the fury. Dave recalls doing the only thing he could think of; he stuck out his mike and asked the father why they were battling to a shelter in the face of the hurricane's fury.
"Even to this day, I won't forget the look on his face," Game recalls, eyes tearing up 15 years later as he remembers. "He just said, 'it's not that hard to leave when your house blows down around you'."
The comment stunned everyone, raising even more fears about what they would find when the winds finally died down. Al Sunshine and his family were shell-shocked when they finally peeked out of the wreckage of their home.
"We probably looked and felt like World War 2 victims of saturated bombings," he said. That didn't stop him from taking a home video camera, and with the help of his wife, starting to document the chaos of his neighborhood and home.
"The biggest problem was we didn't remember how bad hurricanes could be," said Chuck Lanza, then with Miami-Dade Fire Rescue and now the person who heads Broward's disaster preparedness effort.
"We weren't ready. We weren't ready for a couple of reasons. One is we hadn't prepared ourselves for the big storm, the Hurricane Andrew Type of storm, and secondly we hadn't looked at the long term effects of it on the economy."
"There were a lot of people who grew up in this town who didn't remember what a hurricane was," said Charles Danger, with the Miami-Dade Building Department. "We were not [ready] and we paid the price."
We're still paying the price today. The insurance industry rates never dropped down to pre-Andrew days.
While a lot of residents still have a lot of bad memories, others have some very good memories.
"I helped everybody in my neighborhood," said James Murphy, as he held back tears. Murphy lost his home, but he remembers how Andrew also brought out the best in so many neighbors here. "I tell you right now, neighbors helping neighbors was the greatest thing in the world."
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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